Australia is responsible for terrorist’s family. No question

It is scandalously unfair and a shirking of our international obligations to leave Australian-born terrorist Khaled Sharrouf’s family in Syria for the poor old Kurds to deal with, writes Claire Harvey. Bring them home.

Bring the children home.

Actually, bring them all home — babies, children, women, fighters, weirdos, morons, camp-followers and idiots alike.

For we created them right here in Australia, and we must deal with them, for good and bad, whatever they may have done or seen. Some are victims of crime. Others are criminals. Many are both.

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They say they deserve to come back to Australia. I don’t know about that — but I do know it would be scandalously unfair and a shirking of our international obligations if we were to leave them in Syria for the poor old Kurds to deal with.

I’m talking about the Australians in Syria and Iraq, the remnants of ­Islamic State.

An old photograph showing three children of slain Islamic State terrorist Khaled Sharrouf with their grandmother Karen Nettleton. Picture: Supplied

Presently they’re being held by the US-led international force, ­including the mainly Kurdish Syrian opposition militia, who helped ­demolish Islamic State for the good of the world.

Just five years ago, IS was a terrifying force of monsters and criminals who controlled vast territories, running a nation-state with taxation, schools, roads and hospitals.

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They were broadcasting their ­depravity to the world with videos of aid-workers, journalists and military personnel being beheaded and burnt alive, gay men being pushed off tall buildings, civilians being tormented.

It was terror porn, and it lured a certain brand of freakshow-weakling from places like Adelaide and Sydney to join the big adventure, in the hope of perhaps owning a sex-slave or  being allowed to cut off someone’s hands.

The freakshow-weaklings were followed by women, many of whom were stupid and deluded enough to be turned on by the prospect of “righteous” violence, and their children, many of whom were born in the short-lived “caliphate”, who bear ­absolutely no blame whatsoever.

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Journalists like my brother, the ABC’s Adam Harvey, his colleague Eric Tlozek, Nine’s David Wroe and others have met these tragic families, now languishing in camps and ­prisons, and all begging, or demanding, to come home.

The Sharrouf children in 2014 (clockwise from top left) Zaynab, Hoda, Abdullah, Humzeh and Zarqawi. Abudullah and Zarqawi died in Syria.

“We’re Australians too,” 16-year-old Hoda Sharrouf, orphaned daughter of jihadi Khaled Sharrouf, told Nine’s Sydney Morning Herald.

“Australia needs to do something about it. They need to step up.”

Hoda is worried about her older sister Zaynab, who at 13 was ­“married” to her father’s jihadi mate Mohamed Elomar, and who, at 17 years of age, is now pregnant with her third child.

The Sharrouf children are victims of appalling crimes including child sexual abuse, facilitated by their ­parents. That’s not their fault.

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And I agree with Hoda — Australia does need to step up — even if it means we spend the next 50 years dealing with these deeply traumatised  and/or  wickedly   self-righteous people.

“At the end of the day, we’re human. We have human rights,” ­another Australian woman, believed to be hardcore Melbourne jihadi bride Zehra Duman, told my brother in Syria.

This is a woman who ­boasted of wanting to see the blood of “kuffar” (infidel) run in the streets after she followed her jihadi boyfriend to the Middle East. “Kill kuffar in alleyways, stab them and poison them. Poison your teachers. Go to haram (unclean) restaurants and poison the food in large quantities,” Duman wrote on Twitter in 2015.

I’m not asking you to feel sorry for Zehra Duman.

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She’s clearly a nasty, selfish fool. But I’d rather she spent the rest of her life being nasty and selfish in an Australian prison than living in some bombed-out Syrian village poisoning her children’s minds and plotting more evil.

Women and children evacuated from an Islamic State group's embattled holdout arrive at a screening area held by US-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in Syria on March 6. Picture: Bulent Kilic/AFP

And I’d rather her ­children were living safe in some Australian foster family — or with her own deeply ashamed Australian relatives — than dying in destitution in the desert.

We are a comparatively wealthy nation with a functioning judicial and corrections system.

We’ve taken great pride in the past in hunting down war criminals who were hiding out in Australia — from elderly Nazis to ex-commanders from the former Yugoslavia — and sending them back to their homelands to face justice.

It would be rank hypocrisy for us now to shirk our obligation to ensure our own citizens get the help — and the justice — they deserve.

Claire Harvey is the deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph.

@chmharvey

Originally published as Australia is responsible for terrorist’s family. No question