David Penberthy: Give ISIS kids a ticket home. They’re Aussies

Australia rejecting the children of late IS fighter Khaled Sharrouf on the basis they could follow their father’s path, would be hugely unjust, writes David Penberthy. They are the ultimate victims of a shocking war.

Karen Nettleton is reunited with her grandchildren after they spent five years with Islamic State. Picture: ABC Four Corners

It is, instinctively, an easy question to answer.

What would you do with Australian citizens who travelled to Syria at the height of the war with IS, where they lived in the Islamic caliphate and appeared in stomach-churning photographs posing with the dead victims of the militant group?

Simple. You would do everything to make sure they never entered our country again and, if they did, that they were arrested, tried and locked up for the rest of their lives.

Let me put the question another way.

What would you do if it emerged that these citizens were aged 12, 11 and three at the time when they travelled to Raqqa, and only ended up in this godforsaken hell hole because of the actions of their derelict, fanatical parents?

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And that their parents are now dead anyway, their deluded mother losing her life through disease, their terrorist father as a result of an air strike that also claimed the lives of their two older brothers?

These are the exact circumstances that the three remaining children of the late Khaled Sharrouf and Tara Nettleton find themselves in. Sydney-born Sharrouf, a radical Muslim who was afflicted with schizophrenia, and his Anglo-Saxon wife Tara, a Muslim convert, took their five children to Syria in 2014 to join the IS caliphate.

Karen Nettleton with her daughter Tara as a child. Picture: Supplied

Nettleton died in 2015 and Sharrouf and their two eldest sons, Abdullah, 13, and Zarqawi, 11, were killed in an air strike in 2017.

Abdullah was the youngster who at the behest of his father was photographed holding a severed human head, straining under the weight of the hideous thing. He was also pictured posing in front of a man who had been crucified alive by IS fighters.

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With both parents and these two brothers now gone, all that remains of this family are the other three children, daughters Zaynab, now 17, Hoda, 16, son Humzeh, 8, and their grandmother Karen Nettleton, a perfectly normal suburban Aussie grandma who has done a remarkable thing.

This week’s Four Corners chronicled Nettleton’s fraught journey from Turkey into Syria. After many false starts and setbacks, during which she broke down repeatedly and suffered major panic attacks, Nettleton found and entered the squalid refugee camp where her three grandchildren reside.

On ABC Four Corners episode Orphans of ISIS, Karen Nettleton reunited with her grandchildren after they spent five years with Islamic State. Picture: ABC’s Four Corners

After a desperate search through the vast tent city, where even teenage girls must wear full-body niqabs due to the presence of IS fanatics within the camp, Nettleton found her grandkids.

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I started watching this documentary with a degree of ambivalence. My hard-hearted view was all of these Australian IS families have landed themselves in a massive problem entirely of their own making. It is the height of audacity for them to turn around — as many have — and demand the Government step in to extract them from the mess, as we have seen so gallingly with the IS bride Shamima Begum in the UK.

The Sharrouf case is more complex than that. I am not sure the above hard-line view should also extend to children who have actually been made orphans in this hideous conflict, and were only there because of the abysmal actions of their parents.

The most bracing part of this superb documentary was the first conversation between Nettleton and her granddaughter Zaynab.

This was the first time Karen had seen Zaynab, Hoda and Humzeh Sharrouf since they were taken by their mother Tara Nettleton to join the terrorist organisation in Syria and Iraq. Picture: ABC’s Four Corners

At the age of just 15, Zaynab was married off by her parents. She has two children and is more than seven months’ pregnant with her third, and is understandably freaking out about giving birth in the disgusting conditions of the camp, where several babies and mothers have died during labour.

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The surreal aspect of the conversation between grandmother and granddaughter was hearing Zaynab’s voice, the thickest Aussie drawl, emanating from inside her repressive hooded garb that she still wouldn’t remove when inside her tent, lest the fanatics discovered she had shown her face.

Zaynab sounded like some average teenage Aussie girl who would serve you at your local suburban supermarket checkout, yet here she was in the midst of this carnival of horrors, having seen and suffered so much, trying to find a path home.

The one weakness of the documentary — and I suspect it was either requested upfront by Karen Nettleton, or extended out of sympathy by the journalist — was that it could have pushed her harder on the question of how these three children could readjust to life in Australia.

“Just because their last name is Sharrouf doesn’t mean they are monsters,” Nettleton said.

It was a reassurance many Australians would find unconvincing. But whatever risks there are in letting them return — to the extent that there are necessarily any — it seems especially cruel for us to airbrush these three young people out of the citizenship picture.

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They were not willing participants in this warped journey. They didn’t even know they were in Syria. They are the ultimate victims of a shocking war. Undoubtedly, they have seen things that will affect them psychologically. But to reject them on that basis would be the same as denying entry to Jewish children after the horror of the Holocaust, or Rwandan kids after the Hutu-Tutsi conflict, on the basis they would be incapable of functioning in civil society.

The biggest difference in this case is they’re not refugees. They’re Aussies.

Australian governments take kids away from derelict parents on safety grounds every day of the week, and rightly so. What a weird double standard it would be if these kids were told to stay away from their birthplace, when they only ever left because their parents were so derelict.

What this documentary showed is that they have got one particularly excellent thing going for them. The love of their remarkable grandmother.

In addition to that they would be monitored and supported to get them back on the right path. It might actually be a reasonably simple process, as living in Raqqa would surely be the ultimate form of aversion therapy for anyone who yearned to see the society IS would create.

We should let them come home.

@penbo