Aussie terrorist Khaled Sharrouf’s children in Syrian refugee camp: report
Aussie terrorist Khaled Sharrouf’s surviving children have reportedly fled Syria’s IS stronghold, as their grandmother urges the Australian government to bring them back home.
World
Don't miss out on the headlines from World. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Three surviving children of Australian terrorist Khaled Sharrouf are reportedly being held at a Syrian refugee camp after leaving Islamic’s State’s last stronghold in Baghouz before it was overrun by Kurdish fighters.
Sharrouf’s daughters — Zaynab, 17, who is pregnant, and Hoda, 16 — and son Hamza, eight, are in the Kurdish-controlled Al-Hawl camp alongside eight other Australian women and their children, including Zaynab’s two daughters, aged three and two, according to multiple outlets.
His two sons, Abdullah and Zarqawi, are believed to have died aged nine and eight, respectively, alongside their father in a US air strike as they travelled in a car near Raqqa in 2017.
Sharrouf had served jail time over a terror plot in Sydney before leaving Australia and joining Islamic State in Syria.
In 2014, he posted an image to the internet showing his then seven-year-old son holding the severed head of a Syrian soldier, an act that was widely condemned.
The children’s mother Tara Nettleton is believed to have died of a medical condition in 2015, a year after she followed Sharrouf to Syria from Sydney.
Her mother, Karen Nettleton, has called on the federal government to help her surviving grandchildren return to Australia.
“They’re with other Australian and foreign fighters (in the camps) and they shouldn’t be in amongst all of that,” she told the ABC.
Ms Nettleton said she was worried by reports of illness spreading through the camps.
“Zaynab is seven-and-a-half months pregnant, she’s feeling very fatigued,” Ms Nettleton said.
“Hoda’s got a foot injury, she has no feeling in her foot so it’s very difficult for her to get around.”
Last night a spokeswoman for Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton told The Australian the minister would not comment on the revelations.
But last month his spokesman told the ABC that the Australian government’s ability to confirm the identity of Australians in Syria was extremely limited.
“Australian officials cannot facilitate the safe passage of people out of the conflict zones,” the spokesman said.
Kurdish-led forces pronounced the death of the Islamic State group’s nearly five-year-old “caliphate” last month after flushing out diehard jihadists from their very last bastion in eastern Syria.
World leaders hailed the victory as a major landmark in the fight against ISIS and its ideology, but warned the group that spurred a spate of global terror attacks was far from defeated.
“Syrian Democratic Forces declare total elimination of so-called caliphate and 100 per cent territorial defeat of ISIS,” spokesman Mustefa Bali said in a statement, using another acronym for ISIS.