IS families blur lines between our security and our sympathy
Several factors have driven the divide between Labor and the Coalition on how to manage the legacy of ISIS.
In 2019, Australian officials travelled to Syria and gathered up a group of young Australians who had been detained in one of the secure camps housing the families of dead or detained Islamic State fighters.
When they arrived back in Australia, Scott Morrison, then prime minister, noted they had “got off to a horrible start in life as a result of the appalling decisions of their parents, and they’ll find their home in Australia and I’m sure they’ll be embraced by Australians”.
Among them was a teenage woman who had been taken to Syria by her family when she was just 13 and married off to an older ISIS fighter. She returned to Australia with several young children.
Last Saturday, another group of 17 Australian women and children touched down in Sydney. They had been held in the camps in Syria for three years and seven months before Australian officials brought them home.
Among them was a 22-year-old woman who had been taken to Syria by her family when she was just 15 and married off to an older ISIS fighter. She returned to Australia with four young children.
Anthony Albanese did not suggest Australians would embrace her or any of the 13 children in the group. The Prime Minister has framed the return of the families purely as a national security issue.
“Our first and only priority is to keep Australians safe,” he said.
Peter Dutton, who was the home affairs minister at the time the first group was brought back, has taken a different approach this time.
The Opposition Leader said the group needed to “live with their decision’’ to travel to Syria, that the repatriations were not in Australia’s best interest and that the families should not have been brought home.
The comments represent a rare political split on national security, an area where Australia has come to expect broad bipartisanship from the two major parties. Several factors have driven the divide between Labor and the Coalition on how to manage the legacy of ISIS – the families the fighters left behind.
There are significant differences between the two repatriated groups.
The first returnees were almost all orphans, from two family units, their parents dead in Syria.
The second group includes three women who travelled to Syria as adults, claiming they were tricked or coerced by their husbands into entering the caliphate.
The Australian public is much less sympathetic towards these women who are usually seen, rightly or wrongly, to have willingly accompanied their husbands into Syria.
This belief had not been tested in a court of law because the women have not been charged with any offence.
Having inherited the issue from the previous government, Labor made the decision to act, and began bringing some of the 16 women and 42 children detained in al-Roj camp in northeastern Syria home. But having done that, the government then chose not to explain its decision. Instead, ministers from the Prime Minister down have simply said the decision followed national security advice, and nothing more was to be said.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil’s interview in The Weekend Australian today gives the first real insight into the Government’s thinking, and once, again, it is framed around national security.
Only Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has argued the humanitarian case, pointing out the women and children are Australian citizens, and “some’’ of the women had been taken over as children themselves.
The opposition, led by Dutton and home affairs spokeswoman Karen Andrews, stepped into the information vacuum, repeatedly warning of an unacceptable risk to Australia as a result of Labor’s decision. This position makes it clear that if something were to go wrong – if one of the repatriated families were to pose a threat, or an official involved in their repatriation was injured or killed – the Coalition would pin the blame firmly on the Albanese government.
Labor is well aware of this risk, which some say is so serious it could potentially bring down the government in the event something went catastrophically wrong. Both sides of politics are arguing or implying that they had formed their competing positions based on information received from ASIO and the AFP.
Albanese said the government was acting on national security advice when it made the decision to bring the women and children home. The chief adviser in this space is ASIO.
Dutton was briefed by ASIO director-general Mike Burgess last month on the planned repatriations. He emerged from the “top secret” briefing and said he was “more strongly of the view now that there is a very significant risk in bringing some of these people to our country that can’t be mitigated”.
ASIO has never revealed what advice it gave to the former Coalition or the current Labor governments. Andrews explained the process, telling ABC that when she was the minister “we took advice from the security agencies. And let me just be clear on that point. It is not the role of the security agents to say whether or not these people should have been repatriated to Australia. And intelligence agencies would give advice on various risk assessments.’’
What ASIO is likely to have done is spelled out the risks associated with returning the women, and the risks associated with leaving them in Syria.
This would have been provided via a threat or risk matrix, examining possible actions and potential outcomes.
The least-worst scenario was probably to bring them home, before the children grew up and could come under greater influence from ISIS, which is still highly active in Syria.
ASIO, the AFP and Defence would then presumably have advised on how any risk associated with bringing them back to Australia could be managed and mitigated. The government is likely to have then weighed that advice with other matters such as international law obligations, moral obligations to the 13 children – who are all innocent victims – and decided it was an acceptable risk which could be managed.
O’Neil all but confirmed this, issuing a statement advising the government had “carefully considered the range of security, community and welfare factors in making the decision to repatriate”.
The first four families repatriated were deemed the most vulnerable of the cohort in the camp – with young children, many of them ill, and the women not accused of serious offences.
Sydney women Mariam Dabboussy and her three children, Mariam Raad and her four children, and Bessima Assaad and her two youngest daughters, aged 15 and 12, are among the group.
The fourth member is Shayma Assaad, 22, and her four children, including the youngest, a girl of three, who was born in the camps. Shayma, the daughter of Bessima, was the child taken to Syria at 15, who ended up on the camps at 19, pregnant and with thee young children.
Western nations across the globe continue to confront the legacy of the evil terror group ISIS. Countries are repatriating their citizens from Syria, with a number of women charged and jailed in their home countries. It is not an easy reckoning.
In the US this week, Kansas woman Allison Fluke-Ekren received the maximum 20-year sentence after being convicted of leading a 100-strong all-female battalion of ISIS fighters in Syria. Her own children, including one who was taken to Syria and married off to a fighter, turned on their mother and detailed the abuse inflicted on them.
The court in Virginia had heard she led the Khatiba Nusaybah battalion in Raqqa, teaching girls as young as 10 to use weapons including automatic guns, grenades and suicide vests. She continued to plot attacks in the West after the fall of ISIS in March 2019.
On Wednesday, The Netherlands repatriated 12 women and 28 children from the al-Hol camp.
On the same day, Germany took back one woman and four children. The woman was arrested when she arrived home and expected to be charged with membership of a foreign terrorist organisation. She was accused by prosecutors of working with ISIS’s administration.
German counter-extremism academic Sofia Koller wrote that Germany had now returned 95 women, of which 33 had been charged and 26 convicted to date.
By contrast no Australian woman has been charged after returning from Syria, although charges are highly likely against some of the 12 women and 29 children who remain in al-Roj camp, and are expected to be returned in three groups in coming months.
Katja Theodorakis, head of counter-terrorism at the think-tank ASPI, said national security had arguably been the overriding factor in Western decision-making on repatriations.
“Humanitarian and human rights considerations or the international legal obligations the UN puts on member states to prevent the spread of terrorism have been easy to push aside in favour of national security,’’ she said.
“In other countries, like for example the Netherlands, prosecution of the mothers was also a key variable in shaping decisions.
“In the case of the first cohort, Morrison’s public statement indeed stands out, when he explained the decision to repatriate on the basis that the children were victims of their parents’ decisions, without referencing security considerations.
“This is very much in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
“Without wanting to speculate, what we have to keep in mind here is that political risk calculations are not solely determined by objective assessments but decisions are also very much influenced by wider political considerations.’’
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout