ISIS brides made their bed; do we let them lie?

Repatriating Australian women and their children - detailed in al-Hawl camp in northern Syria - is a fraught issue, long on emotion but short on details.

Mariam Dabboussy in the administration building of the al-Hawl camp. Picture: ABC

The subject of Australian women and children detained in al-Hawl camp on the northern Syrian border normally elicits mixed responses. Advocates seek their return to Australia as soon as possible, while the general population feels sympathy towards the children but little for the women.

Recently there have been renewed calls by the media and advocates to repatriate the women and children to Australia, including a social media campaign supporting 47 Australian children and 20 women in al-Hawl camp. Without doubt it is an emotive and very complex issue.

Like many advocacy campaigns it is long on emotion but short on details.

While the campaign even breaks down the age groups of the children, it is silent on the current nationality of the 20 women and of the parentage of the 47 children it claims are Australian. If the campaign is to convince the public, it will need to be more forthcoming with information about the backgrounds of the people for whom they advocate.

Part of the reason attitudes towards the women are quite circumspect is because of a general feeling that just like the men detained in Kurdish camps who claim never to have fought for Islamic State, the women also try to distance themselves from any ideological affinity with the terrorist group. Given a number of them have Australian legal representation it is fair to assume their disavowals are a legal tactic to minimise and control the flow of information. There are normally three lines of argument offered by the women to account for their situation and it is worth critically examining them to see if they pass the credibility test.

The women were tricked into coming to Syria and the Islamic State paid bonuses or rewards to men who brought in new women. I am not aware of Islamic State ever offering or paying bonuses to bring women from the West to the caliphate. No evidence has been offered to support this claim, nor is any such offer made in any of the 25 issues of Islamic State’s English-language online magazines, in any of the speeches by its spokespeople or in any of the document caches uncovered to date. Married fighters were paid an additional stipend for their wives and children, but the idea of a “finder’s fee” for female relatives doesn’t appear to have any basis in fact.

The argument that they were tricked, coerced or forced to go to Syria also relies entirely on self-serving accounts that are light on detail. Mariam Dabboussy, for example, told ABC’s Four Corners her (now dead) brother-in-law tricked her and her parents-in-law into going to the Turkish-Syrian border without their know­ledge where they ran into Syria while being shot at in late 2015. A dramatic story, to be sure, but one that doesn’t address how they magically came to be on the Turkish-Syrian border when on a family holiday to Lebanon.

Her father-in-law, Hicham Zahab, told a somewhat less dramatic story to Kurdish press, saying he was in contact with his sons in Syria and that the family travelled to Gaziantep in Turkey before crossing the border and going on to Tabqa. No gunshots, no fuss. Dabboussy also fails to mention that her father-in-law also has been charged by the Kuwaiti government with smuggling arms for Islamic State and the Australian Federal Police successfully claimed money from the sale of his Sydney house under proceeds of crime legislation.

The women were tricked or forced into marriage or were simply “ISIS brides”. Although we don’t know the details of all the women in the camp, of those we know more than a third were married before they even left Australia. And of those who weren’t married before they left Australia, most appear to have married Australian jihadis once inside Islamic State-held territory.

The term ISIS brides connotes a lack of agency on the part of the women and infers a peripheral role for them. The reality is somewhat different. One edition of Islamic State’s online magazine said: “As for you, O mother of lion cubs … And what will make you know what the mother of lion cubs is? She is the teacher of generations and the producer of men.” The next edition called on women to avoid their children being raised on Western education practices that encouraged Muslims to “tolerate and respect other religions”. Women were a strategic asset. While men conquered territory, women supported the fighter and inculcated the next generation of jihadis in Islamic State’s warped Islamic ideology. It was a role many took to with relish.

One of the single women who travelled to Syria wrote on her social media site: “An ideal Muslimah must be a loving daughter, an obedient wife and a gentle mother! I want to raise lions who will be thorns in the hearts of their enemies.” And Dullel Kassab, who was killed in an airstrike in Syria along with her children, posted on her social media page a picture of her children’s breakfast with the comment “C’mon eat ur eggs so u can be big and strong and fight the kuffar (unbeliever)”.

Once they realised what Islamic State was all about they tried to escape but were recaptured. Again self-serving and without evidence to support the claim, this argument relies on the assumption that the person was tricked into going to Syria and/or didn’t know what Islamic State was doing and tried to leave once they realised its true nature. Yet by June 2014 Islamic State had captured Mosul and proclaimed a caliphate, and within a few months were slaughtering Yazidis, beheading and executing people, and posting their actions on social media for all to see. Nearly all the women in question arrived in Syria well after Islamic State began subjugating and killing people and in response to a widely broadcast call to join the group. These women weren’t actors in a 21st-century version of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad.

But if the women are not naive victims, what about their children? The argument put forward is that they have done no wrong and shouldn’t be made to pay for the sins of their parents. And the quicker they are returned, the more likely it is they can be successfully deradicalised. It is, on the face of it, a compelling argument. I also believe those children for whom paternity and maternity have been proved and whose legal intricacies have been worked out should be returned as soon as possible to begin the process of deradicalisation.

But therein lies the rub. Calls to bring every child back immediately brush over the complexities of the mess the jihadis have made of these children’s lives. Presuming parentage has been established to the government’s satis­fac­tion, the issues of custody and the best interests of the child need to be worked through. To get children back quickly and into deradicalisation programs it may be best to remove them from their mothers and place them in the care of the commonwealth for the time being. Would the mothers (and fathers) agree to this to get their child out of the camp, would courts grant custody to the commonwealth and, if they did, could that order be enforced in northeastern Syria if the detained mother refused?

Alternatively, it is possible the government could seek the return of the parent(s) and children, then arrest and charge the parents on return and take custody of the children. On Friday there were media reports that arrest warrants had been issued for several of the women in al-Hawl. But for others the government is presumably still gathering evidence and it is unlikely they will be returned until that process is complete.

For mothers who are no longer citizens, the situation is even more complex. Zehra Duman is now only a Turkish citizen and presumably will never be allowed to return to Australia. To the best of our knowledge she has two children to two Australian jihadists, both dead. Are they Australian or Turkish children, or both? Can the Australian government be granted or exercise custody of those children and what rights do two sets of Australian paternal grandparents have regarding custody of their respective grandchildren? Would the children be bet­ter off in Turkey with their moth­er or in Australia without her?

Then there is the case of an Australian couple who went to Syria with their children and allegedly had two more while there. They have lost their Australian citizenship and are both Lebanese citizens. What does that mean for their Australian-born and Syrian-born children, particularly if their parents were no longer Australian citizens at the time the children were born in Syria?

Australian terrorists also had children with local and foreign woman. Mahir Absar Alam claims he had three children to a Syrian wife. Should Alam’s Syrian wife and their children be repatriated to Australia? And Hicham Zahab has claimed one of his dead sons had 13 children to five “wives”, including Lebanese, Moroccan and Australian women, and that the children were in al-Hawl camp. If true, what does the Australian government do with this mess of parentage and citizenship — which family (and, potentially, government) has a right to custody, what are the best interests of the children and who gets to define this?

Most reasonable people are keen to have children to whom we have obligations brought back to Australia and started on the process of deradicalisation. But the complexity of the family situations of those men and women who joined Islamic State is far greater than advocates let on, and the government is left to design a policy to try to address the damage that these men and women have done to their children. It is, and will be, a difficult task.

Rodger Shanahan is a research fellow at the Lowy Institute and the author of a study into Australian jihadists, Typology of Terror.