Customs failure allowed jihadist to join Iraq fight

A SYSTEMIC failure in intelligence-sharing led to convicted terrorist Khaled Sharrouf and his brother being allowed to leave the country.

A SYSTEMIC failure in intelligence-sharing led to travel alerts for convicted terrorist Khaled Sharrouf and his brother being negated, allowing him to leave the country to join the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.

Following revelations in The Weekend Australian that Sharrouf has executed unarmed Iraqis as part of ISIS’s march towards Baghdad, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said a travel alert had been active on Sharrouf’s brother’s passport, which he used to leave Australia.

But weak information-sharing arrangements higher “up the chain” led to frontline Customs officers allowing him to leave Australia on December 6, due to the brothers’ physical “likeness”.

This news comes as Foreign Minister Julie Bishop revealed that she has cancelled the passports of Australians seeking to return after fighting in Syria.

Mr Morrison described Sharrouf’s departure from Sydney airport as “the first canary in the mine” and subsequent reviews have led to Customs and other agencies improving their process­es before other jihadists could exploit the flaws.

“In many ways, this incident has provided a very early warning to the government,” the minister said. “Had Khaled Sharrouf been picked up on the way out, then it is quite possible that these weaknesses that have since been identified may have remained.’’

The passport used by Sharrouf, who is believed to be in Iraq with fellow Sydney man Mohamed Elomar, contained no biometric data and the actions of frontline Customs officials “were within the tolerances in terms of a face-to-passport check”.

“The broader issue that the reviews have focused on is that the primary line officers and others ... don’t have access to full narratives and nor would they normally do that,” Mr Morrison said.

“So there were other issues up the chain, which wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment on, that have been identified both within Customs as well as the information exchange between the other agencies involved.”

Mr Morrison said he had ­received no brief on whether the government could be exposed to legal action over Sharrouf’s ­actions in the Middle East.

Ms Bishop said yesterday that passports of Australians fighting in Syria had been cancelled in a bid to stop them returning.

“I have cancelled a number of passports when it’s been reported to me that Australians are seeking to leave or in fact are seeking to come back from fighting in, particularly, Syria,” Ms Bishop told ABC TV’s Insiders program.

“We are receiving reports that they are also in Iraq where ISIS is fighting the Iraqi security forces, and so we are doing what we can across government.”

Forty passports were cancelled between July 1 last year and May 1.

An Australian who featured in one ISIS propaganda video was identified by several media outlets yesterday as Zakaryah Raad. The video, shared across multiple social­-media websites, says the man, “Abu Yahya ash Shami”, was killed near Syria’s border with Iraq after filming an interview.

US President Barack Obama has expressed “deep concerns” over Australians who are fighting in Syria and Iraq who may try to return to the West.

“There is no doubt the problem in Syria is one that we have been paying a lot of attention to over the last couple of years, as you see jihadists coming in from Europe and as far as Australia to get trained and then going back into their home countries,” the President told CNN.