PM tells desperate Sharrouf children Australia will co-operate if they get to an embassy

Australia will help the children of Khaled Sharrouf if they get to an embassy.

Three of Khaled Sharrouf’s children, from left, Zaynab, Abdullah and Hoda, believed to have been photographed in Syria. Picture: Supplied

Scott Morrison has opened the door to letting the children of infamous Islamic State terrorist Khaled Sharrouf back into the country if they can reach an Australian embassy.

The Prime Minister again ruled out extracting the children from a Syrian refugee camp, but said Australian officials would co-operate if they got to an embassy.

“We are working with the Red Cross … where there are particularly children and mainly that’s where our focus is exclusively,” he said in Canberra today.

“There are the normal assessments that are done. The identification process, there are issues relating to people’s citizenship that has to be confirm and you’d expect that, but where those issues are able to be addressed, we would follow the normal processes for issuing of travel documents after all those other matters have been addressed

“But where there are Australians who are caught up in this situation, particularly as innocent children, we will do what I think Australians would expect us to do on their behalf.”

Khaled Sharrouf’s children: Zaynab (pink) Abdullah (middle) Hoda (purple) and Humzeh (front centre). Picture: Supplied

Zaynab fled to the camp with sister Hoda, 16, and their only surviving brother, Humzeh, 8, from the bloody battle in Baghouz.

Pressure has been mounting on the Australian government to bring home at least a dozen Australian women captured as Islamic State was overrun are now being held in refugee camps in northern Syria and Iraq. Between them they have at least 19 children — with 12 younger than 10.

One of the Sharrouf children — Zaynab, 18 — is seven months pregnant with her third child and believed to have severe malnutrition and dehydration and shrapnel wounds that are not healing, according to Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph.

The widowed bride, forced at the age of 13 to marry her ­father’s friend and fellow Australian jihadi Mohamed Elomar, is at risk of complications and premature labour.

Earlier this week the PM said “not one Australian life” would be put in danger to save ­Islamic State converts.

“It’s appalling Australians have gone and fought against our values and our way of life. I think it’s even more despicable that they put their children in the middle of it,’’ Mr Morrison said.

‘Please rescue our daughter’

It comes as the parents of a young, pregnant mother from Melbourne who fled the fall of Islamic State in Syria begged for her to be returned to Australia, appealing to Mr Morriso­n to show her “love, compassi­on and forgiveness”.

Six months’ pregnant, Kirsty Rosse-Emile, 24, entered the Al-Hawl refugee camp in northeast Syria with her two-year-old daughter, Amira, just weeks before Kurdish-led forces defeated the Islamic State at the town of Baghouz last month.

Ms Rosse-Emile, who arrived in Syria with husband Nabil Kadmir­y in 2014, joins more than 70,000 people, including more than 30 Australians, in the camp.

They are in limbo following the military defeat of the terror group.

Kirsty Rosse-Emile before she left Australia for Syria.

Ms Ross-Emile’s father, Guy, told The Australian he hoped the government would help bring his daughter and granddaughter home. He said she was not a terrorist.

“We’re trying to get our daughter here,” said Gus, who asked that his surname not be published.

But a relative of Mr Kadmiry, now aged 45, believed the couple became radicalised soon after they were married about six years ago. They said the couple disappeared without telling anyone, and then Mr Kadmiry called his mother in Morocco to tell her he was in Syria.

Facebook pages in her adopted Islamic name, Asmaa, show a strong embrace of Islam and friendship with at least one other woman who travelled to Syria, Dullel Kassab.

One account created in 2012 contained images of posters with slogans such as “Jihad. The only solution”. Another image posted on the page on July 21, 2012, ­featured the words “Lions of Islam” over the top of pictures of various terrorist figures, including al-Qa’ida leader Osama bin Laden and Iraqi Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — who founded the group that became Islamic State.

Kirsty Rosse-Emile’s mother Emma holds a photo of her daughter as an infant. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

Her parents said she and Mr Kadmiry had travelled to Morocco in early 2014 and then made their way to Syria.

“They left in 2014 without us knowing,” her father said. “I wasn’t on good terms with the bloke because the bloke had some funny ideas. He was lazy and he went to the (now-defunct Islamic centre) Al-Furqan and all that. He was so strict, you know. He didn’t want to sit with women.

“So he went there to his family’s farm in Morocco in 2014 and then surreptitiously he went to Syria through Turkey.

The border there was porous. (Turkish President Recep Tayyip) Erdogan is complicit in that because he was letting all the Sunni Muslims go in … displacing the Shiites. My daughter is not a terrorist. She was taken there because she was trained as a nurse.”

His wife added: “She would never have left the country on her own to go over there.

“My daughter was taken over there by her husband. She didn’t go over there to marry somebody. And there are other women who have done the same, they have gone over with their husbands. (Scott Morrison) has put them all in the same basket and making them out to be evil people. And they’re not.”

Guy said they did not know she was in Syria for three years — until she called them to ask for help. He said he contacted authorities to ask for them to help ­return her to Australia. He claimed authorities treated his family like terrorists after police arrived at their home with a search warrant and seized their phones.

“We are not terrorists, we are law-abiding citizens’” he said. “I love Australia, it’s a country of milk and honey. It’s a good country.”

He said he wanted to appeal to Mr Morrison’s Christian beliefs to show “love, compassion and forgiveness” to people like his daughter: “I want him to extricate these people from there because they are suffering.

“Look at the situation. They have defeated the caliphate, they have eradicated it.”

With Mark Schliebs, Rory Callinan

Amira, 2.