100 Australians fighting with ISIS remain lost in action

The fate of 100 Australians recruited to fight for Islamic State may never be known.

ISIS terrorist Khaled Sharrouf's children, from left, Hoda, Abdullah, Humzeh, Zaqawi and Zaynab.

The fate of up to 100 Australians remains unknown as US-backed forces aim to seize back the final 700sq m of Islamic State territory in Syria in the coming days.

They are what’s left of the 230 Australians who travelled to the conflict zone since 2012, with nearly 100 known to be killed and another 40 who have returned.

Aside from the few caught and arrested — such as Neil Prakash, who was stripped of his Australian citizenship while in Turkish custody late last year — little is known about what has happened to the remaining foreign fighters and their families.

The Department of Home ­Affairs said yesterday that about 100 Australians who had fought for or supported “Islamic extremist groups” were currently in Syria and Iraq. The department refused to say how many have been captured by Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

“The government doesn’t provide a running commentary on the status of individuals in the conflict zone for security reasons,” a department spokesman said. “The Australian government’s capacity to confirm reports of deaths in either Syria or Iraq is extremely limited.”

Backed by the US, the SDF expects to take the last Syrian town held by Islamic State — Baghouz, in the country’s remote east — in the coming days. The SDF slowed its advance into the town because of civilians they believed were being used as human shields by Islamic State fighters.

Deakin University terrorism expert Greg Barton said he did not expect many Australians to be in the town, and suspected many got out of Syria before the 2017 fall of Raqqa, which served as the capital of Islamic State’s so-called caliphate.

“Clearly a lot of IS figures in northern Iraq and presumably a lot in Syria were not in this last stand and (there’s) an unknown number in Turkey that may be many thousands,” Professor Barton said. “So as to where the Australians are, my guess would be that quite a few are in Turkey.

“I don’t think many of them will end up in this last siege. I think they would have gotten out in some of the negotiated evacu­ations of Raqqa and smaller ­settlements further east, or in other movements.”

Lowy Institute Middle East expert Rodger Shanahan said it was possible some Australians were in Baghouz, but a large number may have been killed in previous battles.

“Some of them could have been caught in the fighting in Mosul (Iraq) or in Kobane (northern Syria) before that,” Dr Shanahan said. “In Kobane, they were using 1000-pound bombs, so if you hit one of them there’d be nothing left of them. In Mosul, they might be at the bottom of a collapsed four-storey building and we’re never going to find them.

‘‘One of the issues is that we’re never really going to have 100 per cent certainty (about what happened to the Australians) because some of these bodies won’t exist anymore and nobody’s going to go looking for them.”

He said the Australian fighters rarely occupied senior positions in the terrorist group and were “expendable” on the battlefield, where they died.

“But there’ll be others who have survived and there’ll be others who have gone to ground, perhaps in Iraq where the support network is a bit more robust,” Dr Shanahan said.

The Department of Home ­Affairs also declined to respond to questions about the surviving children of Islamic State fighter Khaled Sharrouf, who was killed alongside two of his sons in 2017.

Little has been revealed about his eldest daughter, Zaynab Sharrouf, now believed to be 17, her three-year-old daughter and two other siblings since his death.