Australia bans a citizen with alleged IS links from returning from Syria

MELBOURNE, Australia — Australia’s government banned an Australian citizen with alleged ties to the militant Islamic State group from returning home from a detention camp in Syria, the latest development in the case of fraught repatriation of families of IS fighters.

The woman was planning to join another 33 Australians — 10 women and 23 children — and fly on Monday from Damascus, Syria, to Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Wednesday.

But the group was turned back by Syrian authorities to the Roj detention camp, due to unspecified procedural problems.

The Australian government had acted on news that the group planned to leave Syria, Burke said. He said the woman, whom he did not identify, had been issued with a temporary exclusion order on Monday and her lawyers had been provided with the paperwork on Wednesday.

She was an immigrant who left Australia for Syria sometime between 2013 and 2015, Burke said, declining to elaborate on whether she had children — though he generally blamed the parents for the predicaments of their offspring stranded in Syria.

“These are horrific situations that have been brought on those children by actions of their parents. They are terrible situations. But they have been brought on entirely by horrific decisions that their parents made,” Burke told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Burke has the power to use temporary exclusion orders to prevent high-risk citizens from returning to Australia for up to two years.

The laws were were introduced to in 2019 to prevent defeated Islamic State fighters from returning to Australia. There are no public reports of an order being issued before.

Burke said security agencies had not advised that any of the other Australians in the group warranted an exclusion order. Such orders can’t be made against children younger than 14.

Confusing messages at a cramped camp

At the Roj camp, tucked in Syria’s northeastern corner near the border with Iraq, the Australian women who had expected to travel home refused to speak to The Associated Press on Wednesday.

One of the women, Zeinab Ahmad, said they had been advised by an attorney not to talk to journalists.

A security official at the camp, Chavrê Rojava, said that family members of the detainees — who she said were Australians of Lebanese origin — had traveled to Syria to arrange their return. They brought temporary passports that had been issued for the would-be returnees, Rojava said.

“We have no contact with the Australian government regarding this matter, as we are not part of the process,” she said. “We have left it to the families to resolve.”

Rojava said that after the group had departed the camp to travel to Damascus, they were contacted by a Syrian government official and warned to turn back. The families were “very disappointed” upon returning to the camp, she said.

“We recently requested that all countries and families come and take back their citizens,” Rojava said.

She added that Syrian authorities do not want to see a “repeat of what happened in al-Hol camp” — a much larger camp, also in northeastern Syria that once housed tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, with alleged ties to IS.

Last month, during fighting between Syrian government forces and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which had controlled al-Hol, guards abandoned their posts and many of the camp’s residents fled.

That raised concerns that IS members would regroup and stage new attacks in Syria.

The Syrian government then established control of al-Hol and has begun moving its remaining residents to another camp in Aleppo province. The Kurdish-led force remains in control of Roj camp and a ceasefire is now in place.

The thorny issue of repatriating IS-linked foreign citizens

Former Islamic State fighters from multiple countries, their wives and children have been detained in camps since the militant group lost control of its territory in Syria in 2019. Though defeated, the group still has sleeper cells that carry out deadly attacks in both Syria and Iraq.

Australian governments have repatriated Australian women and children from Syrian detention camps on two occasions. Other Australians have also returned without government assistance.

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Wednesday reiterated his position announced a day earlier that his government would not help repatriate the latest group.

“These are people who chose to go overseas to align themselves with an ideology which is the caliphate, which is a brutal, reactionary ideology and that seeks to undermine and destroy our way of life,” Albanese told reporters.

He was referring to the militants’ capture of wide swaths of land more than a decade ago that stretched across Syria and Iraq, territory where IS established its so-called caliphate. Jihadis from foreign countries traveled to Syria at the time to join the IS. Over the years, they had families and raised children there.

“We are doing nothing to repatriate or to assist these people. I think it’s unfortunate that children are caught up in this, that’s not their decision, but it’s the decision of their parents or their mother,” Albanese added.