Plan to repatriate ISIS families should be supported, with caveats


An operation to repatriate the Australian family members of former Islamic State fighters — dozens of women and children — from squalid detention camps in Syria cannot happen soon enough.

It will not be an easy process. There are many practical and security concerns that must be addressed. But the revelation from reporters Daniella White and Matthew Knott on Monday that the federal government has finally begun preparations to assist some 20 women and 40 children, who have been in limbo since the fall of the so-called Islamic State in 2019, is a welcome pivot from the Morrison government’s steadfast refusal to countenance the move.

Children gather outside their tents, at al-Hawl camp, which houses families of members of the Islamic State group, in Hasaka province, Syria.Credit:AP

The previous government was adamant that it wanted nothing to do with any Australians — neither fighters nor their families — caught up in the Islamic State’s wave of violent conquest and terror, at least on Australian soil. In 2019, a spokesman for then-home affairs minister Peter Dutton told this masthead the government was “determined to deal with these people as far from our shores as possible”.

The same year, Dutton explained to radio 2GB his concern that “these are people that would in our judgment — not all of them, but some of them — have the potential and capacity to come back here and cause a mass-casualty event”. The Morrison government also cited security concerns including the safety of officials who would have to travel to the camps.

Yet to leave these people essentially stateless, whatever their level of complicity, was an abrogation of the government’s responsibilities, both legal and humanitarian. As deputy editor Michael Bachelard wrote in 2020, following his visits to the region in 2017-18: “These women and their children should be given the opportunity to return to face justice, or, if no crimes can be proved against them, to reintegrate into society.”

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He also suggested that continuing to simply wash our hands of the problem could itself create a security risk, citing an ASIO warning against allowing these children to come to maturity in the camps, embittered with the knowledge they had been abandoned by Australia. “In a networked world, they could become the next generation of online terror recruiters.”

Timothy Allan Betts of the US Bureau of Counterterrorism similarly remarked in July that “leaving fighters and family members in north-east Syria is not a viable option; we risk these individuals migrating from conflict to conflict in a way that creates new strife and instability elsewhere, threatens our collective security, and presents serious threats to innocent civilians.”

There are compelling reasons, then, to begin the repatriation. The focus now must be on the mechanism: in particular, how the federal government creates effective protocols for dealing with returnees and rehabilitating them that are effective both in safeguarding the community and the rights of those individuals.



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