May 19, 2024
Jason Koutsoukis is The Saturday Paper's special correspondent.
EXCLUSIVE: Amid calls for the urgent repatriation of so-called Australian ISIS brides and their children stranded in Syria, Anthony Albanese has decided to shelve any plans to bring them home.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has shelved indefinitely plans to repatriate about 40 Australian women and children currently stranded in detention camps managed by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.
Two senior government sources with direct knowledge of the issue told The Saturday Paper that while the government had not formally decided against repatriating the so-called ISIS brides and their children, the prime minister had made it "very clear" that unless there was a dramatic deterioration in the security situation in and around the camps, the issue "would not be revisited before the election".
"Not bringing these women and children who are Australian citizens home is nothing other than a complete failure of political will," says Save the Children Australia chief executive Mat Tinkler. "That and nothing else." Most of the 40 people are detained in Al Roj camp near the Turkish border and have been interviewed in person by Australian security officials. Four people detained in Al Hol detention camp further south have not been interviewed due to its inaccessibility to Australian officials.
Save the Children Australia is currently attempting to compel the Australian government to repatriate a group of the detainees in Syria via a writ of habeas corpus.
In November last year, Federal Court Justice Mark Moshinsky dismissed Save the Children's application on the grounds the detention of the women and children was not under the control of the Commonwealth. Last week the full bench of the Federal Court heard an appeal from Save the Children to overturn Justice Moshinsky's ruling.
"Australian citizenship has to mean something," says Tinkler. "Being a child has to mean something too. And if our government cannot move to help a group of Australian women and their children from one of the worst places on Earth, then what does it actually mean to be an Australian citizen?" In a supporting affidavit to the Federal Court, Greg Barton, professor of global Islamic politics at Deakin University, said the Australian government faced no practical barrier from the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), or from current circumstances on the ground, to repatriate Australian women and children.
"AANES, together with the United States, desperately wants the current very slow pace of repatriation to be substantially accelerated. There are no recorded incidents of repatriation being refused," Barton said.
In 2019, then Liberal prime minister Scott Morrison authorised the repatriation of eight Australian children from a Syrian detention camp. Many of those who lobbied on behalf of detainees in the country believe that, had it not been for the Covid-19 pandemic, Morrison would have repatriated all the Australian women and children.
In October 2022, Labor's Home Affairs minister, Clare O'Neil, announced a group of four Australian women and their 13 Australian children had been repatriated from Al Roj camp to their families in New South Wales, mostly in Western Sydney.
Last week one of those women, Mariam Raad, 32, pleaded guilty to willingly entering a Syrian region controlled by Islamic State, a terrorist organisation.
Raad, who is on bail, will be sentenced next month and faces a maximum penalty of up to 10 years in prison. She is the only person among the 17 people repatriated in October 2022 to face court.
Kamalle Dabboussy, chief executive of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC), says the 17 who were repatriated in October 2022 have comfortably settled back into their home communities in Sydney. He led a public campaign for his daughter Mariam Dabboussy's return to Australia and remains a strong advocate for the repatriation of those who remain in north-east Syria.
"They are getting on with their lives, getting engaged with their communities, playing sports, and as far as national security goes, they're doing exactly what they said they would do, which is cooperate with Australian authorities," says Dabboussy.
Coordinated by the Joint Agency Task Force, the October 2022 repatriation was led by Australia's special envoy to AANES, Marc Innes-Brown, who, in his discussions with AANES officials, referred to the 17 Australian citizens as "Cohort 1".
A file note made by Innes-Brown on October 27, 2022 - the day before the repatriation of the 17 was publicly announced - referred to "the plan to repatriate further groups of women and children".
That plan became a lasting political headache for the Albanese government, however, when Western Sydney community leaders, including Fairfield mayor Frank Carbone and Liverpool mayor Ned Mannoun, turned concerns that the women and children posed a security risk into a story that dominated national news headlines for weeks.
The issue was shrewdly fanned by the federal opposition leader, Peter Dutton.
"No, I dispute that - it wasn't a headache, I can take a Panadol for that," says one government official not authorised to speak publicly. "It was a fucking migraine, a big ugly stain on the blue carpet that spread all the way around to the prime minister's office, and the pain of it hasn't gone away," the official added, referring to the colour that distinguishes the ministerial wing from the rest of Parliament House.
At the time, Clare O'Neil defended the October 2022 repatriation on national security grounds, saying the most important thing to understand was that the people at the heart of the issue were Australian citizens.
"The national security question for us is, do we want these children growing up in a squalid refugee camp where they have no access to health and education, where they are subjected every day to radical, violent ideology that tells them to hate their own country? Or do we want them to grow up here with Australian values? So that's the choice for us," O'Neil said.
Australian government officials maintain their focus at all times has been the safety and security of all Australians.
Officials also point to Australia's continued partnership with humanitarian agencies that have the mandate and expertise to deliver assistance to affected people in north-east Syria, including Australian citizens.
Since 2011, Australia has provided about $568 million to the Syria response, including $2.5 million in the 2022-23 financial year to the United Nations Population Fund, and $4.5 million to UNICEF, the United Nations children's fund.
"The government recognises the incredibly challenging situation in northeast Syria," a spokesperson for the prime minister told The Saturday Paper. "We have a longstanding practice of not commenting on national security matters or individual cases." A strong backer - then and now - of repatriating all Australian citizens detained in Syria is Dennis Richardson, whose many public service postings include secretary of defence, director-general of security and Australian ambassador to the US.
"I would simply note that the United States, Canada, the UK and a range of other countries have found it within their wit to take similar people back to their own countries," Richardson said in November 2022. "And if they can do it, it's simply a nonsense to suggest that we can't.
"I believe in terms of our collective security responsibilities, we should be bringing them back to Australia. I argue that not on the grounds of compassion. I argue it in terms of our hard-headed appraisal of our national interest and our own security interests," he added.
Richardson tells The Saturday Paper he stands by these views, noting "the US only last week announced they were taking back more families from the camps".
Even Ned Mannoun, who so strongly opposed the repatriation in 2022, has had something of a change of heart.
"After we received a briefing from Clare O'Neil at the time, as well as I think the deputy director of ASIO, and without breaking confidentiality for either them or us, I think what we heard was very reassuring," Mannoun says. "I think having seen that one person has been charged that we're aware of, you know, I guess I now have confidence in it." Still deeply offended by the idea of any Australian citizen going overseas to align themselves with a terrorist organisation, Mannoun believes the only way to maintain community harmony in the event of future repatriations is to ensure that those who return face the full force of the law.
"If you leave Australia to fight against its ideals and then you want to come back, I believe that you should not be treated the same way that people like yourself and myself, and millions of other Australians who believe in our way of life [are]," he says.
A key point emphasised by AFIC's Kamalle Dabboussy is this is exactly what has happened not just in Australia for those who returned in 2022, but in all countries that have brought home citizens from detention camps in north-east Syria.
"They are the most-watched people on Earth," says Dabboussy, "and they're cooperating with authorities wherever they go, whether they're in Europe or North America, or Canada, or Eastern Europe, or in the Caucasus - they're all settled in and cooperating with authorities quite well. As far as repatriations go out of north-east Syria, not one has met an incident. So this can be done, it's proven it can be done, and my hope is that the prime minister and the government can do it, because they should do it." Whether or not the government moves to reconsider further repatriations from Syria, the position taken by the federal opposition will be critical.
According to shadow home affairs spokesperson James Paterson, the opposition remains open to the possibility, albeit within very tight guardrails.
"No further repatriations from Syria should occur unless the Albanese government can give the Australian people an iron-clad guarantee that they pose no danger to our community," Paterson tells The Saturday Paper. "We have a serious enough domestic terrorism threat environment and strained community cohesion already without exacerbating it any further." Australian Greens foreign affairs spokesperson Jordon Steele-John openly urges the government to repatriate all Australian citizens detained in camps in north-east Syria as soon as possible.
"The Australian women and children being held at dangerous detention camps in Syria are at grave risk and they deserve an urgent government response," says Steele-John.
"Many of the women in these camps were tricked into making trips to Syria under false pretences or are children who have had the incredible misfortune to be born into this situation," he adds. "These are Australian citizens who must be allowed to return home and receive support to be integrated back into our community." With Labor members of parliament feeling bruised by the furore over last year's High Court decision ordering the release of more than 150 people from immigration detention, it's unlikely that many - if any would be privately urging Albanese to act now to repatriate any more Australians detained in Syria.
Still, one Labor backbencher acknowledged the issue had the potential to cost the party in areas where it is being challenged by the Greens, such as the seat of Wills in Melbourne's inner north.
"I get the politics of it, it's awful, but another part of me worries that we are creating a reputation for ourselves of abandoning Australians stranded overseas. I just wish we had brought them all back at once." "It wasn't a headache, I can take a Panadol for that. It was a fucking migraine, a big ugly stain on the blue carpet that spread all the way around to the prime minister's office, and the pain of it hasn't gone away."
