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ISIS families trying to return to Australia have been warned they could be arrested once they land, as the Coalition calls on Labor to find a way to block “terrorist sympathisers”.
News that a group of four women and nine children have arrived in Damascus and hope to fly to Australia within days has added urgency to the question of how the group should be treated on their return.
Their plan to fly to Australia, which remain unconfirmed and could be thwarted by authorities in Syria or a stopover country, has become a flashpoint in a broader debate on migration and extremism. The Bondi massacre in December and the rise of One Nation’s anti-migration campaign has put a bigger spotlight on the ISIS families, as Labor has hardened its language against any repatriation.
“These are Australian citizens and the government is not assisting them to come home,” Foreign Minister Penny Wong told reporters in Adelaide on Monday.
“And if they do come home, they will face the full force of the law.”
The majority of Australians who have returned from the caliphate have not faced serious charges when they arrived in Australia. One woman, Mariam Raad, was charged in 2023 with willingly joining her husband to travel to Syria when it was under terrorist control. She pleaded guilty and avoided jail.
The government has previously flagged that members of the group deemed to pose a security risk would be monitored in the community.
Trying to balance the legal rights of Australians to return home with low levels of public support for people who joined the ISIS movement, ministers have insisted for months that officials were not helping the group return.
Government departments have provided members of the group with passports, which the government argues it was legally obliged to do because they are citizens. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s firm public statements in February this year, in which he said he had no sympathy for people who had “made their bed” and chosen ISIS, was reportedly a factor in the decision of Syrian authorities to block the women and children from leaving the camp.
“The Australian government is not and will not repatriate people from Syria,” a spokesman for the federal government said on Monday. “Our security agencies have been monitoring, and continue to monitor, the situation in Syria to ensure they are prepared for any Australians seeking to return.”
But the Coalition, working to win back voters who have flocked to One Nation since the last election, rounded on Labor.
Opposition home affairs spokesman Jonno Duniam said the Coalition wanted answers on the more than a dozen ISIS-linked Australians who may try to follow the current group that has made it to Damascus.
Frontbencher Aaron Violi said on Sky News that “these are terrorist sympathisers that chose to leave our country”, arguing Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke should have made greater use of special powers allowing the government to block specific individuals.
Burke has been targeted by the opposition over his relationship with a prominent supporter of the ISIS families. In February, he revealed he blocked one woman under an order designed to protect Australians from national security risks, on advice from security agencies.
Labor MP Jerome Laxale told Sky that the opposition was playing politics and undermining national security.
Liberal senator Maria Kovacic, a leading moderate, said she “had a great deal of empathy” for children who were forced into a bad situation, but the community deserved to know how risky it was to bring them home.
“The government will say it’s a matter for private citizens how they return. I would suggest that the government should be across this, and the fact that they’re not is a significant problem,” she said.
“We don’t know if any of them will be charged with a crime, if in fact they have committed those crimes.”
Duniam and the Coalition released a policy in February that would make it illegal for people to return from a terror hotspot without government permission; legal experts question if the plan was workable.
Greens senator David Shoebridge, who visited the Al-Roj camp last year, has put his support behind the push to bring the group home.
“[The children] had no choice in going to Syria to have their childhoods devastated like this,” he said last month.
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