Australian PM Albanese says no help for ISIL relatives held in Syria camp

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced that his government will not repatriate Australian women and children from Syria who have been identified as relatives of suspected ISIL (ISIS) fighters.

“We have a very firm view that we won’t be providing assistance or repatriation,” Albanese told ABC News on Tuesday.

Albanese said that while it is “unfortunate” that children have been affected, Australia is “not providing any support”.

“As my mother would say, you make your bed, you lie in it,” he said.

“We have no sympathy, frankly, for people who travelled overseas in order to participate in what was an attempt to establish a caliphate to undermine and destroy our way of life,” he added.

A spokesperson for Australian Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke also warned that those who return to Australia from Syria will face the law if they have committed crimes.

“People in this cohort need to know that if they have committed a crime and if they return to Australia, they will be met with the full force of the law,” the spokesperson said, according to the Reuters news agency.

A total of 34 women and children holding Australian citizenship were released on Monday from the Kurdish-controlled Roj detention camp in northern Syria.

The Australians, who are said to be relatives of ISIL fighters, were later returned to the camp due to what was described as “technical reasons”, the Reuters and AFP news agencies reported.

Roj detention camp director Hakmiyeh Ibrahim told Al Jazeera that the women and children from 11 families were handed over to relatives “who have come from Australia to collect them”.

The women and children were seen boarding minibuses to reach the Syrian capital, Damascus, from where they were to depart for Australia.

But halfway through the trip, Kurdish escorts were ordered to turn back, as the group did not have permission “to enter government-held territory”, according to Al Jazeera’s Heidi Pett, who is reporting from Aleppo.

Rashid Omar, an official at the Roj camp, later confirmed to AFP that the Australian nationals were forced to return to the detention facility. He said that representatives of the families were still working to resolve the issue with Syrian authorities.

‘Concern in the Australian population’

The humanitarian organisation Save the Children Australia filed a lawsuit in 2023 on behalf of 11 women and 20 children, seeking their repatriation, citing Australia’s “moral and legal responsibility” to its citizens. The Federal Court ruled against Save the Children, saying the Australian government did not control their detention in Syria.

A 17-year-old Australian boy died while under detention in Syria in 2022.

Rodger Shanahan, a Middle East security analyst, told Al Jazeera that the Australian government is facing more resistance to the return of its citizens from Syria following the deadly Bondi Beach attack in December, in which 15 people were killed, at a Jewish festival in Sydney.

“I think that there’s a concern in the Australian population that people might appear to have done away with their radical views, but they still retain them deep down,” Shanahan said.

While Kurdish-led forces still control the Roj camp, they withdrew from the larger al-Hol camp in January, when Syria’s central government’s security forces took control of the area.

At one point, the al-Hol camp housed some 24,000 people, mostly Syrians, but also Iraqis, and more than 6,000 women and children with foreign nationalities.

Governments around the world have been resisting the repatriation of their citizens from the camps in Syria.

The Roj camp also housed United Kingdom-born Shamima Begum, who was 15 when she and two other girls travelled from London in 2015 to marry ISIL fighters in Syria. In 2019, the UK government revoked Begum’s citizenship soon after she was discovered in a detention camp in Syria.

Since then, Begum has challenged the decision, which was turned down by an appeals court in February 2024.

Born in the UK to Bangladeshi parents, Begum does not hold Bangladeshi citizenship. She is reported to still be in the Roj camp.