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Sami Sheebo fears the return of Australia’s so-called ISIS brides. He does not trust that seven years in a Syrian camp has cured them of the bloodthirsty Islamist ideology they travelled into and lived under.
Sheebo is a leader of the Yazidi community in Australia. He escaped Iraq after IS fighters invaded his home village in 2014, where eight mass graves were required to bury the thousands killed. More than 6000 Yazidi women were kidnapped and put through the appalling horror of sexual and domestic slavery.
“My community are very concerned that if returned [the IS-related families] might attack them again,” Sheebo says simply.
“They work and build as a group. On a Friday, they gather, talking, trying to get people to join them. From a small group they become a big group. Others will join them and they control a whole suburb.
“They will be a danger to Australian society.”
Youel Zaya and Ismail Ismail feel the same way. They escaped Syria after their Assyrian Christian village was overrun by IS fighters, who desecrated and destroyed their churches. Zaya, Ismail and their families were ordered to convert to Islam or leave. Among 200,000 others, they fled. More than a thousand who stayed behind were killed.
I ask if they have any sympathy with the Australian children of IS-associated women. Zaya replies: “These children are raised there, and they’ve been raised with this ISIS, so what are they thinking? What’s in their minds? We really don’t know.”
These fears are specific to the experiences of these groups, but they reflect the broader political debate over the IS women and children.
On the political left, the call is for the government to bring them home. The women were duped or forced to travel by their husbands, people say. The children have done nothing. On the other side of politics, these 11 women and 23 children – plus one young man – are said to be so dangerous that they should be denied the right to enjoy their citizenship of Australia.
As Sheebo puts it: “They are responsible for their life – they made that decision by themselves and they have to accept that.”
This debate prompts many questions. How and why did these people get to Syria and what did they do in the so-called caliphate? Did they commit crimes while there, and have they genuinely repudiated IS’s ideology?
It’s reasonable to ask – if we are to repatriate them – whether there are programs to reintegrate and deradicalise them and whether those programs are up to scratch.
Josh Roose, for one, is sceptical of some of the women’s claims that they were duped, or bullied by their husbands into going to Syria. The associate professor at Deakin University and an expert on violent extremism says from the early days of IS in 2014, it was clear its ideology was violent.
It was also wildly attractive to some.
Based on the idea that Muslims had been crushed and persecuted globally, IS invited people – particularly marginalised second- and third-generation young Muslim men – to “become warriors and heroes and knights of the caliphate”.
Women would start a new society, breeding “lion cubs” for a new utopia.
Says Roose, 200 or 300 Australians were attracted by this narrative, one of the largest cohorts proportionate to population in the world.
Once there, says Roose, some Western women had become “highly active in recruiting, and visual propaganda … and they were active in policing behaviour of women, enacting rules and laws, and enslavement of women and girls”.
However, of the cohort seeking to return now, he says little is known about their activities in Syria and Iraq.
Analyst Rodger Shanahan has unpicked some of it. In a recent story in The Australian, he wrote that one of the women, Hodan Abby, said it would be “great to be martyred for the sake of Allah”. She wanted to “raise lions who will be thorns in the hearts of their enemies”.
Melbourne-based Kirsty Rosse-Emile posted after coalition airstrikes, “May Allah destroy them all … destroy these filthy kafirs and protect our brothers and sisters.” The ABC reported recently that Rosse-Emile was groomed by a much older man, married at 14 and was taken by him to Syria.
Kawsar Abbas travelled to Syria with her adult daughters Zahra and Zeinab to join her husband, their father Muhammad Ahmed. They insist their enterprise was charitable. But, writes Shanahan, Kawsar’s brother Roger Abbas and two of her sons, Ahmed and Omar, were killed in Syria, and two of the daughters married men who were also killed in 2016.
Neither the government nor the Australian Federal Police has revealed what criminal charges, if any, might be laid against these women on their return. One temporary exclusion order has been issued, but authorities will not say against whom, or why.
ASIO director-general Mike Burgess said in 2022 that the agency had conducted risk assessments involving face-to-face interviews with the entire cohort of Australians in the camps. Their possible return had been factored into the agency’s risk assessment that year, in which the threat of a terror attack was dropped from “probable” to “possible”.
Hakamia Ibrahim, the camp director in Syria where they have been living for the past few years, told a local journalist the Australian women – unlike others in the camp – were “well-behaved”.
“They did not have any problems and in the camp they did not cause problems or behave in an aggressive way.”
Says Roose, “Unless there is an extraordinary claim against them, we’ll probably have to let them back in”. However, “there should be every effort made to establish their culpability for their crimes overseas as a starting point”.
This will be difficult. Eyewitnesses have probably died or melted back to their villages and specific crimes must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Much would rely on foreign intelligence, he said.
Family advocate Kamalle Dabboussy was unavailable for comment this week, but in 2022 he told this masthead there was no evidence that the Australian women had been dangerous.
“They were solely protecting their children and they were in survival mode, to my knowledge”.
Many women, he said, quickly regretted their lives. They were treated poorly, widowed and traded in marriage to unknown men. Under-age girls were also married off and quickly impregnated.
“Men were allowed to exercise their base animalistic urges without any control – and very quickly, no matter why a woman turned up, she found herself with absolutely no agency,” Dabboussy said at the time.
“What’s important now is that women have offered to work with law enforcement on return as evidenced by their offer to go under control orders by consent.”
In 2019, 2022 and 2025, three groups of Australian women and children – 32 people in total – returned from the camps. None has been convicted of a crime.
Advocates say community and government programs, delivered at state level, are working, and police keep a close watch. Despite requests, no woman or child has done an interview to show the community their progress.
Roose says many studies have shown people are never truly deradicalised, but they can be “disengaged” from exercising their views through violence. The “quiet reintegration” of those who’ve come back so far was encouraging.
Criminologist Dr Clarke Jones, who works with terrorist offenders and prison gangs, says each state has its own model and no deradicalisation program gets it right 100 per cent of the time. So far, he says the work with those who have returned from Syria has been successful: “No untoward incidents … It’s gone more smoothly than I would have thought.”
The best programs involved returning people to their communities for support – including having their religious views modified and moderated – and having police monitor them.
“I can understand why there is reluctance in the broader community,” Jones says. “This needs a great deal of caution. You’d be stupid to say otherwise.”
But these women and children are not convicted terrorists, and to say they would never fit in was “bunkum, it’s just not true,” Jones says. First, and urgently: “You’ve really got to get those kids out of [the camps] to get them into the necessary support structures.”
The risk of leaving them there is too high.
“When they are being continually exposed to IS ideology, then … as each week passes it gets worse.”
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