Chapter 1: What led these women and children to join the Islamic State?
I'm on a Qatar Airways flight about to head to Melbourne with a group of Australian women and children who have been linked to the Islamic State group. These are women who left the country to marry ISIS fighters and their sympathisers. They were put into the Al-Raj detention facility in north-east Syria after the fall of the caliphate.
tonight but their freedom is likely to be short-lived federal police have confirmed some of the women will be arrested as soon as they arrive on home soil late yesterday four women and nine children arrived in australia from syria the women who originally left the country to be part of the islamic state caliphate have spent the years since its collapse in syrian refugee camps
Many of their children, who are Australian citizens too, have never been here before.
I want to taste the ice cream there and buy some toys. We all want to go back to our countries and stay with our families.
But they aren't the first to come back. Since 2019, women and children like them have been returning. What they're returning to has become more and more hostile, with politicians maintaining they aren't welcome.
We have been very clear from the beginning. These people should not return to Australia. The government should be doing everything it can to prevent them coming back to the country, and they haven't. I don't want them here. I don't trust them. I don't like them. They're not compatible with the culture of a way of life. They will never, ever, ever get out.
I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to 7am. Today, Professor Michelle Grossman, expert on violent extremism from Deakin University, on our responsibility to these citizens and the danger of politicising their position. It's Friday, May 8.
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So, Michelle, there's 13 women and children who left a detention camp in Syria a couple of weeks ago. They've now arrived back in Australia.
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Chapter 2: What challenges do returning ISIS-linked families face in Australia?
To begin with, can you just tell me what we know about these women and how it was that they ended up in Syria in the first place?
We know that a fairly large number of people, men and women and children, departed for Syria to join the Islamic State Caliphate. 2014, 2015, 2016, those were really the sort of peak years.
The last thing we want is people who have been radicalized and brutalized by an evil death cult roaming our streets. We do not want anyone who is a menace to our community, who has broken our laws, just roaming our streets.
We talk about women who joined Islamic State as if they're all a single cohort, but actually they're not. So some women went because they were absolutely ideologically aligned with what Islamic State stood for and what it was trying to do, particularly in terms of establishing the kind of caliphate that they wanted. Some women went because they needed to keep their families together.
They might not have made the choice themselves, but if their husbands or partners made the choice They went along. In some cases, I think they did not want to lose their children. The children would have been taken by the husband. So you have a variety of different reasons. Having said that, the chief reason was because people did want to align themselves with Islamic State.
And now, of course, because of the passage of time, you know, we're talking 10 to 12 years later than the peak period of travel. There are now children who were born either in Islamic State-controlled territories or indeed born in the camps.
And can we talk a bit more about what these women and children would have been exposed to over all of those years in Syria and then in detention? Because the al-Raj refugee camp in northeastern Syria, where many of these people were, that has a reputation for being a really desperate place to be.
Yeah, so I think in terms of what they've been exposed to, certainly Islamic State represented not just a kind of military operation, if you like, to try to take control of territory in Syria and Iraq, but it represented a political operation. and religious and cultural project. That's how I would describe Islamic State.
And so people who were there, and particularly children, would have experienced a lot of indoctrination, a lot of training, a lot of socializing into the beliefs and the values and the behaviors and the norms of what Islamic State stood for. And then, of course, what did Islamic State stand for? It stood for a caliphate. It stood for a very...
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Chapter 3: How has public perception shifted regarding returning ISIS affiliates?
There's been one exclusion order against one woman in that camp, one Australian woman, who has been prevented from returning. And that was based on a security risk assessment.
The legal threshold that we have is with respect to temporary exclusion orders. I have received advice in one instance so far of that threshold having been met. And when I received that advice, I acted immediately and that exclusion order remains in place.
But the fact that the rest of them have been enabled to return without those exclusion orders being placed against their return tells you something about how the level of risk has been assessed.
Coming up, do we have the right approach when it comes to counterterrorism, trauma and children? Michelle, we've been talking about the women and children returning to Australia from Syria after spending years there being linked to Islamic State fighters. As you said, we know that they're going to be closely monitored by police, by security agencies.
But can we talk a little more about what we know is in place to meet them in terms not only of assessing threat, but of potential de-radicalisation?
So look, I think there are a number of elements that go into dealing with people returning from this kind of conflict zone. Regardless of what you think of the politics of it all, every single one of the people coming back will have experienced some form of trauma. So there will need to be a trauma-informed framework and trauma-based counseling and support, especially provided for the children.
That is a little bit different to the kind of counter-extremism work that might go on, but there are programs to help them reorient themselves to a more pro-social way of thinking, of feeling, and of living. A lot of that also depends on the communities that they reintegrate into. And I know that quite extensive work has happened with the local communities where people will be
And that is a crucial factor because with all the counter-extremism programs and psychological and trauma-based counseling in the world, if people are trying to reintegrate into a community setting where they feel they're unwanted,
where they're going to be completely rejected and ostracized, what hope are you giving them for their prospects of being able to rehabilitate and adapt when you leave people feeling hopeless? I'll never be accepted. I'll never be wanted. I will never be accepted in terms of change. Then you leave people feeling that they've got nothing to lose.
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Chapter 4: What are the potential security risks posed by returning individuals?
I have contempt for their parents who have put these children in that situation.
But the reason they are coming back is because they are Australian citizens. So what are our government's obligations here, not only to these 13 people, but to the rest of the women and the children who remain right now in Syria?
I mean... In a very basic sense, the Australian government has already fulfilled one of its obligations, which is to provide them with passports. I think then what you're finding is that the focus shifts slightly because government also has a responsibility to community safety. and community well-being.
So what government does to help them reintegrate, in my view, is actually government taking responsibility for hold of community safety and well-being, not just for those women and children. I think when we talk about the women and children, we also have to disaggregate a little bit. Yes, the women made varying levels of degrees of choice to go. I mean, in the end, they did go.
and they did make that choice, the children didn't choose. The children didn't have the agency to choose. The children did not say, I want to be, you know, in this position.
So I think that we have to really pay out on the difference in terms of the support that we offer for children who, through no fault of their own and through no choice of their own, ended up in the circumstances that they did.
I want to be on Channel's Got Talent and get the Golden Buzzer. The Golden Buzzer? Yeah. For dancing or for singing? For both. For both?
Yeah. And we've spoken a lot about what it will mean for these women and these children to come back to Australia and what life will be like for them. But as you have watched that debate play out here over their return, has it made you reflect at all on what it means to be Australian right now, how we're responding to this?
Look, I think it does raise quite a fundamental question. Were we going to really turn children away and say, through no fault of your own and no choice of your own, you ended up here and you are Australian citizens, but we don't want a bar of you? What kind of Australia would that make us? To turn our backs on children who had no power and no choice as Australian citizens?
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