The Australian government will refuse to repatriate its nationals, a group of 34 women and children, from Syria with alleged ties to the Daesh terror group, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Tuesday.
The women and children from 11 families were supposed to fly from the Syrian capital Damascus to Australia, but Syrian authorities on Monday turned them back to the Roj camp in northeast Syria because of procedural problems, officials said.
Only two groups of Australians have been repatriated with government help from Syrian camps since the fall of Daesh in 2019. Other Australians have also returned without government assistance.
Albanese would not comment on a report that the latest women and children had Australian passports.
“We’re providing absolutely no support and we are not repatriating people,” Albanese told Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Melbourne.
“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, destroy, our way of life. And so, as my mother would say, ‘You make your bed, you lie in it,’” Albanese added.
Moral obligation
Albanese noted that the child welfare-focused international charity Save the Children had failed to establish in Australia’s courts that the Australian government had a responsibility to repatriate citizens from Syrian camps.
After the federal court ruled in the government's favour in 2024, Save the Children Australia chief executive Mat Tinkler argued the government had a moral, if not legal, obligation to repatriate families.
Albanese said if the latest group made their way to Australia without government help, they could be charged.
It was an offence under Australian law to travel to the former Daesh stronghold of Raqqa province without a legitimate reason from 2014 to 2017. The maximum penalty was 10 years in prison.
“It’s unfortunate that children are impacted by this as well, but we are not providing any support. And if anyone does manage to find their way back to Australia, then they’ll face the full force of the law, if any laws have been broken,” Albanese added.
Australians in Roj camp
The last group of Australians to be repatriated from Syrian camps arrived in Sydney in October 2022.
They, reportedly, were four mothers, former partners of Daesh supporters, and 13 children.
Australian officials had assessed the group as the most vulnerable among 60 Australian women and children held in Roj camp, the government said at the time.
Eight offspring of two slain Australian Daesh members were repatriated from Syria in 2019 by the conservative government that preceded Albanese’s centre-left Labor Party administration.
