My mother would have said, if you make your bed, you lie in it.
They're known as the Isis Brides, eleven women and twenty three kids who for nearly a decade have languished in a dusty desert detention camp in northern Syria. Some of the children have known no other home, but the PM insists the group aren't welcome here.
These are people who went overseas supporting Islamic state and went there to provide support for people who basically want a caliphate.
This week they tried to make their way back home, but at the last minute they were turned around at a checkpoint and back where they started.
They're all Australian citizens, and you know, it breaks my heart to think of all these kids, these kids as young as five, going through this hongo and trauma.
I'm Nicole Johnston and you're listening to set a today. Green Senator David Shubridge and Professor Joshua landis founder of the Syria Comment blog on the threat of radicalization, the hope of rehabilitation, and what happens next is chaos takes over in Syria. It's Thursday, February nineteen. David, could you start off by reminding us who these families are that are trying to leave this detention camp in Syria and how did they end up there in the first place.
The bulk of the Australians in this detention camp, and it's in a desert in the northeast part of Syria. The bulk of the children they were either brought over to Syria at an incredibly young age We're talking, you know, tiny infants, or they've been born in Syria, or they've been born in the detention camp. So the bulk of them are children aged from as young as five through to twelve or thirty.
And then there are some of their mums as well.
So we're talking about thirty four people who were on the bus around about twenty four of them are children.
I've spoken with three of the women.
I've visited the detention camp in September of last year, and they're women who are now in their late twenties early thirties. They had come over to Syria, some of them I know as their partners, the wives of people who were fighting in Isis with all of that toxic ideology in Isis. They have been as young as seventeen eighteen or nineteen. These women, they expressed to me, the ones I spoke to, how deeply regretful they were of that terrible life decision and how very young they were
at the time they went over. But you know, I don't know the story of each of the women. And they found their way into Syria.
Islamic States have lost their Syrian capital, Ruka.
And then when the Kurdish horses defeated the ISIS regime, and you know, thank you to the Kurdish forces and many of them Kurdish women fighters who defeated ISIS. These women and their kids got swept up and put into a detention camp and they've been held in a detention camp for a decade now in northeast Syria. And they don't want any part of the conflict in Syria. They don't want any part of ISIS. They want to go
home and bring their kids home. And that's meant they've been quite isolated and targeted by some of the other people in the camp, who you know, maintain that sort of strong push, that ideological push. So they're very isolated. There's been instances of violence against them in the camp. The kids can't go to the school because they're not safe at the school. And you know, it's a series of tents and dusty tracks surrounded by barbed wire in
the middle of a desert in northeast Syria. It's a deeply dispariting place.
So, David, as you said, on Monday, these women and the kids, they got on a bus. They were planning to leave the camp, get to Damascus and then hopefully on to be route and eventually home.
At the camp in northeastern Syria, a group of women and children hurriedly climbed into waiting vans, their faces covered with scarps, masks and sunglasses and bags packed.
But of course, as we know, they were turned back. Do we know why that happened or what happened.
I don't know exactly why it's happened. I've been talking with people who are in contact with the families and their representatives, and what appears is they got through almost all the checkpoints that you passed through going from the camp across into the area controlled by the regime and Damascus, and they went through I'm told they went through multiple of these checkpoints and they were stopped at the final checkpoint.
And then turned around.
And there are multiple potential reasons why that has happened, and one of the reasons given to us was that there had been no effective communication from the Australian government to the regime in.
Damascus to allow that to happen.
I can't tell you for sure that that's true, but I do know they got turned around at the last checkpoint, and that would have just been sold destroying. I think about all those little kids in the bus, close to getting out of this prison, that many of them meeting for their life and then failing at their last turtle really sold destroying.
You know.
It is unfortunate for the children that caught up.
It is, but we have a very firm view that we won't be providing assistance or repatriation.
David, the PM said about these women, you made your bed and now lie in it.
Now.
Many of these women, as we just heard, they chose to follow their partners over to Syria and to join ISIS. And there are Australians who agree with the PM and they're worried about them being radicalized, especially after what's happened at Bondai. So can you understand why the government isn't that keen to welcome them back.
I can understand people's anxiety about the women and if any of them have committed crimes or they have engaged in criminal activities where they should be absolutely be held to account under Australian law. I can't believe the prime ministers said that about a five year old kid or a six year old girl. That I saw a seven year old kid or an eight year old kid saying to Australian children, you made your bed and you sleep
in it. These children are innocent victims in this. They're Australian children and the great majority of these people on the bus were Australian kids who had no agency, no
control over what was happening to them. You know, it's hard to realize this, but Anthony Albernezi is failing that the morals has set up by Scott Morrison, who in twenty twenty two brought a number of women and children home from the detention camp in Syria, put in place structures with AZO and the AFP to oversight that return, put in place reintegration resources so the kids had as safe a return as possible.
You know, I was appalled.
And shocked and horrified that a labor Prime minister would say that about kids.
And David, one last question from me, do you know what other countries are doing about their nationals stuck in these camps? Because there are hundreds of people from all over the world, from Asia, from Europe, from Canada that the UK has had a really hardline position on them. So where does Australia fit into.
All of that?
Is its position sort of the way most countries are looking at it.
Australia's position is uniquely awful, refusing to have any engagement to bring back their own citizens. And what I've been to the camp, there's two layers of security at the camp. The external security is by a group of women Kurdish fighters and other fighters. And they're tough, right, They've been fighting Isis for over a decade. And I met with them when I went to the camp, and they said to me, these tough women who fought Isis and seeing
their friends and family die. They said, why isn't Australia taking these women and children home? They're your women and children. Why are you making us look after your women and children? And they also said, like the Australians are not the problem.
There's another camp full of some fifty thousand largely men. Incredibly, you know, connected to Isis incredible security risks associated with those detainees, but these women and especially these children are not the issue when it comes to the extremes it.
David, thanks for speaking with us today.
Pleasure, good speaking.
Coming up. Just how real is the threat of radicalization for these women and kids, Josh. We just heard from one of our local politicians, David Shubridge, about the need to rehabilitate these women and children who've been inside ISIS. Now, how worried do you think the public should be about them being radicalized in these camps?
Well, now, these women and children are the thirty four Australians who might be coming home. They've been there for eight years. So many of those children are We don't have any clue if they're radicalized or not radicalized.
And same with the women. It's a mixed bag.
There are many women who've come out of those camps and said, look, I don't believe in Islam anymore. I just want to go home. I want to take care of my kids, I want to get them in education. So there are mothers from right across the spectrum. You're going to get a totally mixed bag, but it's been chaos since they were arrested because the Kurdish militia that had control of these people in our whole camp, they
did not have jurisdiction to try these people. America was paying for the camp to be held and paying for them to hold these people, but America was not interested in repatriating or and no one else was, so they just got dumped and were kept in this interment camp. And now most of them are just been let go and there have been a small number that have been moved up to Aleppo, but we believe about twenty thousand have just fled into Syria, including about six thousand foreigners.
So these Australians are a small little subset of this group, and clearly the Australian government is going to have to do some investigation and they're going to have to send them to evaluators and figure that out.
Across the Middle East, though, have there been efforts in other countries to try and deradicalize people who had been members of Islamic state.
There have been in Sadi Arabia has a very good program they have used in Moms and other Islamic authorities. They've given classes and they've had these, you know, sort of seminars and discussion groups, sort of like an AA group. But they've taken them seriously and that's the most important part, and they've discussed it with them, and I think the government is going to have to do something.
Like that, Josh, if we could talk a little bit about the broader context of what's happening in Syria. Last month, we had the Syrian army sweep into the northern part of the country and take over those areas that the Kurds had controlled during the civil war. As we know, they're now emptying these Isis Islamic state detention camps out. Why is the government doing.
That, Well, We've got two major reasons.
One is that this government is led by the head of al Qaeda, who used to be the head of al Qaeda in Syria.
Ah'ming a shut up.
Secondly, those people in the camps, those Isis family members, many of them come from the tribal members of northeastern Syria. But now that I'm going to shut up has swept up there. And we've got to remember that many of the auxiliary troops he used to roll back the Kurds were better in tribes and it's their relatives who are in these camps. So they have rolled into these camps
and they want to let them go. They feel sorry for them, they feel like they've been unjustly treated, which they have in a sense because they've just been locked up and the key has been thrown away, no trials, no investigation. So there's a great deal of sympathy for these people and a feeling that they've been persecuted both by the Americans, by the international community, and by the Kurds. So they're letting them go.
So, Josh, what's going to happen to all of these detainees, because, as you said, some of them are being set free in Syria, some of them going home to other countries, some of them ending up in Iraq. What's going on?
It's going to be chaos.
And Syria has been chaos for the last year because at the height of the opposition fight against the Osid regime, there were one thousand, five hundred different militias in Syria. I'm going to shut it took over, but he was one militia. There were dozens of other militias in Syria that joined him in this takeover. He collected all those militia leaders together and said you are now the Syrian army. But many of those militia leaders are quasi independent. They
have their own ideologies. So these people are going to go back to their families, they're going to try to find a living, they're going to try to escape and go back home.
It is. It's going to be chaos now these women and children.
Syria doesn't really know what to do with them because you can't have trials for most of these people because there's no evidence against them.
That evidence has been destroyed. It's already eight years that they've been locked up in these camps.
There isn't a good solution for them.
Josh, thanks so much for joining us pleasure. Also in the news, Pauline Hansen has offered a partial apology for suggesting there are no good Muslims. The One Nation leader has been widely condemned for the comment made while attacking the government over the possible return of the wives and children of Islamic state fighters. Hanson now says she doesn't believe there are no good Muslims, but added a qualifier, saying, in general that is what they want, a world caliphate,
and I am not going to apologize. I will have my say now before it's too late, and Australians are in for the biggest rise in health insurance premiums in a decade. A four point four one percent increase will kick in from April one. The hike, which is above inflation, was approved by the Health Minister, who says it reflects higher medical and ho hospital costs over the last financial year. I'm Nicole Johnston. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.