Australia is preparing to rescue and repatriate up to 60 ISIS brides and their children who have languished for years in Syrian detention camps.
The rescue plan, which successive governments have wrestled with for years, will see the return of 16 women and 42 children held in al-Roj detention camp, near the Iraqi border.
Kamalle Dabboussy, whose daughter Mariam remains trapped in the camps with her three children, said all the signs of a breakthrough were there.
It follows reports that an ASIO mission had cleared the way for the repatriation process to commence.
“It caught us all by surprise. It had been a wall of silence for a couple of weeks, and that was different,’’ Mr Dabboussy told news.com.au.
Mariam Dabboussy was a childcare and migrant support worker in Sydney before she travelled to the Middle East in mid-2015 with her husband and their 18-month-old child.
She later told Four Corners that she was “tricked” by her then-husband, Kaled, into going to Syria.
“If it wasn’t for him, none of us would have found ourselves here,” she said.
After her first husband died in an air strike, she was forced to remarry twice. Her second husband was killed when she was nine months pregnant.
“I mean, as it went along we just basically figured out that we just got conned by the boys,’’ she said.
The rescue plan follows the 2019 mission that saw the return of the five children and grandchildren of notorious former ISIS recruit Khaled Sharrouf, who famously posed with a severed head in Syria.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil warned that, given the sensitivities of the operation, she was not able to offer more details. “The Australian government’s overriding priority is the protection of Australians and Australia’s national interest, informed by national security advice. Given the sensitive nature of the matters involved, it would not be appropriate to comment further,’’ she said.
While some women travelled to Syria willingly, others were taken as teenagers and married off to terrorists while under the age of consent. Many of the children were born overseas and have never attended school or received medical care in the detention camps, where they were held without charge.
The widows, wives and children of dead or jailed combatants have pleaded to return to Australia for years after the fall of Islamic State.
Many now claim they were coerced or tricked into travelling to Syria and have even offered to be the subject of terror control orders if they can return home.
The control orders, which can be imposed on those who trained or participated in training with a listed terrorist organisation, can require a person to remain at specified premises for a maximum of 12 hours within any 24 hour period, wear a tracking device, report to someone at a certain time and place, and allow themselves to be photographed and fingerprinted.
Germany has previously repatriated 91 citizens, France 86 and the United States 26.
But the Morrison government resisted calls to follow suit, warning that some women within the group would pose a “significant security threat to our country”.
Two years ago, the then-home affairs minister Peter Dutton warned against the women returning home.
“These are not innocent women who have taken their children into the theatre of war,” Mr Dutton said at the time.
Save the Children Australia chief executive Mat Tinkler, who has been campaigning for years for the women and children to be repatriated, backed any moves to allow them to return home.
“For more than three years, these children have been trapped in one of the worst places in the world to be a child, and their situation has been growing increasingly desperate. I saw these conditions first-hand when I travelled to Roj camp in northeast Syria in June,’’ he said.
“Australian children are poorly nourished, suffering from untreated shrapnel wounds and the situation is impacting their mental health.
“They are just hanging on.
“The possibility that they could finally be brought home to safety in Australia will be an enormous boost for their families.’’
