Australian IS Families Turned Back After Leaving Syria Camp
Australian IS Families Turned Back After Leaving Syria Camp
34 Australian women and children linked to Islamic State were briefly released from a northern Syria camp but sent back for 'technical reasons,' highlighting ongoing repatriation disputes.
A group of 34 Australian women and children with family links to the Islamic State have been held in the Roj camp in northern Syria for nearly seven years. They were released on Monday to head home but then returned to the camp for technical reasons, with authorities not officially repatriating them. The exact cause remains unclear, though reports suggest gaps in permissions between factions governing the region.
They were handed over to members of their families who had travelled to Syria and boarded minibuses with a military escort to Damascus, with plans to continue to Beirut to obtain passports. Canberra's stance has been that it will not repatriate those connected to IS, though it has said it may issue passports to citizens who present themselves at an Australian embassy.
The camp houses more than 2,000 people from around 40 nationalities, many of them women and children who arrived after IS lost its final territory in 2019. The fate of these relatives remains uncertain amid a patchwork of local governance and international policy, illustrating a broader international dilemma over how to handle foreign IS members and their families.
