A group of 19 Australian women and children, who have spent the last seven years in Syrian detention since the fall of Islamic State, finally touched down in Melbourne and Sydney on Tuesday, swapping one kind of confinement for a very different kind of political hot potato.
The cohort - 12 children and seven women - left a Syrian detention camp last week and boarded flights home. Most either left Australia more than a decade ago, or were born in Syria or Iraq after their parents made the ill-advised pilgrimage to the so-called caliphate.
A flight carrying some of the group arrived in Melbourne just after 4.30pm, with another landing in Sydney about an hour later. The Melbourne arrivals, displaying a newfound appreciation for discretion, exited through a side door by 6.40pm, dodging the assembled TV cameras, photographers, and reporters like they were still evading drone strikes. A small police presence kept things orderly, though a NSW Police spokesperson confirmed they didn't expect to arrest any of the Sydney arrivals.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, in a statement that could have been written by a PR firm specializing in 'tough love,' said security agencies have been preparing since 2014 and have 'longstanding plans in place to manage and monitor them.' He added, with characteristic subtlety, 'These are people who have made the horrific choice to join a dangerous terrorist organisation and to place their children in an unspeakable situation.'
The Sydney group is expected to include Nesrine, Sumaya, and Aminah Zahab, along with Hyam Raad and their children. Aminah is the mother of Muhammad Zahab, a senior IS recruiter killed in 2018, who apparently convinced his mother and sister to join him in Syria. Nesrine Zahab, the cousin, has a more complicated story: she claims she was 21 when she snuck away from a family holiday in Lebanon to help Syrian refugees, only to find herself in a war zone. 'Did I cry and scream and chuck a fit like a little girl? I chucked the biggest tantrum,' she told the ABC, providing perhaps the most relatable description of accidentally joining a terrorist group we've ever heard.
The Melbourne group includes Kawsar Kanj and her five children (one now an adult), and Kirsty Rosse-Emile and her two children. Kanj traveled to Syria in 2014 with her husband, Majed Raad - who was acquitted in the Pendennis terror plot nearly two decades ago - and had her citizenship revoked by then-minister Peter Dutton in 2019, only to have the High Court overturn that decision. Raad is thought to have survived the collapse of IS but his current whereabouts are unknown. Rosse-Emile was 19 when she left Melbourne's south-east with her husband; their children, now about 9 and 6, were born after they departed.
Save the Children Australia CEO Mat Tinkler, perhaps the only person in this story focused on the actual children, called for 'wraparound health and psychosocial support,' noting that 'two-thirds of the returning group are children' and that the political debate has been 'deeply disappointing.' The Morrison government repatriated eight orphans in 2019; the Albanese government brought back 13 children with their four mothers in 2022, plus two mothers and four children in 2025, and nine children with four mothers last month - three of whom were arrested and charged.
Tinkler also called for the remaining Australian woman in Syria, who has been issued a temporary exclusion order preventing her return, to be allowed to leave. Because apparently, seven years isn't quite enough detention for everyone.