Australia’s government will not repatriate from Syria a group of 34 women and children with alleged links to the Islamic State after Syrian authorities turned them back to the Roj detention camp, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Tuesday. The decision followed a planned flight from Syria that officials said was blocked due to procedural problems, leaving the group in detention rather than traveling to Australia.
Albanese said the government would not provide assistance to the group. In remarks to Australian Broadcasting Corp. in Melbourne, he said, “We’re providing absolutely no support and we are not repatriating people,” and added, “We have no sympathy, frankly, for people who traveled overseas in order to participate in what was an attempt to establish a caliphate to undermine, destroy, our way of life.” Albanese’s comments also drew on a proverb-like line, “You make your bed, you lie in it,” as he defended the government’s stance.
The episode became a political flashpoint as Australia’s opposition called for preventing returns by using existing legal tools. Opposition leader Angus Taylor demanded Albanese explain whether the government had considered banning Australians from returning, pointing to temporary exclusion orders that allow a minister to prevent certain high-risk citizens located overseas from returning to Australia for up to two years.
Taylor told reporters that the people involved had “chosen to associate with a terrorist caliphate,” and he said “the door must be shut to people who do not believe in those things,” citing democracy, the rule of law and basic freedoms, including freedom of religion. When asked about whether temporary exclusion orders would be used in this case, Albanese did not provide a direct answer, saying decisions on national security issues would be made “appropriately upon advice” from security agencies.
Albanese also addressed reporting that the women and children had Australian passports. He declined to comment on the report, but he argued that international charity Save the Children had failed in court to establish that the government had a responsibility to repatriate citizens from Syrian camps. He said that after a federal court ruled in the government’s favor in 2024, Save the Children Australia’s chief executive, Mat Tinkler, had argued the government nonetheless had a moral obligation to repatriate families.
The prime minister said the legal exposure for those who manage to return without government help could include prosecution. Albanese said that if anyone from the latest group makes their way back to Australia “without government help,” they could be charged, and he added that under Australian law it is an offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison to travel to Raqqa in Syria and elsewhere in the caliphate without a legitimate reason between 2014 and 2017.
The case comes amid ongoing uncertainty over how to handle citizens linked to Islamic State who remained in detention camps after the group’s defeat in Iraq in 2017 and later in Syria. The Associated Press reported that IS sleeper cells still carry out deadly attacks in both countries, and that during battles against IS, thousands of extremists and tens of thousands of women and children linked to them were taken to detention camps. Under this framework, the question of repatriation has continued to divide governments: some countries repatriate people with alleged IS links, while others have declined.
The report also described the background for Australia’s past repatriation efforts. It said only two groups of Australians had been repatriated with government help from Syrian camps since the fall of the Islamic State group in 2019, while other Australians have returned without government assistance. The last group repatriated from Syrian camps arrived in Sydney in October 2022, and included four mothers—former partners of Islamic State supporters—and 13 children.
In Syria, camp staff and detainee families have been part of the process discussions. Manager Hakmiyeh Ibrahim of the Roj camp, in northeastern Syria, told The Associated Press that relatives of the Australians said the Australian government had prepared passports and travel paperwork and that families were advised to collect the documents. Separately, the report said eight children of two slain Australian IS fighters were repatriated from Syria in 2019 by the conservative government that preceded Albanese’s center-left Labor administration.
The issue resurfaced in Australia after the Dec. 14 killings of 15 people at a Jewish festival at Bondi Beach, when attackers were alleged to have been inspired by the Islamic State group. Internationally, other governments have pursued different approaches, with the report listing countries that have repatriated citizens from Syrian camps, including the United States, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada, and noting that last year families repatriated from Roj camp included German, British and French nationals.
The Associated Press said thousands of accused Islamic State militants held in detention centers in northeastern Syria have been transferred to Iraq by the U.S. military to stand trial there, underscoring a broader pattern of legal and detention processes continuing beyond the territorial collapse of the group.