Overdue Reckoning for Western Nationals Who Abandoned Home for Caliphate

They came home on Qatar Airways flights. Between 2012 and 2016, dozens of Australian women traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State, marrying fighters and raising children inside the Caliphate. When it collapsed in 2019, they ended up in Roj, a detention camp in Syria’s far northeast run by Kurdish forces, a festering problem that Western governments, including Canberra, spent years hoping would stay there. It didn’t. On the evening of May 7, two aircraft touched down in Melbourne and Sydney, carrying four Australian women and nine children who had spent more than seven years in Roj. Within minutes of landing, three of the women were arrested at the aerobridges. By the following morning, two of them faced charges of crimes against humanity.A second wave followed. On May 21, seven more women and 14 children departed Roj under Syrian government escort, in what Australian officials acknowledged may represent the last remaining Australians held at the camp. Australian authorities have not confirmed whether all will travel onward to Australia, yet warned again that those who have committed crimes will be met with prosecution upon arrival. The crimes alleged go beyond simply traveling to join the Islamic State. Kawsar Ahmed, 54, and her daughter Zainab Ahmed, 31, are accused of purchasing a Yazidi woman as a slave for $10,000, keeping her in their home in Syria, and using her as one. A third woman, Janai Safar, 32, was charged in Sydney with membership of a terrorist organization and entering a declared conflict zone. The charges carry maximum sentences of 25 and 10 years, respectively. The Australian government, which had refused to assist or facilitate the women’s return, could not stop it either. Under both Australian and international law, citizens hold a fundamental right of return. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke was unsparing. “They made an appalling, disgraceful decision,” he said. But when the flights landed, the law took over, exactly as authorities had promised it would. What happened in Melbourne and Sydney last week is now being studied in London, Paris, Ottawa, and Washington, because every Western government with nationals still unaccounted for in the wreckage of the Islamic State knows its own version of this reckoning is coming. Australia has become, by default, the test track: what does accountability look like when a democracy’s citizens go to war against its values, and then come home? ISIS Camp Followers At LargeWhen the Caliphate collapsed in 2019, foreign fighters and their families were held in camps guarded by Kurdish fighters inside Syrian Kurdistan. At the end of January this year, the Syrian government announced that both Roj and al-Hol — a second, larger, camp — would close, just ten days after taking control of them. The al-Hol camp has since shut, and thousands of suspected Islamic State militants previously held in Syria were transferred to Iraq by the United States military to stand trial there.The collapse of al-Hol, which at its 2019 peak held some 73,000 people, including roughly 6,500 foreign nationals from more than 40 countries, effectively ended whatever semblance of oversight had existed. With it went any realistic prospect of a coordinated, government-led resolution.Senior Fellow Devorah Margolin of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy tells the New York Sun the moment for a managed approach has largely passed.“For the approximately 6,000 third-country nationals held in al-Hol camp, the window for controlled repatriation has closed,” Ms. Margolin says. “Many of these individuals have disappeared into Syria, whose government seems uninterested or unable to find, detain, adjudicate cases, or otherwise manage individuals previously held in al-Hol.”Roj, she noted, is different from al-Hol — it has been operating under tighter oversight. However, that window has now largely closed for Australia: a second convoy of seven women and 14 children departed the camp on May 21, which Australian officials believe may represent the last remaining Australians held there. Other nations’ nationals remain, but the camp’s capacity to serve as a holding point for Western governments is rapidly diminishing “There is still time to address repatriation for those held in Roj, and those transferred to Iraq,” Ms. Margolin explains, while cautioning: “Without a clear plan, the future for those in Roj will likely be similar to those who were at al-Hol.”Terrorism expert Colette Toubba tells the Sun the dispersal problem is already arriving, and governments are not ready for it.“The window is not closed, but it is shrinking, with al-Roj slated to close in the near future,” emphasizes Ms. Toubba, research associate at the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium (TRAC). “Once that oversight ends, countries wanting to keep tabs on their nationals will largely be playing catch-up, which is substantially harder when those nationals are dispersed across Syria without documentation.”The problem, experts caution, extends well beyond Australia’s borders.“The repatriation debate should take on a much greater sense of urgency, not only in Australia but in all countries that still have citizens and other individuals with a relationship to their home country,” Senior Director of the Counter Extremism Project, Hans-Jakob Schindler, tells the Sun.Unhappy Returns: Jihadist HomecomingAustralia’s position — we didn’t bring them back, they came themselves, and now the law will sort it out — is legally defensible. Under both Australian and international law, citizens hold a fundamental right of return that the government cannot permanently block: It can delay, complicate, and prosecute upon arrival — but it cannot bar the door indefinitely.There are “very serious limits” on what Australian authorities could do to prevent citizens reentering the country,” Mr. Burke acknowledged. Australia, however, is hardly alone in having avoided this moment for as long as possible. Most countries, citing security and logistics concerns, have either refused to repatriate their citizens from the camps or have taken years to do so.In 2019, the United Kingdom invoked national security to revoke the citizenship of Shamima Begum, the London schoolgirl who traveled to Syria at 15 to join ISIS, rather than bring her home.France has repatriated 179 children and 60 women since 2019. However, it halted operations for two years before resuming in September 2025, and women returned have typically been indicted and placed in pretrial detention immediately upon arrival.Canada, for its part, repatriated dozens of women and children across multiple operations, but only after sustained court pressure and years of delay. At least four Canadian men are still believed to be held in northeastern Syria.The Netherlands and Germany, by contrast, have implemented planned repatriation programs linked to judicial processes and long-term supervision and have argued that accountability through the courts is more durable than indefinite detention abroad.The Trump administration, meanwhile, cut at least $117 million in humanitarian aid from northeastern Syria in early 2025, while publicly encouraging other nations to repatriate their own nationals — in effect, pressing allies to clean up a problem Washington was simultaneously defunding, critics say.The consequences of inaction are fraught with risk, warns Anne Speckhard, Director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism.“Every country that refuses to repatriate should consider the alternatives, one of which has played out recently — escape from the camps and setting up extremist activities elsewhere,” she tells the Sun.“Some of the Australian women who were in the camps were known by those who interviewed them to still espouse pro-ISIS views. These are the women that we have seen moving from al-Hol to Idlib where they are living freely and promoting the resurgence of an Islamic State.”She cautions that the threat could reach Australian soil directly.“In the past ISIS sent operatives from Syria with fake passports to attack in their home countries, and they did so with very violent suicide attacks,” Ms. Speckhard recounts. “This scenario could very well play out again if Australian pro-ISIS women are able to escape and regroup.”Some experts underscore that keeping nationals abroad does not make a country safer — it simply moves the problem out of sight.“Having radicalized and potentially dangerous individuals under control is always better than having such individuals in a foreign country where they are not under direct control or monitoring,” Mr. Schindler explains. “The risk is that such individuals have knowledge about the country and can either try to return clandestinely or pass on that knowledge to other individuals that travel to Australia.”Political resistance to repatriation is understandable, he allows, but does not resolve the underlying problem. Germany’s record of successful prosecutions of returned foreign terrorist fighters, including women, demonstrates that accountability through the courts is achievable, he argues.Not everyone, however, draws the same conclusion.“The addition of known members of ISIS to the Australian population is a self-own by the government, and increases the now almost inevitable odds of yet another major terror attack on Australian soil,” Senior Fellow Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute tells the Sun.“There is no overarching legal obligation to repatriate a citizen that has gone to war against his own nation — as long as a country doesn’t believe that international custom supersedes domestic law.”And the Children?Whatever conclusions governments reach about the women — coerced, complicit, or somewhere in the murkier middle — the question of the children is harder to dismiss. The United Nations has long held that children brought into or born in conflict zones should be treated primarily as victims.“The longer these minors stay within the conflict zone, the more treatment and psychological help they will require upon return,” Mr. Schindler says. “They have grown up in a very violence-oriented social system and are highly traumatized and radicalized.”Ms. Toubba, however, paints a grimmer picture of what that radicalization looks like in practice.“TRAC has documented many videos that prove their continued commitment to the Islamic State even if they never knew the so-called ‘glory days’ of the Caliphate, which are revered inside al-Hol,” she observes. “Imagine growing up only learning about the ‘Camelot’ promised to return.”Many women in the camps have shed their own identities entirely, she notes, renaming themselves after their sons, severing any connection to nationality or personal history.“This makes them much more dangerous without a tether to the real world,” she warns. “These children are foreign nationals. Any request for derivative citizenship is at the discretion of the government and should be denied.”Ms. Speckhard sees the situation differently.“Children very easily rehabilitate,” she asserts. “We have many examples including teen boys who successfully rehabilitated and reintegrated to live healthy, successful lives at home.”Ms. Speckhard contends that governments allowing pro-ISIS mothers to block their children’s repatriation are failing in a basic duty of protection.“This is criminal in my mind — all governments should remove children from their citizens if they are willfully being indoctrinated by terrorists and placed in grave danger,” she continues.In any case, every Western country with nationals unaccounted for in Syria is watching what happens in Australia because they know the same reckoning is coming for them.“This has been a festering problem for years and should have been addressed long ago,” Ms. Pletka adds. “Now, it will be on a scattershot basis, which means more terrorists everywhere.”

Overdue Reckoning for Western Nationals Who Abandoned Home for Caliphate

Overdue Reckoning for Western Nationals Who Abandoned Home for Caliphate

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