Government Criticised for Resettling ISIS Families in Sydney Without Community Consultation

The Kurdish-run al-Hol camp, which holds relatives of suspected ISIS terrorists in the northeastern Hasakeh governorate, during a security operation by the Kurdish Asayish security forces and the special forces of the Syrian Democratic Forces, on Aug. 26, 2022. Delil Soulieman/AFP via Getty Images

The centre-left Labor government’s decision to resettle ISIS families in Australia without consulting with the community has faced fierce pushback from the opposition and an independent MP.

It comes after the government repatriated four women and their 13 Australian children from an Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) Camp in Syria to Australia.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil announced in a media release on Oct. 29 that the repatriation decision “was informed by individual assessments following detailed work by national security agencies.”

Minister for Home Affairs Clare O’Neil during the Jobs and Skills Summit in Canberra, Australia, on Sept. 2, 2022. AAP Image/Mick Tsikas

But Shadow Minister for Home Affairs Karen Andrews argued that the government didn’t comprehensively take into account security and welfare factors when it brought back the brides of ISIS fighters and their children.

She noted that the people living in Western Sydney who had to flee from ISIS are now “terribly concerned that they are going to be living side by side with people who are associated with those they actually fled from overseas.”

“They witnessed firsthand overseas what impact ISIS had on them. They saw their friends killed. They perhaps saw members of their family killed, in some cases, by being beheaded in front of them,” Andrews said on Wednesday.

“There are more women and children in those camps in Syria. The government needs to come clean on what it is going to do. Is it planning to repatriate more women and children? Where will those women and children go?”

“What is the cost to the taxpayer of monitoring this repatriated cohort — if, in fact, they are being monitored? What are the details of any welfare and integration program access and delivery cost — if there are any?”

Liberal MP Karen Andrews speaks during a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on Aug. 23, 2021. Rohan Thomson/Getty Images

The comment was echoed by Liberal MP and Former Immigration Minister Alex Hawke, who said the repatriation decision poses national security risks.

“What we don’t agree with is, of course, what this government has done in bringing back the brides of ISIS fighters, women who did voluntarily leave our country to support an ISIS regime that we know threw homosexual people off buildings, that we know subjected Yazidi women to repeated months of slavery followed by death, and pushed young boys into mass graves.”

Meanwhile, Independent MP of the Western Sydney electorate of Fowler Dai Le, who’s a former refugee from Vietnam, said the threat of ISIS to the nation has slipped to the back of the minds of many Australians, but for members in her community, “it still keeps them up at night.”

“We in this House cannot, and will not, understand the immense impact this decision by the government has had on my community unless you physically leave your office and travel to south-west Sydney and to Fowler and the surrounding areas to see for yourself the concerns about placing ISIS families within walking distance of those who have experienced Islamic State’s direct oppression.”

Independent MP for Fowler Dai Le poses for photographs in her Australian flag-inspired dress after delivering her first speech in the House of Representatives at Parliament House in Canberra, Monday, September 5, 2022. AAP Image/Lukas Coch

About 10 percent of the population in Fowler have escaped war-torn Iraq, Syria and Lebanon and escaped the ISIS regime, Le added.

In 2017, at least half of the 12,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees arriving in Australia were settled in southwest Sydney, where unemployment was bucking the national trend.

Labor Persists in Bringing Back ISIS Brides

O'Neil argued that as Australian citizens, these women and children “have an enduring right” to re-enter Australia, adding that they “were assessed in a detailed manner and have all received an assessment of being low risk.”

“Is it in the nation’s interests for a large group of Australian children, who will in all likelihood one day return to Australia, to spend their formative years living in a squalid refugee camp where they have very little access to health, where they do not get to go to school and where they are subjected every day to radical ideologies that tell them to hate their own country or are they safer growing up here with Australian values?”

O’Neil will be visiting the Western Sydney community to hear from the community groups traumatised by the ISIS states, a move that was welcomed by Fowler MP Dai Le.

Afghan security forces take part in an ongoing operation against ISIS terrorists in the Achin district of Nangarhar province, on Nov. 5, 2019. Noorullah Shirzada/AFP via Getty Images

Labor MP for Macarthur Mike Freelander accused the Opposition of politicising the matter, saying, “the women, of course, did the wrong thing, but many of them were barely children themselves.”

“Most children have poor growth, poor nutrition, skin infections, parasitic infections, iron deficiency and B12 deficiency. They are severely psychologically traumatised; their learning is severely impaired. They are exposed to physical and psychological violence every day, seven days a week.”

According to Save the Children, an estimated 7,300 children “live in camps under the guardianship of their ISIS-affiliated mothers who are diligently indoctrinating them with ISIS ideology and instilling in them the desire to avenge their fathers who were killed or taken prisoner in battles.”

UN Refugee Agency said that people living in Internally Displaced Persons camps legally remain under the protection of their own government even if they have fled for similar reasons as refugees, such as armed conflict and generalised violence.