The fundamental question is not whether these women and children are sympathetic figures. The question is what kind of country Australia intends to be when the answer is genuinely hard to give.
Thirty-five Australians, including 11 women, 23 children and one young man, remain in camps in north-eastern Syria, according to reporting by the Sydney Morning Herald. They are linked, in varying degrees, to Islamic State. Some went willingly. Some, advocates insist, were coerced or deceived. The children, in most cases, had no say at all. For years, successive Australian governments have moved with visible reluctance on the question of bringing them home. That reluctance, whatever its political logic, carries its own costs.
To understand why this debate refuses to settle, you need to hear from people with standing to speak about it, and not just policy analysts in Canberra offices.
Sami Sheebo is a leader of the Yazidi community in Australia. He escaped Iraq after Islamic State fighters overran his village in 2014. Eight mass graves were needed to bury the thousands who were killed. More than 6000 Yazidi women were enslaved. His concern about repatriation is not abstract. "They work and build as a group," Sheebo says. "On a Friday, they gather, talking, trying to get people to join them. From a small group they become a big group. Others will join them and they control a whole suburb. They will be a danger to Australian society."
Youel Zeya and Ismail Ismail, Assyrian Christians who fled Syria after IS fighters destroyed their churches and ordered their community to convert or leave, share that unease. When asked about the Australian children of IS-associated women, Zeya's answer was blunt: "These children are raised there, and they've been raised with this ISIS, so what are they thinking? What's in their minds? We really don't know."
These are not voices that can be dismissed as uninformed prejudice. They carry the weight of lived atrocity, and any honest accounting of this debate must start there.
What we actually know about the women
Associate Professor Josh Roose of Deakin University, an expert on violent extremism, is sceptical of claims that all the women were simply deceived or pressured into travelling to Syria. From the outset of IS's rise in 2014, the organisation's ideology was openly violent. It was also, for a specific cohort, genuinely compelling. IS offered marginalised young men the identity of warriors; it offered women the chance to build a new society. Around 200 to 300 Australians were drawn in, one of the largest proportional cohorts in the world.
Western women in the caliphate, Roose says, were not passive bystanders. They were often active in recruitment, in propaganda, and in policing the behaviour of other women, including the enslavement of Yazidi girls.
The specific records of the women still in the camps are, however, patchy. Analyst Rodger Shanahan has documented some troubling statements: one woman expressed hope for martyrdom and spoke of raising children to be enemies of the caliphate's opponents. A Melbourne woman posted online celebrating IS attacks on coalition forces. Another woman, Kirsty Rosse-Emile, presents a more complex picture; she was reportedly groomed by a much older man, married at 14, and taken to Syria by him.
The counter-argument deserves serious consideration: family advocate Kamalle Dabboussy has said the women were in survival mode, stripped of all agency, quickly widowed and traded in marriage to unknown men. Underage girls were married off against their will. Many, he argued, regretted their circumstances rapidly. The women have reportedly offered to cooperate with law enforcement and accept control orders on return.
Neither the government nor the Australian Federal Police has disclosed what, if any, criminal charges might be laid. One temporary exclusion order has been issued, but authorities have declined to say against whom or on what basis.
The track record so far
Strip away the talking points and what remains is this: 32 Australians have already returned from Syrian camps in three separate groups since 2019. Not one has been convicted of a criminal offence. Criminologist Dr Clarke Jones, who works directly with terrorist offenders, says the reintegration of those already returned has gone better than anticipated: "no untoward incidents... It's gone more smoothly than I would have thought."
That is not a reason for complacency. Jones is clear that no deradicalisation programme achieves a perfect result, and each state runs its own model with varying rigour. But the record, thin as it is, does not support the claim that return is categorically too dangerous to attempt.
The harder argument, and the one that should concentrate minds in Canberra, concerns the children still in the camps. Roose and Jones both point to a straightforward reality: the longer children remain in an environment saturated with IS ideology, the worse the eventual outcome becomes. Every week of delay is a week of further exposure. The Australian Human Rights Commission has long held that children bear a distinct claim to protection regardless of their parents' choices. On that point, the moral case is difficult to argue against.
As for the women, Roose frames the baseline clearly: "Unless there is an extraordinary claim against them, we'll probably have to let them back in." Australian citizenship is not a privilege that governments can revoke through inaction. But he insists that establishing criminal culpability should be the first priority, and the government's failure to be transparent about what evidence exists, or what charges are being contemplated, is itself a form of accountability failure.
History will judge this moment by whether Australia acted on evidence or on anxiety. Those are not the same thing, and a government serious about both security and the rule of law should be working harder to show that it knows the difference. The Parliament of Australia has both the authority and the responsibility to demand that clarity from the agencies involved.
Reasonable people can look at this situation and reach genuinely different conclusions about pace, conditions, and priorities. The fears of Yazidi and Assyrian survivors are not paranoia; they are testimony. The welfare of children who never chose any of this is not a soft consideration; it is a legal and moral obligation. Both things are true at once. The task for government is to hold that tension honestly, rather than letting it fester unaddressed in a Syrian camp for another year.