They left Australia to join the Islamic State. They raised children inside the Caliphate. And when it collapsed, they spent years rotting in a Syrian detention camp while governments on three continents quietly hoped the problem would take care of itself.
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, a camp in Syria’s far northeast run by Kurdish forces. 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.
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, 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.
A second wave followed on May 21, seven more women and 14 children, in what Australian officials believe may represent the last Australians held at Roj.
The Australian government had refused for years to facilitate any of this. It also couldn’t stop it. Under both Australian and international law, citizens hold a fundamental right of return. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke put it plainly: “They made an appalling, disgraceful decision.” But when the flights landed, the law took over.
What happened in Melbourne and Sydney is now being studied in London, Paris, Ottawa, and Washington, because every Western democracy with nationals still unaccounted for in the wreckage of the Islamic State knows its own version of this is coming.
So, what happens next?
