Canberra: Australia has repatriated 17 citizens detained, since the announcement of the fall of the Islamic State organization (ISIS) in 2019, in Al-Hol and Roj camps in Syria.
The 4 women and 13 children left the camp on Thursday afternoon and crossed the border into Iraq by air to return to Australia.
“The decision to repatriate these women and their children was informed by individual assessments following detailed work by national security agencies,” O’Neil said in a statement on Saturday, AFP reported.
As per the media reports, they are the wives, sons and daughters of dead or jailed Islamic State militants.
First step towards welcoming Australians back from Syrian camps
The ABC report stated that Australian officials assessed the returning group as the most vulnerable of the 60 Australian women and children held in Roj Camp. Most of these children were born in Syria.
According to the report, their return will likely be the first step in repatriating all Australians detained in Syria.
Several countries, such as the United States, Germany and France, have returned dozens of their citizens from the detention camps of ISIS families in Syria.
In Britain, a British woman returned with her child this month, making it the first adult allowed to return to Britain from Syrian camps since the fall of the “Islamic State” organization.
In March 2022, the international organization Save the Children said, “It will take 30 years before children stuck in unsafe camps in northeastern Syria can return to their homes if the deportations continue like this.”
Thousands of foreign women and children from the families of ISIS members are in special sections under heavy guard in the Al-Hol and Roj camps in Al-Hasakah Governorate, northeastern Syria.
The organization says that 18,000 Iraqi children and 7,300 others from 60 countries are still stuck in the two camps.
Al-Hol camp alone houses 56,000 people, most of whom are women and children, including about 10,000 families of foreign ISIS fighters. The camp witnessed chaos and security incidents from time to time.
During the past year alone, 74 children died in the al-Hol camp, including 8 killed. The director of the organization’s response office in Syria said, “The longer the children stay in al-Hol and Roj, the greater the risks they face.”
A few countries received large numbers of fighters’ families, including Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kosovo, while others – especially from European countries – content themselves with the return of a limited number of women and children, especially orphans.
