What to do with an ‘ISIS bride’? Show her children a better life

Four women follow their husbands into known terror zones, give birth to their children, wind up in a refugee camp, and then return to Australia promising to be model citizens. Where on Earth do you start to unpack this, or, for that matter, them?

At the centre of it all are Kawsar Abbas, Zeinab Ahmed, Zahra Ahmed and Janain Safar, who travelled to Islamic State-occupied Syria about a decade ago – some with their partners, some in the thrall of its murderous ideology. When the regime collapsed, and with their husbands variously in jail or dead, they and their nine children were held in the notorious Al-Roj camp in north-eastern Syria, where they have languished for years.

The federal government did not repatriate the families; rather, it says, it gave them “the minimum amount of assistance” to return to Australian shores. In any case, it has sparked understandable fear and outrage, with some arguing they should be sent off to The Land of Anywhere but Here.

Such a solution, while no doubt satisfying and expeditious in the short term, ignores a few key facts. Unpalatable though it may be, the women are Australian citizens. Their children, some of whom are not yet teens, are innocent of everything but being tethered to their dreadful parents. Finally, and perhaps most pressingly, the last confirmed sighting of The Land of Anywhere but Here was at the top of the Magic Faraway Tree, which itself existed only in Enid Blyton’s head.

So, no-go on that plan, then.

To hear the women and their handful of supporters tell it now, they are simply bystanders to their husbands’ crimes and should, in fact, be viewed as victims of coercion and abuse; successive Australian governments have failed them; perhaps they have made a few ill-advised decisions, but they are, according to an interview Zahra Ahmad gave two years ago, undeserving of other people’s judgment and condemnation.

“Try to look at it from our perspective,” she said. “We’re human beings. I didn’t make this bed. We are now forced to suffer for the decisions that other people – other male influences, you know – made on our behalf.”

They are sentiments that ring particularly hollow, given the truly appalling views aired by fellow “bride” Safar, who in 2019 told The Australian that the choice to enter a terrorist hotbed was very much her own: “It was my decision to come here to go away from where women are naked on the street. I don’t want my son to be raised around that.”

On Thursday night, upon her return, she was arrested in Sydney in relation to entering or remaining in a terrorist area, while in Melbourne, Abbas and her 31-year-old daughter were detained over allegations that Yazidi women were kept as slaves in a war zone.

For those of us who recognise the futility of reducing their Australian passports to confetti but have no interest in hearing them potentially repeating their noxious views about Australian society, there are very few positives to this outcome.

The government has already flagged the fact that while ever they and their “appalling, disgraceful, horrific, repugnant” ideology are deemed a threat, they will be monitored closely.

There has been much discussion about the impost on taxpayers, but if the cost of publicly self-identifying as part of the lunatic fringe is a permanent ankle bracelet, draconian reporting conditions and a raft of terrorism charges, so be it. There are few who’d bother squawking about domestic counter-terrorism measures, or the ISIS brides’ civil liberties.

Perhaps the only upside is the possibility that the nine children who came to consciousness in one of the world’s most hellish places now have the potential to forge a future in one of the very best. Hopefully, given a choice between life in a First World country or an atrocious, war-torn grief hole, they will come to recognise that acting on the views of the lunatic fringe is an outcome that spells disaster every single time. Even if, in this case, the members of the lunatic fringe in question are their own beloved mothers.

Michelle Cazzulino is a freelance writer.