The return of Australian ISIS-associated women and children has been the subject of contentious debate since the defeat of the ISIS territorial caliphate in Syria, with concerns about their threat to national security at the forefront.
At the same time, Australian organisations such as Save the Children have advocated for the women and children’s humanitarian needs and citizenship right of return. Other commentators have raised the challenge of their reintegration and its impact on Australia’s social cohesion.
Last week’s return of four ISIS-associated women and nine children from Al Roj camp in northeast Syria has resurfaced these debates.
One woman was arrested on arrival in Sydney for her alleged membership of a terrorist group. Two women were arrested at Melbourne airport for slavery offences and crimes against humanity committed in Syria. They are alleged to have enslaved, possessed and used Yazidi women in Syrian territories, which is a crime under Division 270 of the Australian Commonwealth Criminal Code. This law criminalises slavery and related offences, giving domestic effect to Australia’s obligations under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. It aligns Australian law with the Statute’s prohibition of enslavement as both a standalone offence and, where committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population, a crime against humanity. The two women’s bail hearings are delayed until June.
Australia has acted swiftly to prosecute these alleged international crimes, which are the first of their kind seen in Australia. Cases of ISIS-affiliated returnees have been prosecuted in several European states, including Sweden (5), the Netherlands (5), Germany (49) and France (7). In Germany, the fifth verdict against an ISIS member for the enslavement and abuse has recently been delivered. While Australia is not obligated under the ICC to prosecute the crimes, it is an important signal of the country’s commitment to the international rule of law in the context of crimes against humanity being perpetrated in Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, Israel/Palestine, Afghanistan and Iran to name a few. Australia is also committed to preventing violent extremism conducive to terrorism, given its significant harm to people.
The highest priority of the Australian Government is to keep Australians safe. But another vital role of government is to promote social cohesion to ensure community safety. This is front of mind in light of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, which follows the antisemitic terrorist attack last December that killed 15 people. But what does the return of ISIS-associated women and children have to do with community safety and social cohesion?
ISIS-linked women and children may be perceived as carrying the same extremist ideology that inspired the December shootings. Yet their reintegration is more complex because of two factors: their own experiences of violence and the potential for Australia’s response to their return to deepen divisions within the community.
The first complexity is that the women may have been victims as well as perpetrators of gendered violence, and the children most definitely have been exposed to and witnessed to violence and deprivation. Although the Australian and international media often refers to women who voluntarily entered ISIS territory between 2014-2019 as ‘ISIS brides’, the women attracted to Islamic State for family and ideological reasons are not a homogenous group. They took on various roles in the caliphate: fighter, recruiter, fundraiser (terrorist financing), slave owner and/or wife/mother. As well as perpetrators, some women may have themselves been victims of crimes of sexual and gender-based violence including forced marriage, forced pregnancy and sexual violence.
ISIS’s gender ideology has been well documented: Men were recruited as fighters, while women were recruited primarily for domestic and reproductive roles. ISIS also enslaved Yazidi men for forced labour and Yazidi women for domestic and sexual servitude. This gender order was integral to ISIS’s quest to create a Caliphate which included the enslavement of women for domestic and sexual services and men as frontline fighters. Yet this context has rarely been discussed when considering the return and reintegration of ISIS-linked Australian women and children. Rather the women’s alleged unprecedented international crimes have been compared with the alleged war crimes of Ben Roberts-Smith and Oliver Schulz, both soldiers accused of murder.
The second complexity is how we manage the reintegration of this group of ISIS-linked women and children through Australia’s legal, health and social institution has implications for the broader community. It will likely have the greatest impact on the Australian Muslim community, which may face stigmatisation through Islamophobic assumptions linking these alleged crimes to Islam itself, a dynamic that has been documented for years.
Public understanding of ISIS returnees in other non-Muslim majority countries has been shaped by Islamophobia. Returning to a society that discriminates against women for wearing a hijab, for instance, can undermine the sense of belonging that reintegration requires. ISIS reintegration programmes in Germany and other countries have revealed the challenge of working with ISIS returnees in a context of Islamophobia. Moreover, women returnees often face a “double stigma”. They are penalised for their association with a violent extremist group, and for transgressing conventional gender norms by joining the group. Women and children from ethnic and religious minority groups face the greatest stigma.
Australia needs to address underlying systems of oppression, such as racism, Islamophobia and gender discrimination to foster social cohesion in the context of the return home of ISIS women and children. States’ narratives and practices can fuel the very same grievances that attracted citizens to join terrorist organisations in the first place. ISIS recruitment exploits the experience of being treated as foreign in one’s own country, while the return of the ISIS-linked women and children has occurred at a time of heightened social tension. The Bondi attacks revealed Australia’s serious problem of antisemitism, and the aftermath has led to sharp increases in Islamophobia – with both antisemitism and Islamophobia instrumentalised by far-right extremist groups. Research shows that different extremisms fuel each other and exploit the same underlying conditions, which is why confronting any of these extremisms requires confronting all of them.
We cannot challenge violent extremism or promote social cohesion by establishing the rule of law only. Values of human rights, gender equality and dignity need to inform the reintegration of Australian citizens, especially children.