Australia Says ISIS Brides Are Coming Home from Syria

Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke announced on Wednesday that a group of 13 women and children linked to Islamic State fighters have booked flights back to Australia after being released from a prison camp in Syria.

Burke said the group would receive no help from the Australian government, and in fact some could expect to be arrested upon arrival.

“These are people who have made the horrific choice to join a dangerous terrorist organization and to place their children in an unspeakable situation,” Burke said at a press conference on Wednesday.

“As we have said many times: any members of this cohort who have committed crimes can expect to face the full force of the law,” he insisted.

The four women are Australian nationals who betrayed their country and moved to Syria so they could marry ISIS fighters at the height of their “caliphate’s” power. When the Islamic State collapsed, the ISIS brides and their children were held in prison camps administered by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Australia, and many other governments with expatriate ISIS families, seemed content to leave the prisoners in SDF custody indefinitely, but events forced their hands.

The regime of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad was overthrown in December 2024 in a lightning-fast offensive by rebels and jihadis, bringing a surprise ending to a long and brutal civil war that Assad seemed to have won. The new Syrian government soon came into conflict with the SDF, which did not entirely trust the newly minted President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who is a former al-Qaeda officer and wanted to remain autonomous. During this conflict, the SDF had to fall back from many of its ISIS prison camps.

The new Syrian government had no wish to continue warehousing the foreign ISIS members and began urging their governments to take them back. The home governments had long resisted doing so, because the ISIS members were clear security risks who had turned coat against their countries of origin.

In February 2026, the Syrian government announced plans to repatriate a group of 34 Australian citizens linked to the Islamic State after they were released from the Rob prison camp, where most had been held since 2019. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese refused to take the ISIS brides back, although his administration later suggested some of them could be accepted into Australian prisons.

“People in this cohort need to know that if they have committed a crime and if they return to Australia they will be met with the full force of the law. The safety of Australians and the protection of Australia’s national interests remain the overriding priority,” the Albanese government said in February.

Burke repeated that warning on Wednesday when telling the 13 ISIS family members – the first wave from the group of 34 released from the Roj camp in February – what they could expect if they insisted on flying to Australia.

According to Burke, Australian officials became aware of the group’s impending return within a matter of hours, after they booked flights to Australia from Syria. He conceded that despite widespread outrage from the public, there were “very serious limits” on what his government could do to prevent an Australian citizen from returning to home soil.

Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Krissy Barrett said her agency has been preparing for this moment for a decade, carefully investigating whether any of the returnees could be charged with “terrorism offenses” or “crimes against humanity” such as slavery, which was common in the Islamic State. She also noted that traveling to the Syrian “war zone,” which had “no functioning government” at the time, was illegal.

Barrett said that “some individuals will be arrested and charged” upon their return, while their children will “undergo community integration programs, therapeutic support, and countering violent extremism programs.”

Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) chief Mike Burgess took a milder tone, saying he was not immediately concerned by the arrival of the ISIS families – but “if they start to exhibit signs that concern us, we and the police, through the joint counterterrorism teams, will take action.”

Australia’s ABC News reported that some of the children traveling with the group are actually the grandchildren of the ISIS brides. The group left the Roj camp in late April, but their path home to Australia has been complicated.

A Syrian government official told ABC that the group has been stuck in Damascus for the past two weeks, waiting for approval from Australia to fly home. They attempted to fly out of Damascus last week, but were stopped by “comments from the Australian government.”

This account directly contradicts the remarks by Home Affairs Minister Burke, who claimed it was the Syrian government that turned the ISIS brides back last week.

The Syrian official said “the Australian government has the ultimate authority” in the matter, and had asked for some time to put “procedures in place” for the returnees. The procedures have apparently been completed, because the Syrian source said the women expected to depart from Damascus on Wednesday night and arrive in Australia on Thursday.

“These families are still awaiting a solution, which can only be achieved through coordination with the relevant international parties,” the Syrian Information Ministry said.

ABC reported that one woman and one child from the group were expected to “end up in New South Wales,” where the state police are preparing to receive them.

The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) reported last week that the Albanese government seemed reluctantly willing to take the ISIS returnees back until the Bondi Beach jihadi attack in December 2025, after which Albanese took “a more uncompromising approach” and spoke of leaving the Islamic State women to lie in the terrorist beds they had made for themselves.

Even after Bondi Beach, Albanese and his officials seemed unwilling to actually stop the ISIS women and their children from coming to Australia. Deputy Liberal Party leader Jane Hume blasted Albanese last week for neglecting his clear duty to the Australian people.

“These are people that we know have actively left Australia and gone to join ISIS-linked terrorists overseas to fight against everything that Australians believe in: equality, the rule of law, democracy. Everything that we believe in, they are against. And yet, somehow this government has said it’s not our problem, it’s not our fault,” Hume said.

Hume and other opposition leaders demanded transparency from Albanese about the identities of the returnees, the allegations against them, and exactly where they will be “settled.” Skeptics also doubted the repeated assertions by Albanese and Burke that the Australian government would do nothing to help the ISIS brides, pointing out that the women and their children could not enter Australia without various government services, including passport services.