Islamic State-linked families arrive home in Australia from Syria

A group of 13 women and children with links to Islamic State (IS) has begun arriving home in Australia, after spending years in a Syrian detention camp.

The group, who had been living in the al-Roj detention camp since 2019, had been the subject of heated political debate in Australia, with the government saying it would give them no help to return.

Three women and eight children - believed to be members of the same family - landed in Melbourne late on Thursday afternoon with another woman and her child expected to arrive in Sydney.

The families will be met by police with arrests expected.

The group that arrived in Melbourne is reportedly made up of grandmother Kawsar Abbas and her adult daughters Zeinab and Zahra Ahmed, and their eight children.

Abbas is married to Mohammad Ahmad, who ran a charity that Australian police suspect was used to send cash to IS. He denied the accusation in an interview with the national broadcaster ABC in 2019, after it tracked him down to a prison in Syria.

The woman arriving in Sydney has been named by local media as Janai Safar - shye is accompanied by her 9-year-old son, who was born in Syria.

Safar is a former Sydney nursing student who travelled to Syria in 2015 and reportedly married an IS fighter.

In an interview with the Australian newspaper in 2019 she said it had been her own decision to go to Syria and that she did not want to return to Australia for fear of being arrested and having her child taken from her.

The group of 13 are part of a larger cohort of 34 believed to include wives, widows and children of IS fighters who left the camp in February but returned for "technical reasons" with the Australian government refusing to officially repatriate them.

One member of the cohort was banned from returning to Australia earlier this year when the government issued a "temporary exclusion order", meaning they cannot return for up to two years. That person is not among the group that landed on Thursday.

Boarding a connecting flight to Melbourne in Doha, the women told a reporter for the national broadcaster ABC they were excited to return home, saying Australia was "like paradise" to them.

"We just want our children to be safe. It was like hell [in Syria] for them," one said.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Australia had become aware that the women were to return home on Wednesday, when tickets were booked.

"These are people who have made the horrific choice to join a dangerous terrorist organisation and to place their children in an unspeakable situation," he told reporters, adding that "any members of this cohort who have committed crimes can expect to face the full force of the law."