On the morning of 16 February 2026, a Kurdish military escort led a convoy out of al-Roj, the camp in north-east Syria where Australian women and Australian children have been held for years in a condition that is neither proper imprisonment nor genuine freedom. The convoy carried eleven women and twenty-three children with Australian citizenship and Australian passports. The plan was brutally modest – travel toward Damascus, begin the long bureaucratic and logistical unspooling that might end in home. Within hours it collapsed. The convoy was halted near Qamishli after a warning that if it entered government-held territory it would be attacked. The families were forced back to the camp, children frightened by a world they had barely seen and then, once again, confiscated.
If you want a single image that captures Australia’s current posture, its moral evasions, its political timidity, its confusion between vengeance and justice, this is it – Australian children turned around on a Syrian road because we have decided, in practice, that the most convenient place to store the consequences of our citizens’ alleged crimes is in a collapsing foreign detention archipelago.
A democratic society must be able to give reasons for what it does in our name. In this question of repatriating Australians associated, in varying degrees, with Islamic State, women derided as “ISIS brides” and children treated as suspicious by inheritance, Australia is failing that basic test.
If Australian citizens have committed offences, they should be investigated, prosecuted and, if guilt is proven beyond reasonable doubt, punished under Australian law in Australian courts and Australian institutions. If any present a genuine threat, it is better to have them close to us, within the reach of our security and legal architecture, than stranded in overseas camps where control is porous and outcomes are increasingly chaotic. And the children deserve to come home because they are children, because they are Australian, and because leaving them in indefinite detention in a conflict zone is a moral failure that will metastasise into a strategic failure.
Begin with the phrase itself – “ISIS brides”. It is a label engineered to do moral work, so we don’t have to. It compresses a wide range of biographies into one contemptible category, inviting the public to treat a group of people as a single moral stain rather than as individuals with different degrees of agency, coercion, knowledge, complicity, trauma, and responsibility. In the liberal tradition, guilt is personal. Justice is individual. Punishment is justified only when it is deserved and imposed through procedures that respect the moral standing even of those accused of grave wrongdoing.
That last point is what many Australians find hardest to swallow. We have learned to say “rule of law” as though it were branding. In truth, the rule of law is a discipline. It is what we submit ourselves to precisely when we are angry, frightened, disgusted, precisely when the crowd’s most natural desire is not justice but expulsion.
Australia’s current approach is an ethical muddle. On the one hand, political leaders speak as though these women are morally beyond the pale, on the other, they decline to bring them within the jurisdiction where guilt could be tested and punishment imposed. It is the logic of suspicion as sentence. It is also, in any honest ethical vocabulary, punishment without trial.
The camps in north-east Syria have always existed in a grey zone – not a conventional prison system under a sovereign state, not a humanitarian shelter with freedom of movement, but a long-term containment regime shaped by war, geopolitics, and the understandable fear of what might happen if tens of thousands of detainees, many connected to a terrorist movement, are suddenly loosed without planning. Yet the moral status of a “grey zone” sharpens responsibility because it creates precisely the conditions in which rights are most likely to be violated and children most likely to be harmed.
A UN expert who visited the region described the situation bluntly – “indefinite mass detention without legal process” that violates international law and should cease, “especially for children.”
This is the language of a world that recognises a basic truth – that indefinite detention without process is not made moral by being far away, and that children are not made punishable by the alleged sins of their parents.
Now layer on the current instability. In late February, Médecins Sans Frontières warned that the sudden closure of al-Hol camp and the chaos preceding it exposed thousands of people, including children and those with chronic medical conditions, to heightened risks and diminished access to healthcare and protection.
Human Rights Watch warned that the wellbeing and fate of thousands in camps such as al-Hol and Roj are uncertain as closures loom and control shifts.
The Associated Press reported a “mass escape” and repeated breaches at al-Hol amid the upheaval of changing control and weakened internal barriers.
Whatever one’s view of the adults, it should now be obvious that the strategy of leaving Australians “over there” depends on a fantasy – that a volatile region will continue indefinitely to warehouse the moral and political consequences of our decisions. That fantasy is disintegrating.
Those who argue against repatriation often insist that the decisive value is security – keep potential extremists out, and Australia will be safer. It is a comforting sentence because it makes safety feel like a matter of geography. But if we are serious, we must ask what “keeping them out” actually entails in the world as it is.
It entails leaving Australian citizens in camps whose security is porous, whose governance is unstable, and whose future is increasingly uncertain. It entails relying on local authorities and shifting militias to do, indefinitely, what we claim we will not do ourselves – contain risk. It entails accepting that people may escape, be trafficked, be transferred, or be absorbed into new networks that thrive precisely in zones of legal ambiguity. It entails, in short, exchanging governable risk for ungovernable risk and congratulating ourselves on our toughness.
The case for bringing them home is, in part, the case for jurisdiction. In Australia, our institutions, imperfect, but real, can investigate, prosecute, imprison, supervise, restrict, and monitor. In north-east Syria, we have none of that. We have only hope, and hope is not a counter-terrorism strategy.
Consider what we know about Australia’s own tools. The Australian Federal Police states plainly that Australians may have committed terrorism offences overseas and that when Australians return from fighting overseas, they may bring “dangerous new skills and networks.”
That is precisely why managed return and domestic control matter. Australia’s national security framework describes a coordinated counter-terrorism and violent extremism strategy supported by a national plan; this is an apparatus built for prevention, disruption, and response.
Our law includes judicially supervised control orders that can impose restrictions for defined periods, the Attorney-General’s Department notes that a control order must be issued by a court on application by the AFP with the Attorney-General’s consent and cannot last longer than twelve months.
For those convicted of terrorism offences who remain high-risk at the end of their sentence, Division 105A provides for continuing detention orders and extended supervision orders, again within a court framework.
These measures are controversial, and in a healthy democracy they should be debated, scrutinised, and constrained. But their existence shatters the claim that Australia is helpless.
The ethical superiority of domestic management is not simply that it is effective. It is that it is accountable. Courts can be appealed. Orders can be contested. Evidence can be tested. Decisions can be examined by independent institutions. The alternative, indefinite foreign containment, has the opposite moral character – it is opaque, unreviewable, and untethered from any process that could honestly be called justice.
This is where the ethical lens must sharpen because it is easy to talk about security as though it were a trump card that ends debate. But in a liberal democracy, security is a value that must be pursued within moral limits. The point of the rule of law is to make security legitimate.
Those who insist we should “keep them there” should be forced to answer a simple moral question – what, exactly, is “there”? Is it a lawful prison system with charges, trials, representation, and sentences proportionate to wrongdoing? No. Is it a humanitarian shelter where people are protected while their legal status is resolved? No. It is a limbo designed to contain. That limbo may have been understandable as an emergency response in 2019. It is ethically indefensible as a permanent substitute for justice in 2026.
When you consign people to indefinite detention without process, you harden identity. You incubate grievance. You generate trauma, especially in children, and trauma is a social risk. The longer these camps exist, the more they function as laboratories of despair.
Here, Australia’s rhetorical cruelty toward children is particularly revealing. In recent days the public debate has included senior political figures describing children in al-Roj as “sympathisers,” as though a six-year-old in a tent is making ideological commitments worthy of civic exile.
The Guardian’s reporting has offered a corrective of unbearable simplicity – children dreaming of ice-cream, of watching Bluey, of not living in a tent, ordinary desires that should shame any nation tempted to treat them as enemies.
There is a special moral corruption in punishing children for the decisions of adults. It is the abdication of the most basic duties of a civilised state.
Australia has, in fact, already recognised this. In 2019, the Morrison government repatriated eight Australian children from Syrian camps, with the Prime Minister stating they could not be held responsible for their parents’ crimes.
In 2022, the Australian government repatriated four women and thirteen children, explicitly stating that the decision was informed by national security advice and individual assessments and that the focus throughout was safety and security.
These are the actions of a state that knows repatriation can be managed when the political will exists.
We also know that prosecution is possible. One of the women repatriated in 2022, Mariam Raad, was sentenced in 2024 for the declared area offence, with the ABC reporting details of the case and the government describing that offence as part of the legislative suite designed to combat the foreign fighter threat.
This is an important moral data point because it dismantles the lazy binary that poisons the public conversation. The binary says – either we leave people to rot in foreign camps, or we bring them home and “do nothing”. That is false. The adult Australians in these camps can be brought home into the ordinary machinery of investigation and prosecution. If there is evidence, charge them. If there is proof, convict them. If guilt is established, imprison them. That is what the rule of law is for.
And if evidence is hard? Then we confront a hard truth rather than hiding behind it. Yes, evidence from a war zone can be difficult. The Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions notes that many counter-terrorism matters involve conduct partly outside Australia or evidence located overseas, and that referrals are assessed under the Prosecution Policy of the Commonwealth like any other matter.
Difficulty does not justify lawlessness. It does not justify indefinite detention in a foreign limbo. A society that claims someone is too dangerous to return but cannot, or will not, test guilt in court is practising a politicised form of exclusion.
Moreover, Australia’s legal framework has been shaped precisely to address the evidentiary problems posed by foreign conflict zones. The Law Council’s review of the declared areas regime notes that section 119.2 of the Criminal Code makes it an offence for an Australian person to enter or remain in a declared area, punishable by up to ten years’ imprisonment.
One can criticise the breadth of such offences, many thoughtful critics do. But the ethical point here is narrower – our system has mechanisms to deal with the security reality of foreign fighter travel without abandoning the basic structures of legality.
Now, the objection that surfaces in every conversation, often voiced with an air of moral certainty, is that bringing them home is “rewarding” them. But repatriation is not reward. Repatriation is jurisdiction. It is the state bringing its citizens within the reach of its own law. It is the opposite of indulgence. If someone has committed offences, the most demanding, least sentimental posture is to prosecute and punish them here. The indulgent posture is to gesture at their guilt while washing our hands of the hard work of proof and the hard discipline of procedure.
There is also a deeper ethical confusion beneath the “reward” rhetoric. It assumes that the state’s primary relationship to these citizens is moral condemnation rather than legal responsibility. But citizenship is a status that creates reciprocal duties. One of those duties is that the state may not cast citizens into a legal void because they are politically inconvenient. This is a core principle without which citizenship becomes conditional, and democracy becomes a popularity contest enforced by the passport office.
The most compelling case for returning the children is, of course, that they are children. But even here, Australia has begun to flirt with an ethically grotesque logic – that children can be treated as suspect by association, that their right to safety and development can be suspended because of a parent’s alleged wrongdoing, that we can use their suffering as a deterrent message to others. This is the moral equivalent of burning a village to warn the next one. It degrades the state. It degrades us.
And it is strategically foolish. Children raised in punitive limbo are made more damaged, more alienated, more vulnerable to exploitation and ideological capture. Whatever Australia fears about the future, leaving children in camps where the social ecology is saturated with trauma is not a way to prevent it.
That is why the insistence “bring the children home” is the most rational security posture compatible with morality. It allows the state to intervene early with education, healthcare, stable guardianship, and trauma-informed support. It allows the state to separate, where necessary and only where necessary, the welfare of the child from the culpability of the adult. It allows us to be what we claim to be – a society that does not punish children for the crimes of others.
Some will ask whether bringing the children home requires bringing their mothers. There is no single answer, and anyone who claims there is has not thought carefully enough. The ethical starting point is that family unity is a serious moral consideration, separation of a child from a parent is a grave intervention that should be justified only by the child’s best interests, assessed case by case through proper child protection processes. Yet the current debate has moved so far from seriousness that some mothers have reportedly said they would accept their children returning without them if that were the only way to secure their safety.
That statement should be heard as a cry of desperation from people trapped in a system that is unravelling.
Meanwhile, Australia’s own legal settings already acknowledge that the state can, in defined circumstances, delay or condition a citizen’s return. In February 2026, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke confirmed that a temporary exclusion order was issued against one individual among the group in al-Roj, on security advice, while noting that passports were being issued to citizens as a matter of course. Whatever one thinks of temporary exclusion orders, their use underscores an essential point – the state has tools to manage return while still maintaining the fundamental truth that citizens are ultimately subject to Australian jurisdiction. It is precisely because we have these tools that the argument for leaving everyone in a camp becomes even weaker. If one individual meets a legal threshold for temporary exclusion, apply it. If others do not, bring them back under monitoring and, where evidence exists, prosecution. Conflating the entire cohort into a single undifferentiated threat is moral laziness and risk mismanagement.
The current government insists it does not support repatriating those with links to terrorism, yet reporting around the convoy episode noted that the government cannot legally block citizens’ return except through specific mechanisms such as temporary exclusion orders.
That legal reality is a constitutional and moral guardrail. It exists because Australians once understood that the state’s power to exclude its own people is among the most dangerous powers a government can possess. Used casually, it becomes banishment. Used politically, it becomes a tool for manufacturing out-groups. Used permanently, it becomes the quiet death of equal citizenship.
The most telling sign that the “keep them there” policy is failing is that people are trying to come back anyway. When the world becomes more chaotic, informal pathways multiply. Smuggling networks thrive on governmental paralysis. And when returns occur without a planned, intelligence-informed, legally structured process, the state is left reacting rather than managing. If your professed goal is public safety, you should prefer controlled return to uncontrolled return. The moral argument and the security argument converge on the same conclusion – bring them within our jurisdiction rather than leaving them to the whims of a failing camp system and the opportunism of the black market.
We should also be honest about a dark subtext – for many Australians, the attraction of leaving these people in Syria is moral distancing. We want the comfort of thinking that the consequences of terrorism can be quarantined somewhere else, that the ugliness can be kept off our streets, that the moral labour of judgement can be avoided. But moral distancing has a price. It normalises the idea that the state may decide some citizens are beyond care. It teaches a lesson about rights – that they can be suspended when a government’s political calculus demands it. It quietly changes the character of the polity.
Leaving Australian children in a collapsing detention system is a decision to accept foreseeable harm because the victims are politically unhelpful. When MSF warns that camp closure chaos is stripping people, including children, of healthcare and protection, that is part of what our inaction makes more likely. When HRW says thousands are stranded and their future uncertain as closures proceed, that is the predictable endpoint of an Australian policy of avoidance. When the AP reports mass breaches and escapes, that is evidence that the detention architecture we rely on is a crumbling fence.
What then would it mean to act like a serious country? It would mean, first, abandoning the theatrical idea that “over there” equals “safe”. Safety is achieved by control, and control requires jurisdiction.
It would mean, second, separating the moral categories that our politics has collapsed. There is culpability, which must be determined by evidence and courts. There is risk, which must be assessed by security agencies and managed by lawful tools. There is welfare, particularly of children, which must be addressed by child protection and health systems guided by the child’s best interests. One of the reasons the debate has become so toxic is that we have let these categories bleed into each other until they are indistinguishable, and in that confusion, punishment seeps into everything.
It would mean, third, having the courage to pursue justice rather than merely expressing condemnation. Justice for the victims of Islamic State is served by the painstaking work of investigation and prosecution, the public establishment of facts, the differentiation of degrees of responsibility, and the imposition of proportionate punishment by courts that must give reasons. If we truly believe some of these women committed crimes, our moral obligation is to do the hard work of proving it and punishing it. Otherwise we are using victims as rhetorical cover for abdication.
It would mean, fourth, recognising that punishment, when justified, belongs in Australian institutions. There is a moral reason for this that goes beyond national pride. Punishment is among the most coercive acts a state can perform. Because it is so coercive, it must be bounded by legitimacy. Legitimacy in a democracy comes from legality, due process, and institutional accountability. A Syrian camp is not an Australian prison. A camp guard is not a judge. Leaving citizens in camps is not a morally acceptable substitute for punishment, and it is certainly not a substitute for justice. It would mean, finally, speaking honestly about children. The children in al-Roj are not responsible for their parents. Some have lived essentially their entire lives in detention.
To treat them as moral contaminants, to imply they are less entitled to protection because of association, is to cut the heart out of the ethical commitments we claim to hold. It is also to plant the seeds of future harm. A child who learns that their birthplace disowns them is a child whose relationship to that society begins with betrayal.
There is an old temptation in politics – to treat banishment as a form of purification. We imagine that if we can keep the “bad ones” outside the perimeter, the inside will be morally clean. But modern terrorism does not respect perimeters, and modern ethics does not permit purification through abandonment. The liberal democratic state is an institutional order that claims legitimacy through law. When it meets its hardest cases with avoidance and scapegoating, it becomes less legitimate. And legitimacy is itself a security asset. Societies with brittle legitimacy breed distrust, polarisation, and grievance, those are precisely the conditions in which extremist narratives flourish. The easiest thing in the world is to join a chorus of contempt. The hardest thing is to insist that contempt is not a policy.
Bring them home. Not as an act of forgiveness, but as an act of jurisdiction. Bring them home so that wrongdoing can be tested in court rather than presumed on a talkback segment. Bring them home so that punishment, if it is deserved, can be imposed by judges rather than by a geopolitical accident. Bring them home because our security services are better placed to monitor and manage risk when individuals are within Australian reach than when they are in camps whose future is collapsing and whose security has already shown itself porous. Bring them home because children have a claim on us that does not depend on their parents’ moral biography. Bring them home because the alternative is not toughness but abdication – a slow surrender of our legal and moral responsibilities to the chaos of other people’s wars.
Further reading:
Keep Independent Journalism Alive – Support The AIMN
Dear Reader,
Since 2013, The Australian Independent Media Network has been a fearless voice for truth, giving public interest journalists a platform to hold power to account. From expert analysis on national and global events to uncovering issues that matter to you, we’re here because of your support.
Running an independent site isn’t cheap, and rising costs mean we need you now more than ever. Your donation – big or small – keeps our servers humming, our writers digging, and our stories free for all.
Join our community of truth-seekers. Please consider donating now via:
PayPal or credit card – just click on the Donate button below
Direct bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969
We’ve also set up a GoFundMe as a dedicated reserve fund to help secure the future of our site.
Your support will go directly toward covering essential costs like web hosting renewals and helping us bring new features to life. Every contribution, no matter the size, helps us keep improving and growing.
Thank you for standing with us – we truly couldn’t do this without you.
With gratitude, The AIMN Team
These women walked out of Australia, so how can they now call it home?
Do you never give anyone a second chance? One transgression and that’s it, they’re wiped from your life? Quite apart from everything else, that sounds awfully lonely.
People aren’t infallible, jonangel. Even you ought to be able to comprehend that simple observation. Humans are mistake-making creatures, a fact of life long recognised. In most instances, whatever the mistake, they’re given the opportunity to recommence, to start again. Even formal legal systems recognises that, and consider if a person breaks the law and is duly punished, then at the end of that process he is free to begin again. In America it’s practically a rite of passage – screw up, do the time, confess, repent, then be welcomed back into society.
leefe’s correct… your viewpoint is too small, too inhumane, and yes, too lonely. Forgiveness is a defining characteristic of human behaviour. These women were young and impressionable, and they’ve paid a very heavy price for their behaviour, but it’s time to say it’s over, come home.
With Murdoch looming over his shoulder, and the usual suspects waiting to pounce,Albanese will avoid making any decision that is even slightly controversial, as he has repeatedly demonstrated.
Having made the top job, he is paralysed by fear of failure.Too late for that mate,get back under the blanket.
A successful factional manager does not a national leader make , especially one with so many bad decisions marked by moral failures.
So, the man of clay feet, Albanese can make error after error and not expect any backlash let alone reduced living circumstances, whilst the same flawed thinking applies to everyone else across every policy?
I don’t think so, and only a foolish man would continue to believe that, especially when, for whatever flawed reasoning, is involved in a war that’s unwinnable….it also shows the same flaws amongst the remainder of the cabinet.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/03/03/a-war-that-cannot-be-won-israel-and-the-united-states-bomb-iran/
https://kangaroocourtofaustralia.com/2026/03/04/anthony-albaneses-iran-war-lies-will-be-his-john-howard-moment/
While Albanese berates and demeans Australian woman in Syria and refuses point blank to help with full knowledge that they have not committed any crimes except being widowed single mothers like his own mother, an unwed mother. There are parallels between the Australian women in Syria and Albanese’s mother, they all made bad choices and made poor judgemental calls in who they fell in love with (Albanese himself is the master of poor judgement). Unlike the Albanese Labor Government Albanese’s mother was helped by the responsible and compassionate government of the day.
Now, to make matters worse, the feckless opposition wants to make it a crime for anyone helping them or anyone connected to ISIS, whose leader and now leader of Syria was welcomed to the Oval Office by Trump himself, to return home to Australia. In the mean time returning Australian genocidal baby killing IDF war criminals are not arrested but in stark contrast are welcomed home to Australia. These sadistic, callous, depraved low life criminals are time bombs walking our streets and yet under international law they are criminals but in Australiathey walk freely amongst us. What has happened to Australia and the West’s morals and principles? How is it that genocide is acceptable to Western politicians and media?
Thousands of foreign nationals, over 500 Australians, are serving in Israel’s military with the legal tolerance of their home states, while peaceful protest against the war is criminalised and violently met by goose stepping state police forces.This double standard exposes a deep failure of international law and accountability of those nations that signed the Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. What we are witnessing is a fully formed case of what can be described as the wilfull globalisation of the heinous crime of genocide and the crime against humanity of colonising occupation.
Transforming the war into an arena in which tens of thousands of foreign volunteers and mercenaries participate in a calculated attempt to diffuse responsibility for a local crime into a scattered global burden. The blood of Palestinian victims is diluted across multiple nationalities, making legal accountability a complex process that would require confrontation with major world capitals who through portions of their citizenary and policies are complicit while the intent is to diminish Tel Aviv’s.
We are still dealing with the Howard shifty economic effects….
https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2026/03/04/7am-john-howard-peter-costello?
https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2026/02/28/john-howard-legacy-amy-remeikis?
https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/03/thirty-years-on-howards-inventory-australias-invoice/?
You are correct, we all make mistakes, but the simple fact is, these women did what they did knowingly. Would you be so forgiving of Nazis who claimed they made a mistake?
Listen to reason and consider decency and deny the squirtings of an incontinent orifice of no worth. Women and children can be observed, investigated, cleared, monitored, especially by our useless, worthless, money burning invisible ASIO, if ever they do something well. Civilised, intelligent moral and ethical attitudes should prevail here, though the thick will remain impenetrable.
Bring them home as soon as possible. I do not understand the delay in action which makes this a festering issue for the Government. Just as with the Tamil family from Biloela which the previous government insisted on punishing for existing inconveniently, the matter becomes a non-issue once the sensible decision is made.
ajogrady, a minor correction: the current leader of Syria was NOT part of ISIS. He fought with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a militant Islamist group in Syria that fought against ISIS.
Those who have Australian citizenship have already been provided with passports &/or Travel documents and are free to return to Australia if they can get a flight – they will be detained on arrival in Australia and undergo Border Force and ASIO questioning; some may be arrested and charged as a result.
They or their Australian relatives will have to pay their fares ‘home’: the Australian taxpayer doesn’t do that.
@ajogrady
Well said.
Israel recruited snipers who went to Israel to test their shooting skills on fellow humans; children, women and men, they went there to take life, it didn’t matter whether it was to be children, women, men or even their pets. There have been reports of them setting up grotesque, psychopathic competitions amongst themselves. As ajogrady points out, they will be walking amongst us, rewarded for their psychopathy.
Who knows in what capacity these over 500 Australians went there to serve, it doesn’t matter, they went there to facilitate the murder of tens of thousands of people and have their land stolen from them. They should be held to account.
Labor has as much intention of investigating whether they have committed war crimes as it has of ever holding Israel to account for murdering Zomi Frankcom; none at all.
Australia is ruled by psychopaths who put their chances of getting re-elected above people’s lives at every step. Labor has supported Trump’s obliteration of international law and the United Nations at every step, whether actively or through silent consent. Labor has been complicit in genocide at every step of the way. Labor engineered a violent, vicious attack on Australians, on Australian soil, peacefully showing their opposition to the slaughter of fellow humans, to the inhumanity of genocide.
Labor couldn’t show its total disregard for human life and its sycophancy towards Trump fast enough when the USA and Israel launched their illegal, immoral kiddy killing spree on Iran. Labor, the Coalition, One Nation and the corporate media has been gaslighting Iran ever since. Labor’s behavour towards women and children in Syria, and for that matter the people it sent to Nauru, is utterly inhumane. “they made their beds, they can lie in them” – well, how on Earth could that be applied to the children? but that doesn’t matter to Labor, the point is to demonize them in whatever way possible.
Labor is taking us to a very dark place and very quickly.
The only humanity coming from the Australian parliament is from the Greens and some of the independents.
As for Western government support, perhaps it depends on which newsfeed you look at, but it seems to mainly be from the same leaders who have been actively giving support to Israel in its genocide – Van der Leyen, Merz, eventually Macron and Starmer; the rest seem to have been cowed into tacit support, with Spain the exception. Labor should be showing Spain support not Israel and the USA.
@ ajogrady, Gonggongche: Agreed.
1) The Australian single parent families rotting away in Northern Syria MUST be returned home ASAP by the intervention of all the powers of the Australian government. Any legal matters may be handled upon their return to the Australian legal jurisdiction.
2) The ”ZIONAZI volunteers who went to Isrevil to enlist in the amoral IDF must be severely scrutinised upon their return to Australia to protect innocent Australian civilians from becoming victims to their murderous thinking.
Use the Criminal Code s119.2 (Cth) to imprison them upon landing and detain them with due process in detention until appropriate research clearly shows that they DID NOT take part in the Hannibal Directive or subsequent assassination actions against Indigenous Palestinians.
However, will the ZIONZI bosses of Australian politics allow such political action?? Probably unlikely ….. because those ZIONAZIS will want a ticker tape parade through the home state capital for each of these Australians who have demonstrated that their divided loyalties put the best interests of Australia AFTER sucking up to Bibi the Butcher of THE GAZA GENOCIDE.
Why should the ever whingeing ZIONAZIS have different legal rights to all other Australian citizens??
It was bad enough serving in the Australian Army with private school ”boys” who practiced dramatic Hollywood style death scenes because soldiers should ”die gloriously”.
The country boys were more practical ….. why die?? Better to eliminate the enemy and enjoy tomorrow …..
So Albanese said that conducting memorial services for the murdered Ayatollah Khomeini in Melbourne mosques is “inappropriate” in the light of hostilities launched against Iran by our American and Israeli “friends”. Thus, the fate of these Australian citizens stranded in what remains of Syria is sealed. Albanese will not disobey the Zionists who constantly lean over his shoulder and advise him on the “correct” way forward. Australia has lost its sovereignty to Pax Judaica. Our ANZUS Treaty will not save us.
They are Australian and should be allowed back home.
Unfortunately, religious ‘radical’ elements are involved.
As there is no Australian process that allows the investigation of the three bible religions and their spin offs, can any investigation of these women and children, happen?
Would they need some form of social detention during assessment of their trauma??
@ Mediocrates: ”Australia has lost its sovereignty to Pax Judaica.”
1) Rather ”Pax ZIONAZISM”; The followers of Judaism whom I know want absolutely nothing to do with the ZIONAZI White Supremacist, imperialistic, land-grabbing 19th century Viennese theology that has become entangled around the ancient Judaism theology.
2) ”Our ANZUS Treaty will not save us”; never has & never will; just a poor excuse for the locating of the US Pine Gap spy station and other similar installations elsewhere in Australian jurisdiction.
ANZUS was used by the COALition to invite Australia to the US imperialist war in Vietnam where far too many fine young Australian soldiers were lost to US military incompetence and US ”friendly” fire.
@wam: Rather ”social detention” to provide intense psychological treatment for the PTSD resulting from their experiences.
How many Viet-Vets self-medicated by drinking themselves to death because Canberra desk jockeys & the Australian community at large DID NOT respect their efforts in the US imperialist war. Remember it took 28 years before a ”Welcome Home” public event was held ….. how long in 1945??