ABC investigates Australia’s female ISIS members at Al-Hol camp in Syria

Nahla Abdel Moneim

In the context of some countries’ problem regarding the file of ISIS returnees, the Australian network ABC shed more light on the file of female Australian ISIS members who are currently housed at the Al-Hol camp in northern Syria with their children.

The network conducted a field investigation, which showed that there are a few female Australian ISIS members are located at the camp, but most of them have bonds and kinship ties to an extremist named Muhammad Zahab.

Australian Zahab

According to the security information provided, Muhammad Zahab was a mathematics teacher at the Sydney Islamic High School and was popular with students. But after the advent of ISIS in 2014, he engaged in the ideology of the organization and decided to travel to Syria, where he then persuaded his family to join him.

It is likely that Zahab, who was killed by coalition raids, was also involved in three separate ISIS plots and persuaded his parents and brothers to travel to Syria, according to the Interior Ministry.

His parents left Australia in 2015 after selling their home in Sydney and the federal police claim that the family tried to use the proceeds to finance the organization. His cousin Haisem Zahab, from the town of Young in New South Wales, was convicted in June 2019 for researching weapons technology for ISIS.

Testimonies

In one of the tents visited by the network, 11 out of 16 women, most of them children, were related to Zahab by blood or marriage.

In an interview documented by the network, a meeting was organized between some women and their parents who take on the task of persuading the government to take back these seduced women. The report revealed a meeting with an Australian named Mariam Dabboussy and her father Kamal. According to her testimonies to ABC News, she said that her son-in-law Muhammad Zahab handed her and her child to the grip of ISIS, expressing anger at what he did and for bringing them to this bad and frightening fate, as without him, she and the other women would not have lived in the camps.

Mariam said she lived in prosperity and security with her middle-class family on the outskirts of Western Sydney and was not strict. But after she got married at 22 to Muhammad Zahab’s brother Khaled, she was surprised that Muhammad took control of her husband.

In mid-2015, Mariam, Khaled and their 18-month-old child went on their first foreign holiday to Lebanon. Muhammad was already in Syria and was able to deceive his brother and wife to join the organization. The family traveled from Lebanon to a house near the Syrian border in Turkey.

Her husband told her that it was time to go somewhere else and then turned to a piece of sand-filled land with a number of people waiting for the same fate. Upon entering, Mariam found the famous ISIS flag hanging on the wall.

Mariam said that she was angry at Muhammad at the time because she realized his deceit and control over his brother, leading him to Syria and to join ISIS. Afterwards, Khaled was trained in military tasks and left her home to look after her son. Three months later, when Mariam was about to give birth, Khaled was killed in a coalition airstrike on his training camp.

This was not her first shock since entering Syria, but she attempted to escape and was then arrested and returned to the organization. She was married to another ISIS member, who was also killed when she was nine months pregnant.

With ISIS suffering from successive military defeats, she ended up with her children at the camp. She noted that it would take 10 years to reveal the reality of what happened in the village of Baghouz.

ABC also documented the testimony Muhammad Zahab’s sister Nisreen, who was sent with her parents and some men to ISIS. Because she was a single woman, she was placed in a house belonging to the organization that was reserved for unmarried girls.

Shortly afterwards, her brother married her to Ahmed Merhi, another Australian recruited by Zahab. In 2017, Merhi was transferred to Iraq by US forces and sentenced to death.

Nisreen was 21 when she and her cousin snuck away from a family holiday in Lebanon to help refugees on the Turkish side of the Syrian border, as her brother had told her to; however, she stressed that she had never intended to enter Syria but was manipulated.

Among the most prominent women victims at the camp was Zahab’s Australian wife, Mariam Raad, who claimed that she was unaware of her husband’s work and that he lied to her, as she begged to return to her country and take care of her children there rather than the unclean and inhumane camps.

Raad’s family said that Zahab left her in Syria against her will, adding that she is now just defending herself and her innocent children. It is worth mentioning that Zahab’s mother lives at the camp with Raad and also dreams of returning home.

Official response

For its part, the Australian government decided to respond to these women’s claims, saying that some women within the group pose a major security threat to the country.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said that the women were not innocent, as they had taken their children to a war scene. He also confirmed that former New South Wales Deputy Police Commissioner Nick Kaldas, who had dedicated his career to terrorism investigation, assured the authorities that the truth about the women’s stories remained difficult to prove.

Kaldas added that he was well aware of some claims that these women were probably unaware of what they were getting into, but he believes there were also a large number of them who knew exactly what they were walking into and were happy to do so, going there voluntarily.

Australian society is rife with debates about revoking citizenship of ISIS fighters abroad, and the state is unlikely to allow them to return.