Last Australians leave Syria camp holding suspected militant relatives, official says

QAMISHLI, Syria: The last Australian women and children held in a northeast Syria camp housing relatives of suspected foreign militants left the site this week seeking to return home, a camp official told AFP on Saturday.
“Twenty-one Australians left Roj camp” on Thursday — seven women and 14 children, aged eight to 14 — the Kurdish administrative official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Syrian Kurdish forces control the Roj camp, where relatives of suspected foreign militants including Westerners have been held for years.
“They were handed over to the Syrian government and transferred to the Syrian capital with the aim of sending them to Australia,” the official said, adding: “There are no more Australians remaining in Roj.”
Earlier this month, 13 more Australians — four women and their nine children — flew home from Syria.
Two of the women, a mother and a daughter, were arrested on arrival, with police accusing them of having kept a female slave after traveling to Syria in 2014 to support the Daesh group, and of crimes against humanity while living under the self-declared Daesh caliphate.
They had been detained by Kurdish forces in 2019.
A third woman was also arrested on arrival in Australia and charged with entering a restricted area and joining a “terrorist organization.”
The fourth woman was not arrested.
Hundreds of women from Western nations were lured to the Middle East as Daesh gained prominence in the early 2010s, in many cases following husbands who had signed up as militant fighters.
At the time, Australia made it an offense to travel to the group’s strongholds such as Syria’s Raqqa province.
Small groups of women and children flew back to Australia in 2019, 2022 and 2025.
Once in control of swathes of Syria and Iraq, Daesh was territorially defeated in 2019 in a battle spearheaded by Kurdish-led forces with support from a US-led international coalition.
Syria’s new Islamist authorities, who took power in 2024, have formally joined the international anti-Daesh coalition and this year expanded their control to swathes of the north and northeast previously seized by Kurdish-led forces, though Roj camp remains under Kurdish administration.