Australian terrorist’s children out of battle zone after fleeing fall of IS
Updated
The surviving children of Australia’s most notorious convert to the Islamic State group Khaled Sharrouf have escaped the last brutal battle against the terrorist organisation in Syria and are being held in a refugee camp in the country’s north, as their Australian grandmother pleads for help to bring them home.
Key points:
- The five Sharrouf children were taken to Islamic State territory in Syria by their mother, Tara, in early 2014
- Only three children have survived their five-year ordeal, and since mid-March they have been held at the al-Hawl refugee camp in north-eastern Syria
- Their grandmother Karen Nettleton is calling on the Australian Government to help her rescue the children, following similar actions by other Western nations
The ABC has confirmed Sharrouf’s three remaining children — Zaynab, 17; Hoda, 16; Humzeh, eight — fled the siege of Baghouz in southern Syria in mid-March and have been taken by Kurdish forces to the sprawling al-Hawl refugee camp about 300 kilometres to the north.
With them are Zaynab’s two toddlers: Ayesha, three; and Fatima, two.
While the children are safe from the bombs and bullets of the Syrian war they now face another challenge: Since December at least 60 children and babies have died.
There are about 67,000 people interned at the camp, of which about 90 per cent are women and children, according to the United Nations.
The children’s grandmother, Karen Nettleton, has expressed particular concern about the wellbeing of Zaynab, who is about to give birth in the squalid conditions of the al-Hawl camp.
That raises worrying echoes of the case of 19-year-old UK jihadi bride Shamima Begum, who is being held by the Kurds in a nearby refugee camp called Roj.
Earlier this month Ms Begum’s newborn baby, Jarrah, died while at the camp.
The British Government had refused to repatriate or help Ms Begum, and Jarrah’s death prompted widespread criticism at home.
Ms Nettleton said she was worried by reports of illness spreading through the camps.
“Zaynab is seven-and-a-half months pregnant, she’s feeling very fatigued,” Ms Nettleton said.
“Hodeh’s got a foot injury, she has no feeling in her foot so it’s very difficult for her to get around.”
A history of violence
The news is the first public confirmation of the children’s location since they were taken to Syria in early 2014 by their mother Tara Nettleton.
She was following her husband Khaled Sharrouf, who sneaked out of Australia several months earlier on his brother’s passport.
What followed for the children was five years of unthinkable violence and deprivation.
In August 2014 Khaled Sharrouf published a photo of his son Abdullah holding a severed head believed to belong to a Syrian soldier in Raqqa.
The photo catapulted the family to global infamy — even then-US secretary of state John Kerry spoke about the image.
“This image is really one of the most disturbing, stomach-turning, grotesque photographs ever displayed,” Mr Kerry said.
Since then the Sharrouf children have watched as almost everyone around them has died.
Their mother Tara died of health complications in 2015; that same year Zaynab, then aged 13, was married to Sharrouf’s best friend Mohamed Elomar.
Elomar was killed in an airstrike soon after Nettleton’s death.
The children remained in Syria with Sharrouf until August 2017, when he and his two eldest sons, twelve-year-old Abdullah and eleven-year-old Zarqawi, were killed in a US airstrike near Raqqa.
Since being orphaned the children have been cared for by a pair of IS converts: Zaynab’s Lebanese-born second husband and a Moroccan-born wife taken by Sharrouf before his death.
Not without my grandchildren
While the children endured life in IS-controlled Syria and Iraq, their grandmother Karen Nettleton has waged a one-woman campaign to rescue the children and bring them home.
She has made two trips to Turkey to organise their escape but has returned home empty-handed both times.
Now she is calling for the Australian Government to intervene.
“They’re with other Australian and foreign fighters (in the camps) and they shouldn’t be in amongst all of that,” she said.
She said the children needed assistance to get over the border into Turkey, so the necessary paperwork could be done to bring them back to Australia.
While Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said he feels compassion for Australian children stranded in Syria, he has also said there is little the Government can do to help.
However, recent events suggest some Western countries have been able to reach into Syria and save their children, when they are minded to do so.
Last week the French Government repatriated a group of five orphaned IS children from the same camp where the Sharrouf children are being held.
A report about the French rescue by the Guardian stated Kurdish forces in charge of al-Hawl released the children as soon as they were asked to by the French Government.
About nine other countries including Russia and Indonesia have repatriated hundreds of their children.
Push for Western nations to take back IS fighters
The Kurdish forces responsible for the camps have previously called on foreign nations to take responsibility for the foreigners present there.
“This issue is a huge burden on us,” Syrian-Kurdish bureaucrat Abdel Karim Omar told The Guardian in September last year.
“Women and children in particular need rehabilitation, and we are unable to secure that alone.
“Each country must be pressurised to repatriate its own citizens, and prosecute them on their own soil.”
The US State Department is calling on Canberra to deal with Australian IS converts held by the Kurds in Syria.
“Repatriating foreign terrorist fighters to their countries of origin and ensuring they are prosecuted and detained is the best solution to prevent them from returning to the battlefield,” a State Department spokesperson told the ABC in an emailed statement.
“Countries must take responsibility for their own citizens and not look to others to solve the problem for them.”
The statement also referred directly to foreign children in the camps.
“The children of ISIS-associated parents in north-eastern Syrian IDP (internally displaced person) camps are among the most vulnerable populations in Syria,” it said.
“While some governments have taken steps to repatriate these foreign terrorist fighters and their family members, many countries have declined to do so.
“States should find solutions for their citizens and not look to others to solve the problem for them.”
The rise and fall of the terrorist state
The story of the Sharrouf children in Syria is also the story of the rise and fall of the Islamic State group.
The Sharroufs arrived in Syria shortly before the jihadi group launched a massive military offensive which saw them capture swathes of Syria and Iraq.
Initially based in IS’s Syrian “capital”, Raqqa, they also spent time in Mosul and were later shuttled from town to town as IS began to suffer a series of military defeats at the hands of Iraqi and Syrian forces.
By August 2018 IS in Syria was reduced to a small group of towns and villages clustered on the banks of the Euphrates River, several kilometres from the Iraqi border in Syria’s south-eastern Deir ez-Zor province.
The Sharrouf children were living in the northernmost of those towns, Hajin.
The entire area was encircled by a US-backed Kurdish militia, the Syrian Defence Force (SDF).
Supported by US special operations forces and air strikes, the SDF began a grinding offensive that same month to destroy IS’s last Syrian stronghold.
By January this year the children had been pushed south into IS’s ever dwindling area of control, and found themselves in the tiny town of Baghouz — which would become the site of IS’s last Syrian stand.
Their presence in Baghouz was revealed in late February when fellow Australian IS recruit Zehra Duman was found by an American aid worker fleeing the besieged town.
“They’re fine and they’re alive … I don’t know if they’re going to leave [Baghouz] or not,” she told the aid worker, David Eubank, in a filmed encounter.
By early March thousands of civilians were pouring from Baghouz.
The Sharrouf children were prevented from fleeing by Zaynab’s husband, but managed to escape on foot in mid-March.
They were immediately detained by Kurdish forces, who sent them to al-Hawl.
Somewhere between 3,700 and 4,600 foreign children were taken to Syria to join IS — representing about 10 per cent of all foreigners — and a further 730 were born there to foreign parents, according to the UK-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation.
Save the Children estimates that more than 3,500 of those children now languish in the three refugee camps in Syria’s north-east.
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