MELBOURNE, Feb 18: Australia has banned one of its citizens—flagged by security agencies as a high risk—from returning home from Syria’s Roj detention camp, where 34 women and children with alleged Islamic State ties were briefly freed before being sent back due to paperwork snags.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke issued a temporary exclusion order on the individual, good for up to two years, after Syrian authorities halted their Damascus flight Monday. “Security advice met the legal threshold for this one, but not the others yet,” Burke said, noting past government repatriations of Aussies from the camps.
PM Anthony Albanese doubled down: no help for those who joined IS’s “brutal ideology.” “Kids are unfortunate victims of their parents’ choices—we’re not assisting this group,” he told reporters, as the Roj camp holds thousands of foreign IS relatives post-2019.
