EDITORIAL: Government must come clean on ISIS brides

For most who endured ISIS rule during the would-be caliphate’s hey day last decade, life was unbearable.

Survivors describe scenes of abject horror which became their everyday — routine public beheadings of civilians for alleged crimes such as “sorcery” or spying, their corpses displayed as a warning to others who dared oppose the regime.

Morality police patrolled the streets, fining or flogging those found guilty of infractions including listening to music, smoking cigarettes — or in the case of women — failing to have every inch of skin covered.

The homes of the regime perceived enemies were destroyed, their families murdered. Food, fuel and medicines were diverted away from the civilian population and towards ISIS fighters on their mission of jihad against the world.

It was a brutal existence underpinned by a rigid adherence to an extreme Islamist doctrine.

For some, it was everything they’d dreamed of.

Hundreds of Australians left the safety of their suburban lives in our secular, liberal democracy to join a religious death cult devoted to the creation of a tyrannical theocratic state.

Years on, with the caliphate they served defeated, some of them want to come home.

The Department of Home Affairs had been watching the so-called “ISIS brides” — a group of two women who were the wives of men who had joined ISIS in Syria and their four children — for several months before their arrival back in Australia on September 26.

The Government says it played no role in their repatriation. The women were Australian citizens who had managed to smuggle themselves out of Syria after ISIS’s collapse and had since been living in Beirut.

“What we have is a situation where we have a number of Australian citizens who made a terrible decision, an absolutely dreadful decision, to go off and join others who were involved in what has been described as one of the most horrific organisations that the world has seen,” Immigration Minister Tony Burke told the Parliament on Wednesday.

That comment marks the most comprehensive response from the Government on the issue to date.

There was little information coming from Home Affairs secretary Stephanie Foster, when she appeared before a Senate estimates committee.

Ms Foster stayed tightlipped when asked to reveal where the women and children were now living. Even the most basic of information, such as in what State they had settled in, was kept secret.

Mr Burke said security intelligence agencies were monitoring the group.

But how reassuring is that to the tens of thousands of Iraqis and Syrians who now call Australia home, having been forced to flee their home countries to escape persecution from ISIS?

Can every Australian be certain that these women and their children aren’t still loyal to a doctrine which is anathema to our way of life? These are the questions that Government has so far failed to answer.

Responsibility for the editorial comment is taken by Editor-in-Chief Christopher Dore.