The Aussie men and women who joined the jihad

About 110 Australians answered the siren call of Islamic State and slipped out of the country to fight for its expanding caliphate.

Twelve years on from Abu Bakr al-Baghdad’s declaration of the jihadist state on 2014, the vast majority are mere dust in the hellscapes of Syria and Iraq — killed during the five years of ceaseless combat.

They include Perth-born pediatric doctor Tareq Kamleh, who was reportedly slain in 2018 during the siege of Raqqa, where he tended to wounded ISIS fighters at the Syrian city’s besieged hospital.

Kamleh worked at Princess Margaret Hospital and the Mount Hospital before turning his back on his sedate and affluent home State in April 2015 to join the brutal Islamic insurgency sweeping through the Middle East.

Members of his Thornlie mosque had seen him just weeks before his departure and claimed he told people he was going to work with Doctors Without Borders.

Nicknamed Dr Jihad, he came to the attention of authorities here when he appeared in an ISIS recruitment video encouraging other Western medical professionals to join him there.

With Islamic State forces in retreat a couple of years later, he appeared in a second propaganda video, sitting in a tunnel or cave and a holding a rifle, complaining the Muslim world had abandoned it.

“We are under continuous bombing here and we are fighting hard to hold the lands of Islam . . . what more will it take for it to be (a) justified cause for you to come here to fight for Allah’s sake?” he pleaded.

The most enduring and horrific images of the conflict back in Australia were provided by Khaled Sharrouf and Mohamed Elomar, who quickly became the nation’s most notorious and hated terrorists.

Sharrouf and Elomar, both from Sydney, travelled to Syria and then Iraq in 2013, with Sharrouf using his brother’s passport to leave the country.

The pair revelled in the extreme violence, cruelty and barbarism that Islamic State used to instil fear in the hearts of the occupants of the lands it tore through, which in late 2014 stretched from Aleppo in north-western Syria to Diyala in north-eastern Iraq, more than 100,000sqkm

Sickening photos showed Sharrouf and Elomar holding up the severed heads of pro-Syrian government fighters. One of the infamous images showed Sharrouf’s seven-year-old son holding up a head.

Father-of-five Sharouf was no stranger to authorities before leaving the country. After being expelled from school, he graduated from petty crime to substance abuse to terrorism while in NSW.

In 2005, he was arrested with several others in what was then the largest anti-terror raid in Australian history, code named Operation Pendennis. He was sentenced to four years in prison.

When in Syria, one of Sharrouf’s young daughters — then 14 — had reportedly married his mate Elomar, a former professional boxer and a nephew of another convicted Pendennis plotter.

From Syria, Elomar, mocked and taunted ASIO on social media.

“Don’t worry ASIO there is plenty of work for you guys coming up,” he threatened in one post.

The pair’s atrocities were short-lived. Both met violent deaths in Mosul in 2015.

Another Australian to become radicalised and jumped on the ISIS death wagon was red-haired Abdullah Elmir, the so-called “Ginger Jihadi”, who was a former butcher’s apprentice from Bankstown in Sydney’s south-west.

Elmir had tried to recruit other teenagers before making the trip to Syria. He told his family he was “going fishing”.

He made international headlines soon afterwards when he appeared in an IS propaganda video holding an AK-47 rifle, threatening then Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and any nation that stood in the way of ISIS. He was just 18 when he was killed in an air strike.

Another notorious homegrown Islamic State terrorist survived and is currently back in Australia awaiting trial.

Neil Christopher Prakash was considered Australia’s most prominent recruiter for the organisation.

In 2013 he travelled to Syria, from where he also worked as propagandist as part of a group known to the FBI as “The Legion”, whilst urging and organising Australians to carry out domestic attacks.

Three years later, with Islamic State in retreat, he survived an airstrike on Mosul in Iraq and fled across the border to Turkey where he captured and sentenced to seven years imprisonment.

The Australian Government described him as “the principal Australian reaching back from the Middle East into terrorist networks in both Melbourne and Sydney.”

Melbourne-born Prakash, was deported back to Australia in 2022 and is facing six terrorism charges, including engaging in hostile activity in a foreign state, being a member of a terrorist organisation, and entering or remaining in a declared area.

Other battle-hardened ISIS recruits from Australia were captured alive.

When the terror organisation was finally defeated in 2019, it was reported that dozens of Australians were either in refugee camps or in detention. These were mostly wives and children of fighters.

Two men, former Melbourne student Mahir Absar Alam and ex-Sydney tradie ­Mohammed Noor Masri, were interviewed by by media outlets after being captured by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

ASIO has warned that battle-hardened foreign fighters from the conflict remain a threat to the nation.

As recently as last October, a Brisbane man was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for preparing to travel into Syria to engage in hostile activities.

An investigation by the Queensland Joint Counter Terrorism Team, involving the AFP, Queensland Police Services and ASIO, found that between July, 2016, and February, 2017, the man undertook a range of activities as part of planning to enter Syria and help fight to overthrow the government led by Bashar al-Assad.