Four Australian women and nine children linked to ISIS have left Syria's Al Roj camp and are set to arrive in Australia where they could face arrest and charges.
“Some individuals” will be charged, Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett told reporters, without specifying which ones, and indicating that the rest are still under investigation.
The women may face arrest upon their return, while the children will be required to follow an anti-extremism programme and receive psychological support.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke told reporters that “the government is not assisting and will not assist these individuals”. He added that the “government's complete lack of support for these individuals is a direct reflection of the decisions that they made”.
Police said they are ready to make arrests when the planes from Qatar land in Canberra and Sydney on Thursday.
“For more than a decade, investigators, when possible, have been collecting evidence and information in Syria at a time when Syria was a war zone with no functioning government,” Ms Barrett said.
“That evidence and information were to determine whether Australians who travelled to Syria may have committed Commonwealth offences, including terrorism offences such as entering or remaining in declared areas and crimes against humanity offences, such as engaging in slave trading,” she said.
Australian authorities have been preparing for such returns. Mr Burke said law enforcement and intelligence agencies have maintained contingency plans since 2014 to manage individuals linked to extremist groups.
Thirty-four Australian nationals have been stuck in the Al Roj camp since the fall of ISIS. Most of these women travelled to Syria between 2012 and 2016 to reunite with their fighter husbands.
When the caliphate fell in 2019, most of the foreign fighters and their wives and children were held in camps guarded by Kurdish fighters inside Syrian Kurdistan.
At the end of January 2026, the Syrian government announced that the Al Roj and Al Hol camps would be closed, 10 days after taking control of them. This left hundreds of foreign detainees stranded with their government refusing to repatriate them.
By February 2026, fewer than 1,000 families remained in the camps in north-eastern Syria.
