Australian women and children leave Syrian camp for Damascus

The last remaining Australian women and children left stranded in the al-Roj detention camp have reportedly left north-east Syria for Damascus, ahead of an expected return to Australia.

Vision obtained by an ABC news crew in Syria showed a minivan leaving the camp, which it reported was transporting all the remaining seven women and 14 children from the camp, though this has not been officially confirmed.

The group, which was travelling in convoy with a Syrian government escort, is expected to book flights home to Australia in the coming days.

All are Australian citizens and have travel documents. One woman is subject to a temporary exclusion order imposed to prevent her re-entry to Australia.

The Australian government did not confirm reports of the group’s expected departure from Syria. It is understood no plane tickets have yet been booked. Return to Australia could take a number of days.

Tanya Plibersek said the second group would face repercussions on their return.

“They’ll face the same consequences as the first group,” the federal minister told the ABC on Friday.

The Australians are the wives, widows and children of jailed or dead Islamic State fighters, and most have been held at the camp for more than six years. Some of the women could face terror-related charges on landing in Australia.

But many of the women have said they were coerced or tricked into entering Syria, or visited neighbouring countries for humanitarian reasons before being trafficked into IS territory. Some of the children were born in the camp and have never been outside it.

This is the fifth group of Australians to have left Syrian detention camps since 2019. The Morrison and Albanese governments each conducted one government-controlled repatriation, in 2019 and 2022.

Late last year, a group of women escaped the nearby al-Hawl camp, making their way to Beirut and home to Australia. Last month, four women and nine children travelled home to Australia from Damascus.

Three of the women were arrested and charged by the Australian federal police upon arrival in Melbourne and Sydney.

Those women remain in custody. Two, Kawsar Ahmad and her daughter Zeinab Ahmad, have been charged with slavery offences, while the other – Janai Safar – faces charges of joining a terrorist organisation and travelling to a proscribed terrorist area.

The squalid and dangerous al-Roj camp, controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) but described by the US as an “incubator for radicalisation”, is being steadily shuttered, ahead of an expected handover to the Syrian government.

The Albanese government has maintained it is doing nothing to assist the Australians’ return to their home country, and warned anyone who had committed an offence would be prosecuted to the “full extent of the law” on return to Australia.

The health minister, Mark Butler, told morning television on Friday those returning had the legal right, “as Australian citizens, to make their own way back to the Australian border”.

“But if they’ve committed any offence, they’ll be met at that border, as we saw a few weeks ago, with police and charged potentially with very serious offences.”

The US government, which funds the camp’s operation, has ratcheted up pressure on Australia, insisting countries take back their citizens and making repeated offers to assist with repatriations.

With reporting by Australian Associated Press