The AFP have confirmed three women have now been arrested after the so-called ISIS brides and their families touched down in Sydney and Melbourne earlier tonight.
ISIS bride taken straight to police station after touching down in Sydney
ISIS bride taken straight to police station after touching down in Sydney
First vision of the so-called ISIS bride Janai Safar in Australia as she arrives at Mascot…
ISIS bride Janai Safar, 32, has been taken into custody at Sydney airport and driven through a media scrum on her way to the Mascot police station.
The former nursing student, who once told the media she never wanted to return to Australia, is expected to be charged with offences related to entering or remaining in a declared terrorist area.
The offences can carry a ten-year jail sentence. She has a nine-year-old son born after her relationship with an ISIS fighter.
The Australian Federal Police have confirmed three women have now been arrested by Joint Counter Terrorism Teams (JCTT) under Operation Kurrajong.
The other two women, aged 53 and 31, were arrested on arrival into Melbourne International Airport today.
“It was my decision to come here to go away from where women are naked on the street. I don’t want my son to be raised around that,” Ms Safar said in 2019.
“I didn’t train or kill anyone. I just sat at home, and they will put me in jail, they will take my child off me. Why? I’m a Muslim.
“I saw everything (the coalition forces did), and no one gets punished for that. They say I’m not supposed to be in Syria, but they (the Australians) come to Syria with planes.”
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Other Australian ISIS brides and their families landed in Melbourne tonight, including grandmother Kawsar Abbas, 53.
One of her two adult daughter is understood to be the other woman arrested by the AFP.
A massive group of supporters have gathered at Melbourne airport to escort the family of three mothers and eight children through the throng of reporters.
Two of the women are expected to be arrested after they clear customs. The Australian Federal Police are expected to hold a media conference later tonight.
The arrest of the women is expected to be filmed by the AFP and released to the media later tonight, which is standard practice.
Speaking on ABC TV, Education Minister Jason Clare said the women would face the full force of the law on arrival in Australia.
“When the Liberal Party let 40 foreign fighters into the country, they took the steps that they needed to take to keep Australians safe.
“And I trust, in the words of the AFP Commissioner yesterday, when she said that some of these women will be arrested when they arrive and others will be subject to further investigation.”
“Well, kids don’t get to choose who their parents are, and these children have seen sorts of things that no child should ever be exposed to, and it’s going to take time for these children to reintegrate into Australian society,’’ he said.
“These are the sort of programs that the Australian Federal Police run, and I would expect that the Federal Police would want to run countering violent extremism programs with all of the children that return.”
Speaking on Sky News, opposition home affairs spokesman Jonno Duniam said the Albanese Government never should have let the women and children back into Australia.
“They were born into or raised amongst fundamentalist Islamist extremists, so something’s going to have rubbed off on these kids, and therefore they are a risk to our society,” he said.
‘I’m very worried about what we are bringing back into this country. They’re here. They’re our problem as a country, we’re going to have to pay for them and we’re going to have to be worried.”
‘Soldier of Allah’: ISIS bride’s gushing posts
The mother of two Australian ISIS brides arriving back in Melbourne tonight previously described her son as a “soldier of Allah” in social media posts.
Kawsar Abbas and her two adult daughters Zahra and Zeinab are set to touch down in Victoria this afternoon with a large group of children.
Some of these children were born in the Middle East after the women married Islamic State fighters and have spent years in Syrian refugee camps.
AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett said police would be waiting to arrest and charge some of the members when they arrived in Australia on the Qatar Airways flight from Doha.
“Some individuals will be arrested and charged. Some will face continued investigations when they arrive in Australia,” she said today.
Abbas’s husband, Mohammed Ahmad, is accused of keeping two women as Yazidi slaves. He denied those allegations from behind bars in a Syrian prison in 2023.
In 2014, the same year the family travelled to the region for their son Omar’s wedding, Abbas posted the following message on Facebook.
“I got a beautiful message this morning from someone I don’t know, a revert who told me Omar is a true soldier of Allah,’’ she said.
“Yes dear sis, a soldier who won’t walk away from the cry of the orphans. May Allah protect you both and unite us soon.”
Their father Mohammad Ahmad has always insisted he was doing charity work in the region before his two sons Omar and Ahmad joined him overseas. They both died in the conflict.
However Mohammad Ahmad, who remains in a Syrian jail, has been accused of keeping a Yazidi woman named Sarab as a slave. Sarab says she was sent to the family when she was 13.
She knew the Australian man as Abu Omar, a name that the grandmother also uses for her husband on social media.
“It was very unpleasant. I was their slave and they could do whatever they wanted to me,’’ Sarab told the ABC.
“My life was controlled by them. It felt like my existence did not matter.”
After initially telling the ABC in 2019 that his son had a slave but she was treated as “a daughter” Mohammed Ahmad now says he never even saw his son’s Yazidi slave.
“That’s the accusation, it’s not true,” the man told the ABC in 2023.
