Last Australian woman held in ISIS camp set to return from Syria with her daughter

The Australian government has approved the return of the last Australian woman held in a camp housing families of ISIS militants in north-east Syria, along with her nine-year-old daughter, after years spent in Roj Camp.

Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said on Wednesday that the 29-year-old woman had been granted permission to return to Australia following the expiration of a Temporary Exclusion Order that had barred her from re-entering the country.

The woman and her daughter had been due to return to Australia in February as part of a group of Australian women and children held in Roj Camp, but their departure was prevented by the Temporary Exclusion Order. Australia introduced such orders in 2019 to prevent ISIS-linked individuals from returning from the Middle East for periods of up to two years. The woman is believed to be the only known case on which the measure was applied.

Burke said the government no longer had legal grounds to prevent the woman's return after her lawyers formally applied for an entry permit, stressing that police and security agencies would impose strict conditions on her upon arrival.

The Australian minister said the level of security oversight and monitoring imposed on the woman would be extremely high, adding that the government had implemented the maximum precautionary measures permitted under Australian law.

The Australian Federal Police has been conducting investigations since 2015 into Australian citizens who travelled to territories where ISIS declared its so-called "caliphate" across large parts of Iraq and Syria.

It is worth mentioning that the woman left Sydney for Syria in 2015 when she was 18 years old.