Australian leader rules out helping ISIS children

CAIRO - 3 April 2019: Australia’s prime minister said on Monday he won’t put officials in danger by retrieving three orphaned Australian children of a convicted terrorist who have reportedly been found in a Syrian refugee camp.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s response to the plight of former ISIS militant Khaled Sharrouf’s children is the same as his government’s reaction to other Australians who have joined the fight with extremist groups in Syria and want to come home.

“I’m not going to put one Australian life at risk to try and extract people from these dangerous situations,” Morrison told reporters.

But security experts say that Australians can and should be safely brought home from Syrian refugee camps since the defeat of ISIS forces.

Only three of Sharrouf’s five children survived the conflict, Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported. They are 17-year-old Zaynab, Hoda, 16, and Humzeh, 8. The siblings fled the siege of Baghouz village in mid-March. Zaynab is pregnant and has her two children with her, Ayesha, 3, and Fatima, 2.

Their grandmother, Karen Nettleton, said she is particularly concerned for Zaynab, who is about to give birth in the squalid Al-Hol camp. “Zaynab is seven-and-a half months pregnant; she’s feeling very fatigued,” Nettleton told ABC.

“Take care of my children, because even if I die, they are the seeds of the Caliphate.” This is what a Jihadist woman told the head nurse of a Kurdish hospital in northeastern Syria, pointing to the cribs of the more than 75 children of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters who are fighting for their lives, El Pais reported.

These children of African, Asian and European descent were born in Baghouz, in eastern Syria, a former ISIS stronghold on the border with Iraq, and evacuated from ISIS camps in the Syrian desert. Some of them are orphans, but others are visited by their mothers who remain captive in nearby camps.