A little over a year ago, the District Court in Stockholm found 52-year-old Lina Ishaq guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity and gross war crimes in Syria as a member of the Islamic State. She was previously convicted of a gross violation of international law and a gross war crime for bringing her 12-year-old son to Syria and failing to protect him from becoming a child soldier.

Sweden is not the only country to prosecute so-called Isis brides for crimes against humanity. Germany has prosecuted sixteen women for membership in a terrorist organisation, sexual violence and aiding a genocide. France also announced last year that it would prosecute the former wife of an emir of Islamic State for genocide.

What about the Australian brides of Isis? Have they committed war crimes? Does anyone know?

Over 4,000 Yazidis live in Australia. They have been arriving since 2017, fleeing the genocide perpetrated by the Islamic State from 2014 to 2017, which included mass killings, subjecting thousands of Yazidi women and girls to sexual slavery and trafficking and forced conversions.

Mayors in Western Sydney were outraged in late 2022 when the Albanese government repatriated four Isis brides and thirteen children in their communities, accusing the government of treating them as a ‘dumping’ ground.

The mayor of Fairfield pointed out that the victims of Isis lived in these communities and were terrified of the risks they posed. The following year, that same mayor revealed that he had received death threats from Islamic State sympathisers with one reading ‘…you will die soon what you have done to the Islamic fighter bride are not forgivable prepare your coffine (sic)’.

Several hundred Australians are estimated to have travelled to Syria or Iraq to join Islamic State. One of them was Kirsty Rosse-Emile, who had a message for the Australian government when she was interviewed by the ABC a year ago: ‘Hello, I’m here. Can you just come and get me finally and my children and all the other Australians here? We’re ready to start our lives afresh.’ Charming.

Ms Rosse-Emile refused to say why she had gone to live in the Islamic State caliphate in Syria because, she said, her lawyer had advised her that ‘it might make problems for me’.  Her father was not so bashful telling a journalist that his daughter had deliberately gone to live under the caliphate and reports that she had been ‘tricked’ into joining Islamic State were not true. Her social media seems to back that up. In 2012, it included an image of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Islamic State founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi under the headline ‘Lions of Islam’.

In 2022, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had no qualms about allowing Isis brides and their children to return to Australia, simply saying, ‘These are Australian citizens, and they are entitled to be here.’

The community backlash seemed to change that, and he and his Minister for Home Affairs, Tony Burke, became extremely secretive about further repatriations. Burke took the extraordinary step of asking his note-taker to step out of Burke’s office so that the Minister could have a ‘private discussion’ about the return of more of the Isis brides. It is as if the Australian people have no right to know what the Minister was planning to foist on them.

After furious denials of government involvement, late in 2025, two Australian women and their four children returned to Australia, seemingly after smuggling themselves out of a Syrian detention camp into Beirut.

Now, eleven Isis brides and 23  children – three of them teenagers – are trying to return to Australia. Albanese has said that ‘these people went overseas supporting Islamic State and went there to provide support for people who basically want a caliphate.’ As a result, he says, ‘We have a very firm view that we won’t be providing assistance or repatriation’, adding that ‘My mother would have said, “If you make your bed, you lie in it”.’

Quizzed about how the brides and their offspring got passports without attending an embassy if the government wasn’t assisting, he explained that ‘people are having an implementation of Australian law is what is happening.’

The government is, he assures us, acting in line with ‘national security advice’ as opposed to ignoring it, one assumes, as he did before the Bondi massacre. He has also said, ‘We want to make it clear, as we have to the people involved, if there are any breaches of the law, they will face the full force of the Australian law.’

Yet if, as the Prime Minister says, these women went to Syria to support Islamic State, that is prima facie a breach of the law. A key way in which women were expected to support Islamic State was by providing domestic support for their husbands, Islamic State fighters, and by raising the next generation of jihadists.

So, is the government investigating what these women did within the Islamic State? Who knows? Sharri Markson reported on Sky News this week that Australian authorities hadn’t been able to interview the Isis brides in almost three years and ‘police and security agencies’ are ‘highly concerned’ about the risk that three of the adults in the group pose.

We’ve heard a lot about genocide over the last six weeks, as the pro-Palestinian rent-a-mob have been falsely accusing Israeli President Isaac Herzog of inciting genocide in a press conference when he explicitly said, ‘There is no excuse to murder innocent civilians in any way, in any context and believe me, Israel will operate and always operates according to the international rules, and we’ll do the same in this battle, too.’

Yet on the actual Yazidi genocide in Syria and the return of women who supported that regime, the pro-Palestinians have been uncharacteristically quiet. Indeed, last weekend, led by failed Greens candidates and sporting greasy rainbow-coloured locks, they were marching through Sydney University chanting ‘Queers, Queers, Queers for Gaza, Globalise the Intifada.’

Perhaps they really don’t know that Hamas rules Gaza under Sharia law, that homosexuality is illegal, and gays are tortured to death.

If the globalised intifada succeeds, that will be their fate here. As George Orwell observed, ‘Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals can believe them’.