This week, we learned that the government has spent $318 million investigating war crimes allegedly committed by the approximately 230 Australians who travelled to Iraq or Syria to join the Islamic State or other bloodcurdling terrorist groups.

Oops, my bad. Australia has a specialised federally funded office that investigates war crimes committed by Australians abroad. But only if those Australians are members of the Australian Defence Forces.

The government spent over $318 million over the last decade investigating war crimes allegedly committed by 19 veterans at a cost of approximately $17 million per soldier. So far, only two veterans have been charged: Oliver Jordan Schulz, charged with one war crime, scheduled for 2027 and Ben Roberts-Smith who is facing five counts of the war crime of murder. The other 17 servicemen have been trapped in a legal no-man’s land, awaiting a multi-million-dollar knock on the door.

Everyone else gets a free pass. That includes the 100 Australians who joined Islamic State and are still believed to be alive and abroad. And those who have ventured home.

In 2018, the Australian parliament passed a motion recognising the Isis-perpetrated genocide of the Yazidi community of northern Iraq calling for the investigation and prosecution of individuals who committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

Yet, the Australian government has allocated precisely no money for a federally funded office to investigate the war crimes of Australians who are not soldiers, for example, of its own jolly jihadists who camped by Syrian and Iraqi billabongs during the reign of terror of the Islamic State.

As it happens, the male relatives of four Australian Isis ‘brides’ and their nine children waiting in Damascus to return to Australia after seven years in an internment camp have been accused of enslaving Yazidi girls while the family lived in the Islamic State caliphate in Syria.

Yet despite Prime Minister Albanese repeatedly saying that Isis supporters who return to Australia will face the ‘full force of the law’, legal experts say that the women are unlikely to face charges in relation to those alleged crimes. That’s apparently because the question of the women’s complicity in any alleged enslavement and repeated rape of Yazidi women and girls would only arise if the women were in control of an enslaved Yazidi.

‘If the Australian women were just members of the household but had no control over the Yazidi women (and girls), it is difficult, in terms of first principles, to see how they would bear criminal responsibility under an international legal or Australian legal framework,’ says ANU international law professor Don Rothwell.

That’s seems like an odd assumption to make and runs counter to experience in Germany where the attempted genocide of the Yazidi seems to be taken a lot more seriously than in Australia.

In Germany, in 2023, a woman who joined Islamic State was jailed for nine years for crimes against humanity, including keeping a Yazidi woman as a slave, and membership of a foreign terrorist organisation. The court in Koblenz found that Nadine K., a 37-year-old German woman, had abused the young Yazidi woman, aged in her 20s, for three years while she and her husband lived in the Islamic State caliphate in Iraq and Syria. The court also found that Nadine encouraged her husband to rape and beat the woman. In March 2019, Nadine K. and her family were captured by Kurdish forces, and she was repatriated to Germany, where she was arrested in 2022. During the trial, Ms K. apparently denied coercing the Yazidi woman but said she should have done more for her.

This successful prosecution isn’t an accident. Germany has built a dedicated, institutionalised system for prosecuting international crimes. It uses the universal jurisdiction under the Code of Crimes against International Law to prosecute Isis crimes even if they occurred overseas and involved non-German victims. It has specialised war-crimes units with federal prosecutors, dedicated staff and police war-crimes investigators. It runs large, ongoing evidence-gathering investigations about conflicts like Syria and Iraq, even without a specific suspect. In short, it treats Isis crimes not just as terrorism, but as war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity, requiring specialised investigators, prosecutors and long-term funding streams.

That contrasts starkly with Australia where allegations against Australians who joined the Isis jihad in Syria and Iraq have been handled, if they are handled at all, in relation to terrorism offences under the Criminal Code such as joining a terrorist organisation, entering a declared terrorist area or providing support to a terrorist group. These investigations are handled by the Australian Federal Police and intelligence agencies such as Asio. This is the case, even when the alleged conduct falls within the ambit of war crimes, such as enslavement.

Thus, Mariam Raad was charged after returning from Syria with entering or remaining in an Isis-controlled ‘declared area’. The offence carries a penalty of up to ten years’ imprisonment, but Raad pleaded guilty, received no conviction and was let off with a 25-month good-behaviour bond.

One of the few Australians who pledged an allegiance to Islamic State and to send fighters to Syria who received a serious sentence of 15 years had sought the assistance of Islamic State in sending an operative to teach his group how to make improvised explosive devices (IEDs). They planned to detonate the IEDs at the NSW Supreme Court targeting Australian Federal Police officers or at the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

It’s something that Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore should ponder. Moore has allowed a protest group called Stop the War on Palestine to use the council’s East Sydney Community and Arts Centre in Darlinghurst to hold an event billed as ‘Why It’s Right to Say Globalise the Intifada’.

Normally, progressives loathe globalisation, but globalising terrorism is something they are happy to support, it seems. Moore and her mates should be worried about the return of Islamic State supporters. But they shouldn’t imagine they are safe from the intifada because they are not Zionists. After all, if you’re bringing the intifada to Gadigal, it’s not because it’s been colonised by Jews but by the likes of Moore and, indeed, anyone who calls Australia (rather than Gadigal or Naarm) home.