Australian police charge Melbourne woman accused of traveling to Syria to join Islamic State group

An Australian woman was charged Thursday with traveling to Syria and joining the Islamic State group, police said.

The 34-year-old woman was arrested at her Melbourne home eight months after she returned to Australia via Lebanon with another woman, Australia Federal Police Deputy Commissioner Hilda Sirec said.

The arrest came two days after seven women and 12 children linked to IS returned to Australia from a Syrian refugee camp against the wishes of the Australian government.

Three weeks ago, four women and nine children in similar circumstances returned from the same Roj camp for displaced people, which is located near the area where the frontiers of Syria, Turkey and Iraq converge.

Three of the four women were charged on arrival with slavery and terrorism offenses and remain in custody.

All the women who returned from Syria this month remained under police investigation. Another woman, who accompanied the woman charged Thursday to Australia from Lebanon, also was under investigation, Sirec said.

A period of time passing without charges does indicate investigations have ceased, Sirec noted.

The woman most recently arrested in Melbourne was expected to appear Thursday in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on a charge of entering and remaining in a declared conflict zone. She also has been charged with joining a terrorist organization, IS. Each charge carries a potential maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

Police allege she traveled to Syria between 2013 and 2014 to join IS. She was captured by Kurdish forces in March 2019 after IS fighters were defeated and placed in al-Hol camp for displaced people.

She returned to Australia on Sept. 26, police allege.

Janai Safar, 32, of Sydney was charged with similar offenses when she arrived in Australia with her 9-year-old son on May 7. She must spend at least two months in a Sydney prison after a magistrate refused her application to be released on bail.

Police allege she followed her IS-fighter partner to Syria in 2015 and had a child there. The partner reportedly died in 2017. Australia made it illegal for its citizens to travel to the former Syrian IS stronghold of Raqqa without a legitimate reason from 2014 to 2017.

Kawsar Ahmed, also known as Kawsar Abbas, and her daughter Zeinab Ahmed, 31, were charged in a Melbourne court on May 8 in relation to allegations that their family bought a female Yazidi slave for $10,000 in Syria, police said.

The daughter is scheduled to apply for bail next week and the mother has a bail hearing scheduled for June 16.

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