Australia is bringing children of Isis home. Is it ready?

A camp in northern Syria in March holding women and children who fled the Islamic State's last areas of control. Photo / Ivor Prickett, The New York Times

It was the breakthrough that Karen Nettleton had pursued for five years: The orphaned Australian children and grandchildren of Khaled Sharrouf, a notorious Islamic State fighter, were removed from a Syrian camp this week and will soon return to Australia.

Ever since her daughter, Sharrouf's wife, took the eldest of the children to Isis territory in 2014, Nettleton had searched for them, eventually making three trips to Syria and pressuring the Australian government to stage a rescue.

Now that the children — there are six, from newborn to age 18 — are in Iraq and a step closer to repatriation, the government is confronting its next big challenge in the case: how to reintegrate them into Australian society.

With the fall of the so-called caliphate established in Syria and Iraq by the Islamic State group, also known as Isis, governments around the world are facing the same moral, political and security questions that have vexed Australia, as thousands of wives and children of the group's fighters languish in camps in Syria.

In the case of the Sharrouf children — part of a family that made global headlines when one of them, a boy now believed dead, was photographed holding a severed head — the Australian authorities and people close to the family have said that plans are in place to aid their reintegration and offer them mental health services if needed.

But deradicalisation experts have questioned Australia's capacity to provide sufficient help. Resocialising children exposed to the Islamic State's brutality and hatred is new terrain for many countries, but guidelines and expertise on the issue in Australia are especially limited, they said.

"The young ones have not seen normality for a good chunk of their lives; they've probably seen things that adults would fear," said Anne Aly, a member of the opposition Labor Party and a former counterterrorism professor based in Perth.

"They would need a really comprehensive support program to help them resocialise," Aly added. "We haven't really done this before."

Few details are known about the children's experience in Syria, but the eldest have consistently expressed a desire to return to Australia, and their grandmother, Nettleton, says they show no signs of having been radicalised.

"My children are just normal kids," Nettleton said in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year. "When we get back to Australia," she added, "I want to give them a normal as life as possible."

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, addressing his government's decision to remove the children from the Syrian camp, said that while their parents had committed "a despicable act" by taking them to a war zone, the "children should not be punished for the crimes of their parents."

Those close to the family, including their lawyer, Robert Van Aalst, and Dr. Jamal Rifi, a Sydney physician who has worked to de-radicalise Islamic youths in Australia, said government officials had promised to help the children reintegrate. In addition, private donors have offered to sponsor mental health treatment, Van Aalst said. But, he added, "the government has no plans set in stone."

Rifi said that "we have gone a long way in developing a plan that meets the aspirations of the community and ensures the safety and security of the rest of Australians," adding that collaboration between the government and the Australian Islamic community would be crucial.

Mental health and deradicalisation experts agreed that community and family support — in particular, the stability provided by the children's grandmother — were the most important factors in their resocialisation. But some warned that the Islamic State's sophisticated indoctrination techniques needed to be countered by equally sophisticated reintegration programs.

The militant group brainwashed and brutalised children by schooling them to perceive Western values as evil, engaging them in combat training and, in some cases, forcing them to carry weapons and commit acts of violence, said Daniel Koehler, the director of the German Institute on Radicalisation and De-radicalisation Studies in Stuttgart.

"What they wanted to do was really raise the next generation of Isis fighters," said Koehler, who has worked with both Islamist and far-right extremists in Europe and the United States. "They've been socialised with a completely different understanding of right and wrong, and good and evil," he added. That has often made child returnees "the most difficult" cases to manage, he said.

Some research into deradicalisation has suggested that young children either born or brought into Isis territory should be primarily viewed as victims, while a more complex approach might be required for children who were old enough to fully understand or engage with the militants' ideology.

In parts of Europe, specialized programs and handbooks have been developed to help experts navigate this new landscape. In Australia, however, where interventions have largely been prison-based, focused on adults, or centred on weeding out online terrorist propaganda, such assistance is lacking, Koehler and other experts said.

"We don't have any programs," said Ali Kadri, the spokesman for the Islamic Council of Queensland, who said he helped reintegrate two women who were deported back to Australia after attempting to join Isis in 2015.

The Australian minister for home affairs did not respond to requests for comment, and deradicalisation and trauma programs contacted by The New York Times said that working with children in this situation was not their area of expertise.

Some members of the Islamic community and mental health professionals said it would be wrong to assume that the children were radicalised or posed a threat. Australia, they noted, has extensive experience resettling individuals from war-torn countries.

And the Sharrouf children, and other young returnees from Isis territory — three children of the Islamic State fighter Yasin Rizvic were removed from the Syrian camp with the Sharroufs on Sunday — should not be treated as an exception, they said.

"We as a nation have accepted a lot of refugees that have come from equally traumatic backgrounds," said Fiona Jayne Charlson, a research fellow in global mental health at the University of Queensland, whose recent study in The Lancet, a medical journal, quantified the prevalence of mental health conditions among people living in conflict zones.

For decades, thousands of people who have experienced severe violence and trauma have been successfully cared for and reintegrated into Australian society, Charlson added. "I wouldn't consider this any different," she said.

Written by: Livia Albeck-Ripka

Photographs by: Ivor Prickett

© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES