Court cases in Europe linked to Australian men and foreign women who have returned from the Islamic State-held territory in Syria remind us just how intertwined the global jihadist network became and how daunting it is proving for children born out of mixed jihadist marriages.
The first Australian connection was revealed during a court case in Frederiksberg involving a Danish Muslim in her mid-20s. She travelled to Syria in August 2014 and escaped in May 2017.
She was then introduced to an Australian man whom she married. He was described in the court documents as a physiotherapist who was originally from Sri Lanka. That description fits Mohomed Unais Mohamed Ameen who left Australia for Syria in 2014. The Danish woman had two children with him who are now six and seven.
Ameen appeared in a propaganda video in 2015 along with another Australian jihadist doctor, Tareq Kamleh, who is presumed dead and had allegedly taken a Danish woman as one of his wives, but it isn’t known whether any children came from their union. Nothing has been heard of Ameen since.
Another court case, in Gothenburg, Sweden in March, saw a Swedish woman Fatin al-Mandlawi sentenced to three months in jail after being found guilty of two counts of war crimes for posting pictures of mutilated Syrian soldiers taken while she was in Syria. Mandlawi had followed her brother to Syria at the end of 2012 to join jihadist groups, while her sister followed a couple of years later. Once in Syria, al-Mandlawi married the British jihadi Ibrahim Almazwagi with whom she had a child before he was killed that same year. In October 2017, by this time back in Sweden, she gave birth to a second child whose father was allegedly an Australian jihadi.
There are of course other European-Australian jihadist marriages that we know about and likely others that we don’t.
The Melbourne-born alleged terrorist Neil Prakash claimed to Turkish authorities after his capture that he had fathered two children with a Dutch woman while with the Islamic State in Syria. Another Melburnian, Deniz Hassan, fathered three children (one of whom subsequently died) with the Danish-Iranian woman Sara Nobakhti-Afshar. Hassan remains detained in Syria, while Nobakhti-Afshar remains in the al-Roj camp in Syria with her two remaining children. Because her Danish citizenship was revoked she was not eligible for repatriation, however in March this year the Danish supreme court overturned the decision and she will now likely be returned to Denmark and charged.
The potential complexities of the interwoven family links created as a result of relationships formed, and children born, while people were in the so-called caliphate present enduring problems for governments.
Children born to an Australian parent are, on the face of it, eligible for Australian citizenship as long as the child’s parentage can be proven and one parent was an Australian citizen at the time the child was born.
We know that Neil Prakash’s citizenship was revoked, although whether it was before or after his children were born isn’t clear. There are certainly likely to be more who are in this category although, given a recent high court case that ruled two citizenship cessations invalid, this point may now be moot.
Regardless, many if not all of those children with a European parent may never exercise their right to Australian citizenship. With citizenship of a European country, no enduring links to Australia and parents unlikely to ever be granted a visa to travel to this country because of their terrorism convictions, their desire to obtain an Australian passport may be limited.
Stateless children of Australian Jihadists, Syrian women
While the children born to Australian fathers and European mothers are likely to benefit from the largesse bestowed by their western home countries, those born to Syrian women are unlikely to be welcomed within broader Syrian society.
Syrian citizenship normally passes through the paternal line. Children born to Syrian mothers and foreign fighter fathers in IS-held territory may never have been registered at birth, will find it difficult to access Syrian state resources and are unlikely to ever gain Syrian citizenship.
They will effectively be stateless.
Some local workarounds are allegedly being put in place however they are unlikely to allow these children to have a normal life in their country of birth. This raises a difficult question for the Australian government.
What moral responsibility does it have to children born to Australian foreign fighters and Syrian mothers, knowing that those children will probably remain stateless and face discrimination if not persecution in their country of birth. Should they passively wait to see if their families seek to exercise their right to Australian citizenship and then decide how to give them a future commensurate with their nationality? Or should they actively seek to contact these families (difficult as this may be) and alleviate the children’s situation before it impacts any further on their future.
Advocacy groups such as Save the Children have been vocal in calling for the repatriation of children born to Australian mothers, but silent on what to do with children born to Australian fathers.
Dealing with the children that Australian foreign fighters left behind will not be easy, nor will it win the government any votes. But if the Australian government believes it has a duty to repatriate children born in Syria to Australian mothers then it equally has a right to at least offer that option to the children born in Syria to Australian fathers.
Rodger Shanahan is a Middle East analyst and former army officer
