‘ISIS brides’ may pose a security threat
AUSTRALIAN brides of ISIS fighters could pose ongoing security threats and must be carefully vetted, an international war crimes investigator has warned.
Bill Wiley, the head of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), said the ISIS women played various roles within the terrorist group and, in some cases, may have had a clear criminal intent.
“It’s a mistake to think that the women, the adult females with Islamic State, were only there as wives or with no authority outside the household,” Mr Wiley said.
“You can’t make any assumptions about the women, just like the men. They need to be vetted with an eye to two things: Was she simply a housewife or indeed was she part of the ISIS security structures? And it’s possible they were involved in both.
Mr Wiley is speaking out after visiting Australia and meeting with law enforcement and government officials over the work of the CIJA, as dozens of Australian women and children trapped in a camp for families of ISIS fighters in north-eastern Syria have been pleading with the Australian government to rescue them.
It is understood there are about 66 Australians — 21 women and 45 children — held in the al-Hawl camp, which in total contains about 70,000 stranded family members of ISIS fighters.
CIJA is the first and only private body that focuses solely on investigating and collecting evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide with the aim of holding perpetrators to account for their crimes.
Mr Wiley said the ISIS regime was extremely bureaucratic and kept extensive records, so it was likely that more information would come to light about the role of the ISIS brides, and added that whatever the reason the women were in Syria and Iraq
— for marriage or otherwise — authorities likely tracked their presence.
“The salaries of fighters would vary according to whether they had a spouse, how many spouses they had, how many children they had and so forth,” he said. “If you ask about Australian females … or indeed any other nationality, the odds are very high that their names are going to turn up in documentary and digital records, identifying their role … whether it was as a wife or women were integrated into certain security structures.”
The Federal Government was contacted, but did not respond to a request for comment.