No way to help children of terror

THE orphaned children of a Sydney terrorist won’t be held responsible for their parents’ crimes, but being stranded in the crumbling Islamic State in Syria puts them beyond the reach of Australia, the Prime Minister says.

IS fighter Khaled Sharrouf made headlines in 2014 when he posted a photograph of one of his sons holding the severed head of a Syrian government official. Sharrouf had travelled to Syria on his brother’s passport a year after completing a four-year jail term for plotting a high-level terrorist attack in Australia.

His wife, Tara Nettleton, died a year later of medical complications, leaving the five children with their father in Syria.

Then, in 2017, Sharrouf and two of his sons, aged 11 and 12, were killed in a coalition air strike near Raqqa.

The fate of the remaining Sharrouf children was unknown until video broadcast by the ABC yesterday showed a family friend and former IS recruiter claiming three of the children are still alive.

The recruiter, believed to be 25-year-old Melbourne woman Zehra Duman, said two teenage girls and a nineyear-old boy from the Sharrouf family were “fine and they’re alive”.

In the video, Duman tells an aid worker the children are in Baghouz in northeast Syria.

Thousands of IS women and children fled the final jihadi enclave bound for humanitarian camps amid intensifying air and ground attacks from the US-led coalition forces, Al Jazeera reported a week ago.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison says the children’s situation made the case “very complex” and the government’s options were limited.

“The issue of the children involved is obviously a very sensitive one,” he said yesterday.

AUSTRALIA IS NOT IN A POSITION TO OFFER SAFE PASSAGE TO PEOPLE WHO ARE IN THAT PART OF THE WORLD SCOTT MORRISON

“They’re in a very dangerous part of the world and Australia is not in a position to offer safe passage to people who are in that part of the world.”

Mr Morrison said Australia would make decisions “consistent with our national security interests” but noted the children could not be held responsible for the crimes of their parents.

“Their parents, Khaled Sharrouf in particular, who committed despicable crimes, placed their children in harm’s way,” he said.

Duman, in the video, says the children are in the care of other people.