Yusuf Zahab among people Jamal Rifi hopes to bring home

The Sydney doctor trying to repatriate the 34 Australian women and children associated with Islamic State has revealed he also took a 35th passport with him to Syria – for a young male prisoner, Yusuf Zahab.

Dr Jamal Rifi, a medical doctor and friend of Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, has spoken up for the first time from an undisclosed location in the Middle East, telling this masthead he was “shattered” that his mission had not succeeded.

Of Yusuf, who was taken to Syria by his parents when he was a 12-year-old schoolboy, Rifi confirmed, “we do have a passport for him”. However, the now 23-year-old was no longer in the Syrian men’s prison where he had been locked up.

“We went for 35, including a minor who was taken from his mother and put in adult prison – Yusuf,” Rifi said.

“We couldn’t find him. We searched for him and then later on it came to us that he was in Iraq.“

Yusuf’s presence in Iraq has not been officially confirmed.

Fearing the chaotic political situation in Syria, the American military has paid for Iraq to take more than 5000 former Islamic State-related prisoners out of the country. This includes 13 Australians. Rifi said Yusuf was among them.

But Rifi’s mission to bring the 35 back has so far failed, after the women and children were turned around after beginning their journey last Monday and sent back to al-Roj camp. Asked if he regretted anything about the mission, Rifi said: “I’d do it 1000 times.

“I don’t regret, but I regret we had to take them out and put them back in [the camp]. I regret not being able to free Yusuf to return to his mother … The children shouldn’t suffer from the sins of fathers or mothers and Australian children shouldn’t live in such an environment for any length of time. And they’ve been there seven years.”

Rifi said he and family members had tried to do “everything by the book”, having communicated with the International Committee for the Red Cross.

“The only obstacle was we didn’t have anything from the Australian government,” he said.

On the day of the short-lived departure, February 16, Rifi said a premature notification to the media by officials at al-Roj camp had angered the Syrian regime in Damascus, so they had turned the convoy around 50 kilometres from the camp.

However, he confirmed the strong rhetoric of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had prompted the Syrian government to refuse their travel to Australia. Rifi said he was working to change their minds.

“We’re making some inroads, but the biggest obstacle is the prime minister’s statements,” Rifi said. “The Syrian side is asking if he doesn’t want them, we don’t have anything from them, why should we help them?”

On the ground

Rifi said the Syrians feared the Australian government would not accept the women and children, so they would be stuck in a third country.

“They were concerned the stopover country might not let them in because of all the negative statements that were happening in Australia. They didn’t want them to get stuck forever,” Rifi said.

Albanese has said during multiple interviews in the past week that the government would not repatriate the families, and that he has “nothing but contempt” for the women who took their children into Islamic State territory.

He added that, if they do manage to make it back, the fact they were citizens and were travelling on Australian passports meant the government would have to accept them.

Rifi confirmed that apart from issuing passports, no Australian government representative had made any effort to help.

“If we had a piece of paper from the government they would have been home by now,” he said.

“But there has been no support, no paper, no phone calls. Nothing. They said they got there on their own, they had to get themselves home.”

Passports had been granted to the women, children and Yusuf Zahab. The process had taken months, he said, and the family representatives had only picked them up in recent weeks.

“We had to apply for citizenship by descent for the children,” Rifi said.

Uncertain futures

Yusuf was taken from Bankstown into Syria by his parents, Aminah and Hicham Zahab, to join two older brothers in 2015. Aminah has since said her older sons tricked her.

When interviewed in 2024 by the SBS Dateline program, Yusuf said that, as a child “I didn’t even know what ISIS is. I didn’t even know Syria and Iraq exists in my life.” While living in the so-called caliphate, he said he had stayed mostly at home, playing PlayStation and watching movies on a laptop.

Rifi still had hope that the family repatriation would succeed, but he also feared the internal politics of Syria might change things. The Roj camp is in a portion of Syria controlled by an autonomous Kurdish authority, and the interim Syrian government is hoping to bring it all under the control of Damascus.

“The camp is going to shut down,” Rifi said.

Asked when, he said: “Things are so fluid. It changes by the minute. I know that [Syrian] president Ahmed Al Sharaa met representative today with SDF [Kurdish forces] leadership in Damascus, they are talking about reintegration. Things might be faster than we expect.”

Human Rights Watch is concerned that the closure of the al-Roj camp could expose 2000 women and children to “serious risks, including trafficking, exploitation, and recruitment by armed groups”.

Asked about his relationship with Burke, Rifi said the minister had not been aware of his mission to Syria.

“We are friends, [but] I wouldn’t do him any favours. He does what he needs to do as a minister, and I do what I need to do as a human.”

Coalition policy

Rifi also commented on the opposition’s proposal to jail people who assist IS women and children to return. He agreed he would likely be captured by the policy.

“It’s going through a race to the bottom,” he said. “It’s dog-whistling policies.”

Taylor told Sky News on Monday night that there was a “real risk” that the Australians in Syria had been radicalised, arguing that his proposed laws should be tested as a matter of national security.

“Bringing these people to Australia will be bringing back people with links to ISIS. That is not acceptable,” he said.

Albanese said that, in government, the Coalition had allowed 40 fighters to return to Australia. Opposition defence spokesman James Paterson said on Sunday he did not think it was true that any IS fighters had returned to Australia under the Morrison government, and former PM Scott Morrison told news.com.au only orphans had returned during his time in office.

Home Affairs minister Tony Burke said yesterday this was untrue, and that fighters had returned in 2020 and 2021. He did not name them.

“This shows the Liberal hypocrisy laid bare. Citizens who you would never assist make self-managed returns, they always have,” Burke said.

Professor of international law at ANU, Donald Rothwell, said the Coalition’s proposal was unlikely to face a constitutional challenge because it would probably operate under the same mechanism that allowed the government to prohibit financing terrorism.

He said unintended consequences were a greater risk, as complexity around defining terror hotspots could mean innocent Australians got caught up. Rothwell also noted the legislation was extremely unlikely to pass.

Asked about the prospect of a number of returnees coming to Victoria, Premier Jacinta Allan said state officials were talking to their commonwealth counterparts, and her government would look at it “through the framework of community safety coming first”.

“But when it comes to talking about the children of these individuals, we do have to give special consideration of the wellbeing of those children. The education, their health care.”

With Liam Mannix

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