Australian security and counter-terrorism

Almost all Australians who returned from Syria and Iraq did so 'before Isis existed'

Asio director general Duncan Lewis says the ‘vast majority’ of about 30 Australians who came back from fighting did so more than two years ago

An Islamic State propaganda image made available by Islamist media outlet Welayat Tarablos on February 18, 2015, allegedly shows members of the Islamic State (IS) militant group parading in a street in Libya's coastal city of Sirte, which lies 500 kilometres (310 miles) east of the capital, Tripoli. Egyptian F-16s bombed militant bases in the eastern Libyan city of Derna in mid-February after the Islamic State group in Libya released a gruesome video showing the beheadings of a group of Egyptian Coptic Christians who had gone to the North African country seeking work.
An Islamic State propaganda image. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

Australian Associated Press

This article is 11 months old

The overwhelming majority of Australians who have returned home after fighting in Syria and Iraq did so more than two years ago - and before Islamic State (Isis) existed – the head of the nation’s chief spy agency said.

Asio director-general Duncan Lewis told a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday evening that “the vast majority” of the approximately 30 foreign fighters who had returned to Australia did so “several years ago”, well before Islamic State declared a caliphate.

“Some of them fall into the category of those who were fighting in the Syrian civil war on both sides,” Lewis said.

He refused to detail the breakdown of numbers of those who had returned in the past two years.

Lewis said the 30 who had returned presented “varying degrees of threat to the community”, and were included in a “matrix” that evaluated and prioritised the seriousness of the cases.

“We do not have a watchlist as such,” he said. “We manage ... the threat that is presented and the prioritising of that threat and then the attention that is given to that particular threat.”

Lewis confirmed dozens of young Australian women had “either gone or contemplated going” as so-called “jihadi brides”.

“There are 30-40 women that are involved in this cohort that we know of, some of whom have been stopped, some of whom have been successful in getting offshore,” he said. “It’s a relatively recent phenomenon.”

Two weeks ago, it was reported that several Australian women who had gone to Syria had now become slaves of the terrorist group after their partners were killed.