Banned ISIS bride is allowed to RETURN to Australia as Tony Burke reveals she has been given a permit

The last so-called ISIS bride stranded in the Middle East will be allowed to return to Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has confirmed.

Hodan Abby, 29, originally from western Sydney, was the only person in a cohort of Australian women with links to Islamic State in Syria issued with a temporary exclusion order (TEO) by the Federal government.

While the rest of the group have since returned, the TEO prevented Ms Abby from entering Australia for two years on the grounds of national security.

Ms Abby attempted to board a flight from Damascus to Sydney with other ISIS brides in May but was turned away at check-in.

She was given the option of allowing her disabled nine-year-old daughter to return to Australia with the other women, which she declined.

However Burke revealed Ms Abby had formally requested to return to Australia and that she was granted a permit on Wednesday night.

‘We received the final advice yesterday that we can no longer have an exclusion condition for her,’ he told ABC’s AM radio program on Thursday.

Ms Abby’s permit to return will include a raft of monitoring measures that mean she will be subjected to ‘significant and invasive surveillance’.

‘We’ve checked with our agencies, they are ready,’ Burke added.

‘She will have to report where she lives, where she works, where she studies, if she books a ticket to anywhere. 

‘For telecommunications, she cannot use any telecommunications device without giving 24 hours notice. Even if you want to use a public phone, it’s 24 hours notice. 

‘Any social media, 24 hours notice on everything has to be given so there will be a very high level of scrutiny and surveillance.

‘And we have gone absolutely to the legal limit that we’re able to.’

Two cohorts of ISIS brides and their children returned to Australia in May.

Four have since been charged with crimes against humanity offences.

Ms Abby was among the first Australians to independently travel to Syria when war broke out.

Aged 18, she and best friend Hafsa Mohamed, 20, lied to their parents about going on holidays in December 2014, before they boarded flights to Turkey and crossed the border into Syria in the hope of becoming jihadi brides.

Ms Mohamed was killed in the conflict zone in 2015, leaving Ms Abby stranded at al-Roj refugee camp.

Her nine-year-old daughter lives with disabilities and ongoing speech and movement impairments as a result of shrapnel wounds to her head, hip and back.

‘ISIS brides’ describes women recruited by the Syrian-based terror group Islamic State (IS) and moved to Iraq or Syria to marry fighters and raise their children between 2012 and 2016.

Some of the women have spoken about being tricked into living in Syria, with some experts suggesting recruiters painted a utopian view of life with the terrorist group.

Following IS’s fall in 2019, the women and their children were placed in Al-Roj refugee camp in far north-eastern Syria. The men were either executed or imprisoned.

Boys held in the Al-Roj camp were transferred to adult prison once they reached their teenage years, sometimes slightly earlier.

Two groups, each comprised of at least a dozen women and children linked to ISIS, returned to Australia in May.

Eight orphaned children came back to Australia under Scott Morrison’s government in 2019. 

Four women and 13 children were then allowed into the country by the Albanese government three years later.