I lived with ISIS bride Kirsty Rosse-Emile who is begging to come home from Syria. I need to say something before we risk the unthinkable. This is what I know

Before flying to Syria to swear allegiance to Islamic State, Kirsty Rosse-Emile told her Melbourne housemate: ‘I don’t want to go back to school, I want to go and make bombs.’

Now, about 16 years after that living room conversation, Rosse-Emile’s former housemate is sounding the alarm about her imminent return to Australia as one of the 11 Australian ‘ISIS brides’ on the verge of escaping a Syrian refugee camp. 

Sara* vividly remembers the moment Rosse-Emile, then about 17 and known by her Islamic name Asma, divulged her violent ambitions during an otherwise ordinary conversation. 

She is now terrified the Albanese government will let Rosse-Emile and the other ISIS brides back into the country due to the risk of another terror attack like the Bondi Beach massacre, where 15 Jewish people were killed by Islamic extremists on December 14.

‘When she said she wanted to make bombs, I was shocked and I didn’t know what to say,’ Sara said.

‘You don’t expect someone to say that.’

Sara lived with Rosse-Emile and her Moroccan Islamic State fighter husband Nabil Kadmiry in south-east Melbourne in late 2010 – before they relocated to Syria in 2014. 

Previous reports said the pair married when Rosse-Emile was 19, but Sara said Rosse-Emile was just 14 when she tied the knot with Kadmiry, who was in his 30s. 

Now Rosse-Emile – whose Facebook cover photo once read ‘Jihad is the only solution’ – is pleading with authorities to let her return home. 

She asked the Australian government in an ABC interview last year: ‘Can you just come and get me?’

Sara said that would be a big mistake. 

It doesn’t matter if Rosse-Emile really did intend to live a quiet life in Australia, it would be difficult for her to expunge her extremist beliefs, she said. 

‘This wasn’t her mentality when she was 14, this was when she was a married woman, and it wasn’t something that she made up on the spot,’ she said.

‘It was in response to a question about going to school to study.’

‘Even if she doesn’t want to do that anymore, she would still have that mentality and we don’t want that here.’

Rosse-Emile refused to tell the ABC in an interview last year how she ended up in the warzone. She claimed the explanation ‘could create problems for me’.

Bizarre texts and terror links

Sara’s encounters with Rosse-Emile and her husband Kadmiry was laden bizarre behaviour.

The couple rented the self-contained unit out the back of Sara’s house towards the end of 2010, but abruptly moved out in early 2011 when Sara was overseas in Pakistan.

The couple had agreed to feed Sara’s dog while she was away, but a string of messages show Rosse-Emile desperately trying to shirk responsibility.

Sara had only just converted to Islam when she met Rosse-Emile, and said she appeared devout and trustworthy partly because she wore a niqab – a long garment worn by some Muslim women, showing only the eyes.

In late-January 2011, Rosse-Emile asked Sara how her holiday was going, promised to pay the internet bill, and said it was ‘sad’ to hear about a bomb that detonated in Pakistan when Sara was there.

In another message days later, Rosse-Emile announced she and Kadmiry had moved out, and said they couldn’t feed her dog anymore.

‘Salam sister I just want to let you know we cannot keep coming everyday to feed [the dog] because we live a bit far away petrol is expensive now and rising,’ Rosse-Emile wrote.

‘Plus we are very busy some days we cannot come and we have to constently [sic] buy her food let me know asap when u have found someone to take her inshallah salam.’

Sara told the Daily Mail that Rosse-Emile and her husband had only moved five minutes down the road, to a controversial Islamic study centre called Al-Furqan.

The centre was closed years later in 2016, when a number of members were raided by counter-terrorism police – one was shot and killed by police, while two others joined IS in Syria.

Sara replied: ‘This was yours and Nabil’s responsibility, you are Muslim and you gave me your word you would care for her while I was away, Nabil should be going to check on my house every day and getting the mail and feeding her.

‘In a response laden with spelling errors, Rosse-Emile said it wasn’t her responsibility to feed the dog.

‘I payed [the internet bill] on saturday we have the recite for the internet. we didn’t give the word we said while were at your house we would look after her and cut the grass now we moved its not our responsability,’ she wrote.

‘Your sister should come and do the stuff because were very busy and nabil is going to start working inshallah and its to hard to come everyday to feed her its not that we dont want to do it its to hard.’

The dog was fed until Sara returned, but Rosse-Emile and Kadmiry never paid the $600 they owed for rent. 

Travelling to Syria

Rosse-Emile and Kadmiry moved to Al-Furqan in Springvale South after leaving Sara’s place, before they went to Syria in 2014.

In mid-2013, she wrote a series of Facebook posts tagging several people, saying, ‘I miss everyone already!’

Sara said the couple had some help making the travel arrangements, which included signing documents to release his superannuation funds.

With those funds, they were able to pay for the trip.

They reportedly told her father, Guy Rosse-Emile, that they were going to live in Morocco because Kadmiry’s family owned property in Casablanca. 

‘I said, “well, she’s going to have a good life” and then lo and behold, seven or eight months later she rang her mum on WhatsApp and said that she’s in Syria,’ he told The Nightly last year.

Sara didn’t hear about either of them again, until she found out Rosse-Emile was in a refugee camp following the territorial defeat of IS in 2019. 

She heard that some of Rosse-Emile’s children, who were all born in Syria, had died.

The Guardian previously reported Rosse-Emile’s daughter Amirah was at risk of losing her fingers to frostbite in 2020, when she was three, after temperatures at the al-Hawl camp in Syria plunged below zero.

Kadmiry became an IS fighter. His Australian citizenship was revoked in 2019 and he was held in a Kurdish jail, where he is believed to still languish. 

‘Can you just come and get me?’

In her message to the Albanese government last year, Kirsty said: ‘Hello, I’m here. Can you just come and get me, finally, and my children and all the other Australians here?’

‘We’re ready to start our lives afresh.’

She had previously claimed she was tricked into going to Syria, but her father said last year that his daughter was lying.

‘When she said, “Oh, I was tricked” and all that, it’s not true,’ he told The Nightly. 

‘In the way of Islam, when we go and fight for the cause of Allah, either you’re victorious or you are vanquished, but you don’t surrender, because it’s one of the greatest sins that somebody could [commit].’ 

‘I’m a Muslim. I tell the truth. I am not going to lie to anybody. Allah will punish me if I lie.’

He said the Australian government should settle the refugees in a Muslim country like Turkey.

‘That’s what she wanted – she wanted to be in a Muslim country’ where Sharia law would always be enforced, he told the publication.

Other Australians fighting to come home include Nesrine Zahab and her aunt Aminah Zahab and cousin Sumaya Zahab, along with Kawsar Abbas and her daughters Zeinab and Zahra Ahmed, Janai Safar, Hodan Abby, Kawsar Kanj and Hyam Raad.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Wednesday that one of the women is the subject of a temporary exclusion order on national security grounds, which could ban her from entering Australia for two years.

The identity of that woman remains unclear.

As for Sara, she wants the world to know the Rosse-Emile she once knew – and the risks the country could be taking in accepting her back.

‘If anything happens and I didn’t say anything, how can I face any of my family?’ she asked.

*Name has been changed.