MIRANDA DEVINE
The Sunday Telegraph
February 14 2016
THE latest plea for sympathy from the mother-in-law of the (maybe) dead Islamic State terrorist Khaled Sharrouf is too convenient for words.
Karen Nettleton and her lawyer Charlie Waterstreet are now claiming that Sharrouf’s wife, Tara, has died in the ISIS paradise of Raqqa, Syria, making orphans of their five children, aged between 14 and six.
Actually, make that six kids, since Sharrouf married off his 14-year-old eldest daughter, Zaynab, to his head-chopping rapist mate Mohamed Elomar. Their baby was born eight weeks ago, after he was reportedly killed in a drone strike.
Elomar’s death has at least been confirmed by Australian authorities, unlike Tara’s or her husband’s.
Supposedly she died in September from complications to do with appendicitis. Or perhaps it was kidney disease. Reports differ.
Either way, it is handy timing, considering earlier pleas for public sympathy fell on deaf ears, despite Waterstreet’s imaginative sob stories.
In any case, the Australian government is under no obligation to bring any Sharroufs home. The idea that we would risk special forces to enter Syria to assist the family of a convicted terrorist is laughable, even if it were possible.
And it’s a pity Karen Nettleton wasn’t as proactive about protecting her grandchildren before she helped her Muslim convert daughter fly them out of the country in 2014.
Karen travelled with Tara and the children to Malaysia, the first stage in a journey to Raqqa to join Sharrouf. She has said it was just a family holiday, that when she left her daughter and grandchildren in Malaysia, Tara only planned to go to Turkey to visit a friend, and must have been duped by her husband to go on to Syria.
The privations of the Islamic State made Tara regret her foolishness but, judging by photos on her Twitter feed last year, she enjoyed Raqqa at first, living in a nice house stolen from some poor Syrian family, travelling around in a luxury BMW.
“Chillin in the khilafah, lovin life,’’ she posted under a photo of herself and other black-cloaked IS wives toting machineguns.
She didn’t seem to mind that her husband had posted on Twitter a photo of their son holding a severed head, with the caption ‘That’s my boy’.
Nor did she seem to mind that Zaynab, who describes herself as a “soldier of Allah”, was pregnant at 14 to Elomar, almost 20 years her senior.
In any case, the Australian government is under no obligation to bring any Sharroufs home. The idea that we would risk special forces to enter Syria to assist the family of a convicted terrorist is laughable, even if it were possible.
Then there were the Yazidi sex slaves kept at the Sharrouf home. After escaping, they told the ABC how badly they were treated by the Sharrouf children, whose every whim they had to indulge.
“His children were treating us badly as well and they had knives and cellphones, saying that they will take videos while killing us because we follow a different religion,” one of the women said. “And said that they will make a video while cutting off our heads.”
You can’t blame the children for their family, but they have been brainwashed since birth by their father to hate non-Muslims, say police who listened to phone taps for months before Sharrouf was locked up for his part in the Operation Pendennis terror plot. He managed to convince a judge in 2005 to give him a soft sentence of less than four years, on the grounds of mental illness.
But when he got to Syria he declared he had made it all up: “I played the government there like ignorant children i was never mentally ill not then nor now.”
He played the Australian authorities for fools then and now his family think they can do it again.
Orphans or not, there is no guarantee that they won’t one day pose a terrorist risk to Australia if they return.
You would wish that they had never gone to Syria but it was a one-way ticket.
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