Keep Australia's doors shut to jihadi kids in Syria.

Miranda Devine: Lock our door to keep the jihadi kids in Syria

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.

THE leaders of an Islamic sect that supported female genital mutilation have banned the practice in Australia after a ­Supreme Court trial ruled the custom illegal.

Islamic leaders ban genital mutilation after court ruling

YONI BASHAN BRENDEN HILLS
The Sunday Telegraph
February 14 2016

Multicultural Sydney: Auburn genital mutilation: Guilty women, sheik fail to show remorse or speak out says judge

THE leaders of an Islamic sect that supported female genital mutilation have banned the practice in Australia after a ­Supreme Court trial ruled the custom illegal.

Trustees of the Dawoodi Bohra Shia Muslim community issued an edict last week ­ordering its followers not to perform the ritual known as “khafd” or “khatna”, either in Australia or overseas.

The order follows the conviction of a mother, a retired nurse and a spiritual leader, who were prosecuted in ­Australia’s first female genital mutilation trial on two sisters last year.

In both cases, the girls’ ­clitorises were cut with a silver tool, but medical examinations were inconclusive about what types of injuries had been caused.

The trio were found guilty of mutilating the two sisters and are yet to be sentenced.

A meeting was held in ­Auburn on Monday about the practice and on Tuesday a ­letter signed by 12 trustees of the Dawoodi Bohra community, a small religious order, told followers to abide by the law of the land.

The letter cited the convictions handed down by the ­Supreme Court and said, consequently, the practice of “khafd” was illegal.

“All parents and guardians are hereby directed in the strictest terms not to carry out khafd under any circumstances,” the letter said.

It also directed people not to take any child or other ­person outside Australia for the same purpose.

Lawyer John Sutton, representing the Dawoodi Bohra sect, said the move to ban the cultural practice was an ­unequivocal signal that the community wanted to adhere to Australian laws.

Even though medical ­examinations of the two ­victims in the court case were unable to prove conclusively what took place, he said the resolution was clear.

Multicultural Australia: ISLAMIC State fighter Khaled Sharrouf is still alive and making threatening calls to people in Sydney over ­attempts by the NSW Crime Commission to seize his house.

Australian jihadist thought to be dead alleged to have made threatening calls over property

Yoni Bashan
The Sunday Telegraph
February 14 2016

Tribute indicates IS thug Khaled Sharrouf is dead

How Elomar and Sharrouf met their fate

Muslim leader’s condolences to bereaved families


ISLAMIC State fighter Khaled Sharrouf is still alive and making threatening calls to people in Sydney over ­attempts by the NSW Crime Commission to seize his house.

Law enforcement officials have uncovered ­numerous contacts from the terrorist, who had ­reportedly been killed in Syria, including a death threat made last month by­­­ ­­­­­­a person claiming to be Sharrouf to a person in Sydney.

The threat related to ongoing legal proceedings led by the NSW Crime Commission, which is attempting to seize a house bought for Sharrouf before he left Australia.

Authorities believe the house in western Sydney was purchased by murdered standover man Joe ­Antoun and others linked to him.

While the house is not in Sharrouf’s name, the commission is suing its legal owner, a relative of Antoun’s, using Criminal Assets ­Recovery legislation. They want to seize the house because of its links to Sharrouf.
A law enforcement official said Sharrouf has no paper link to the house but remains attached to the property and doesn’t want to lose it.

“Sharrouf thinks it’s his,” the ­official said, adding there had been several suspected contacts from him suggesting he wasn’t dead. “He wants to foster an image he’s dead.”

A second law enforcement official said that since the initial reports of Sharrouf’s death last year there had been information coming through suggesting he was still alive, though without a public presence in Syria it was difficult for Australian authorities to verify the intelligence.

Antoun was gunned down on the doorstep of his Strathfield home in December 2013 over an unrelated matter.

The revelations come as questions continue to be posed over the fate of Sharrouf’s children, all of whom are Australian passport holders, and whether they can be brought back to Australia after ­reports emerged last week that Sharrouf’s wife Tara Nettleton, who took the children to Syria, died from complications with appendicitis.

She had been the main point of contact for negotiating the children’s return to Australia, a third law enforcement source said.

The official said federal authorities fell out of touch with Ms Nettleton around September last year and believe she may have died around that time.

Her mother Karen was last week photographed leaving her home with a tattoo on her arm suggesting the date of death was September 11.

Part of the reason Tara died, the official said, was because she wasn’t given priority treatment at a hospital over injured ISIS men.

Robert Van Aalst, a family friend and lawyer to the Nettleton family, declined to be interviewed but said the family was told in January that Sharrouf was dead.

He declined to say who provided the information.

Another lawyer acting for the Nettleton family, Charles Waterstreet, said he had been told the same but didn’t necessarily believe it.

“Khaled’s fate is unverifiable,” Mr Waterstreet said yesterday.

“The family were told he’s dead but knowing how unreliable everything is, whether he’s dead or not I wouldn’t know, but nothing would surprise me.”

Mr Waterstreet is assisting Karen Nettleton in appealing to ­foreign governments and non-government organisations to lead a mission to repatriate the Sharrouf children.

He said the children — Sharrouf has two sons and three daughters: Zaynab, 14, now a mother of a baby herself, Hoda, 13, Abdullah, 11, Zarqawi, 10, and Humzeh, 5 — were currently living alone in a house somewhere in the country and had no access to food or cash.

The girls were also unable to walk around and seek assistance without a male minder and about $2000 had been wired to them but hadn’t yet been claimed.

He said the children had held off telling Karen about Tara’s death because they didn’t want to upset her.

Despite the illegalities involved in wiring money — it is an offence to send money to terrorist organisations or their sympathisers — the authorities had been sympathetic to the family’s attempts, Mr Waterstreet said.

While there were no firm ­attempts afoot to bring the children home, he said efforts to locate and extract the children were ongoing.

In the past Sharrouf has boasted about his deceptive tactics on social media, including his ability to slip through customs and fly “first class” out of the country.

References have also been made to feigning mental illness during his court proceedings between 2007 and 2009 on charges of conspiring to commit an act of terrorism.

Two psychologists ruled he was unfit to stand trial and one claimed Sharrouf was “unlikely to become involved in a further ­offence”.

On sentencing, the judge took into account Sharrouf’s “drug-induced psychosis” and “chronic schizophrenia”. He was released a month after his sentence was handed down because of time already served.