Well, looks like Albo’s found another voter he’ll be desperate to import. Just when the supply of ISIS brides to import was running out, along comes none other than ‘Dr Jihad’ himself. Sadly, it turns out that rumours of his well-deserved demise were exaggerated.
One of the nation’s most infamous Islamic State fighters, the Perth-born pediatrician dubbed “Dr Jihad” widely presumed to have been killed in Syria nearly a decade ago, is alive, imprisoned in an Iraqi jail and one of 13 Australian men linked to the terror group hoping to be released and returned home.
Only weeks after the controversial return of 10 ISIS brides and their children from Syria, the Labor government is understood to be aware that Tareq Kamleh, the former Adelaide playboy-turned-ISIS saviour, is locked inside a high-security Baghdad prison, undergoing interrogation by the country’s elite counter-terrorism judiciary.
Kamleh’s survival is detailed in court documents, seen by the Australian, which show the 41-year-old did not perish in the final bloody siege of Raqqa in 2017 as his family and authorities believed.
Penny Wong and Tony Burke will no doubt be chartering a luxury private jet and dusting off the red carpet, even as we speak. Just like the 10 ISIS brides and their charming offspring who recently returned to a hero’s welcome. Multiculturalism demands it, apparently. Never mind that these blokes weren’t exactly handing out lollies in the caliphate.
They’ll keep it all a secret, of course. After all, they kept the fact that they knew this scumbag was alive a strict secret for years.
Penny Wong’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was briefed about Kamleh’s survival in 2022 and again last year, but decided to “stay out of it” and “not get involved”.
This is the Albanese government’s code for ‘we’re secretly laying the groundwork to sneak him back in the country as soon as we can’.
The prospects of Tareq and the 12 other Australian-born Islamic State fighters inside Iraqi prisons will hinge upon the Australian government.
And that means they’ll be shepherded right on in, put up in taxpayer-funded housing, with taxpayer-funded benefits and millions of taxpayer dollars spent, every year, ‘monitoring’ them as they make the rounds from Lakemba mosque to the Islamic schools that have sprung up like a virulent fungus across Australia. His father claims “he and the other former Islamic State fighters could be used to influence individuals at risk of sliding into extremism as a warning of the risks and futility of such behaviour”. Pull the other one. Recruiting tools for the next round of ‘martyrs’ is what they’ll be.
Counter-terrorism expert Allan Orr told the Australian that despite the controversy, Kamleh and the other men who are imprisoned in Iraq represented an “intelligence goldmine” for the country’s national security.
Well, interrogate them over there, then. You don’t need to smuggle them back into Western Sydney, and, in Iraq, you’ll be able to give them a good waterboarding, without hand-wringing ‘human rights advocates’ weeping over the monsters who raped, enslaved and genocided their way across the world’s most ancient Christian communities. But, no, Australia’s director of the Human Rights Watch group, Daniela Gavshon, is predictably wailing and begging for these swivel-eyed jihadis to get the red carpet treatment. Because, she says, if they are prosecuted in Iraq – as they should be, given that’s where they committed their crimes against humanity – they might not get a ‘fair’ trial.
Well, cry me a Tigris and Euphrates.
Oh, well, look on the bright side: he’ll fit right in with the Sydney public hospital system.
