An “ISIS bride” allegedly taught her toddler to mimic a killer. Australia still has no plan for people like her.
Rayann El Houli is fighting for bail over videos that allegedly show her coaching her children to act like IS fighters. Her case is what a decade without a policy looks like.
A woman sat in a Melbourne court this week accused of coaching her own toddler to imitate an Islamic State fighter.
Rayann El Houli is charged with entering a declared conflict zone and joining a terrorist organisation. Police allege she filmed her children in IS-controlled Syria, prompting one to describe fighters killing “disbelievers” and to mimic holding a rifle.
The allegations are grave, and they are just that — allegations, to be tested in a court, with a bail decision due Monday.
But step back from the courtroom and a bigger failure comes into view.
El Houli is in that dock because Australia has spent a decade refusing to decide what to do with people like her.
The facts are not in dispute. Around 207 Australians travelled to Syria and Iraq to support Islamic State. Roughly 60 remain offshore, about half of them women and children still held in detention camps.
Successive governments have landed on a position that sounds tough and achieves very little: we will not help you come home, but if you find your own way back, we will prosecute you.
El Houli is what that position produces.
She was not formally repatriated. She was smuggled out, and made her own way back through Lebanon, arriving with her children and, the court heard, declining to take part in a deradicalisation program on her return.
That is the worst of both worlds.
Refusing to repatriate does not keep these people in Syria. It simply means they return on their own terms, through unregulated channels, at a moment authorities cannot control and with far less intelligence gathered before they land.
It forecloses the structured monitoring, prosecution and rehabilitation that a planned return allows.
And it hands the whole problem to a magistrate, to manage the security risk of a former caliphate resident one bail hearing at a time.
The record shows how threadbare the alternative is. Of the women formally returned in 2022, one pleaded guilty to entering IS territory and was discharged without conviction on a good-behaviour bond. Others resettled in the community, with little public information about monitoring or reintegration.
That opacity is its own problem. It makes it impossible to know whether Australia is applying consistent standards, or managing the risk at all.
None of this softens the allegations against El Houli. If the videos are what police say they are, they describe something genuinely disturbing.
But the children in those clips did not choose Raqqa. They are alleged victims of indoctrination and they are also Australian citizens, and there is almost nothing on the public record about what support exists to undo what was allegedly done to them.
That is the hole at the centre of this. Not whether these women should face court — they should, where there is evidence.
It is that a country which calls this cohort one of its gravest security concerns has no coherent plan for them beyond hoping they stay someone else’s problem, and prosecuting them one at a time when they don’t.
A decade on, that is not a policy. It is the absence of one.