A woman accused of joining ISIS has been charged with terrorism offences, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) has confirmed.
The woman was detained in a Syrian refugee camp before returning to Australia in September last year.
She is the fourth woman to be charged over links to ISIS this month.
It comes after a cohort of women and children landed in Sydney and Melbourne on Tuesday night – the second group to arrive in Australia from a Syrian camp in recent weeks.
ISIS
Australia listed ISIS (also known as IS or Daesh) a terrorist organisation in 2005.
The group occupied one-third of Syria from 2014 to 2017, forming a ‘Caliphate’ governed under a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law.
The Australian National Imams Council (ANIC) says ISIS “does not represent Islam or the Muslim world in any way”.
ISIS lost all of its territory by 2019, and many of its fighters and their families were placed in detention camps across Syria, Libya, and Iraq. This included dozens of Australian citizens.
Australians
In 2022, the Federal Government assisted four Australian women and their 13 children to return from Syria’s Al-Roj internally displaced persons (IDP) camp.
The camp is for families of killed or detained former Islamic State fighters.
At least 34 Australians remained in the camps, the majority of whom were children.
In 2023, Save the Children Australia (STCA) mounted an unsuccessful legal attempt to force the Government to repatriate the women and children.
Earlier this month, a group of nine women and four children landed in Australia from the Al-Roj IDP camp.
Upon their arrival, two women were arrested in Melbourne and charged with offences relating to slavery.
Another woman was arrested in Sydney and charged with joining a terrorist organisation and travelling to a declared conflict zone.
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The Government has issued a temporary exclusion order against one ISIS-linked woman living at the camp, barring her from returning to Australia.
Latest
A fourth woman has now been charged for allegedly entering and remaining in a declared conflict zone and joining ISIS.
She returned to Australia last year, and is not directly linked to a second cohort of six women and 13 children who landed from Syria on Tuesday night.
While no one has been arrested from this group, the AFP said “investigations are continuing into all the recent adult female returnees from Syrian camps.”
The woman arrested this week returned to Victoria in September 2025.
The AFP alleges the 34-year-old travelled to Syria with others, including a man, to join ISIS between 2013 and 2014.
“The man is believed to be incarcerated in a Middle East prison,” police said.
The woman was detained in the al-Hawl IDP camp in 2019 but returned to Australia via Lebanon with another woman on 26 September.
She’s due to face Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on Thursday afternoon.
Response
Sirec noted that “a period of time without charges being laid is not an indicator that investigations have ceased.”
Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner Libby Murphy said “we are doing everything we can to ensure there is no risk to the Victorian community from those returning from conflict areas.”
Attorney-General Michelle Rowland said: “There are consequences for people's actions, and that is the case, as we have seen, where there are a number of Australian citizens who have been charged with very serious offences.”
