An Australian woman trapped with her two young children in a refugee camp for Islamic State group families says her daughter needs urgent medical care and she wants to come home.
The woman refused to confirm her identity, but it’s believed she is 24-year-old Zehra Duman from Melbourne.
She is being held at Al Hawl refugee camp in north-east Syria.
In an interview exclusively obtained by the ABC, the woman said she wants to bring her two-year-old son and six-month-old daughter back to Australia.
“Both of my kids are sick. [My daughter is] very malnourished, she’s … very skinny,” she said.
“I have no money, I’m not allowed to have money, they don’t give us food here and they don’t let us contact our families.”
The Australian woman said her daughter’s life was in peril.
“My daughter needs milk and I don’t have money to buy her milk. I don’t know what to do now,” she said.
She also said that she wants to come back to Australia.
“I want to go back to my country. I think everybody’s asking for that because I’m an Australian citizen.
“I understand the anger that they have towards a lot of us here, but the kids don’t need to suffer. You know my kids have a right at least to be treated like normal kids,” she said.
But the Prime Minister Scott Morrison said those who go overseas to support terrorists need to be aware of the consequences.
“They have to take responsibility for those decisions to join up with terrorists who are fighting Australia. I’m not going to put any Australian at risk to try to extract people from those situations,” he said.
“There is a process for us to deal with them under Australian law, and they will face the full force of Australian law should they be in a position to seek to come back.”
The Australian woman’s story appears to match that of Zehra Duman — a 19-year-old who left Melbourne to join the Islamic State group in November 2014.
Ms Duman moved to the IS Syrian capital of Raqqa and married Australian fighter Mahmoud Abdullatif.
She was a vocal supporter of the IS group’s violent rhetoric on social media, as well as an effective recruiter.
In 2015 Ms Duman, calling herself Umm Abdullatif Australi, posted a picture of a woman holding an automatic rifle, with the caption: “catch me if you can”.