Tony Burke under fire after US offered to help ISIS brides after secret meeting

The Coalition has demanded that Tony Burke explain if he made “secret deals” to assist ISIS brides to return to Australia following revelations he directed a senior public servant to exit a meeting with advocates pushing for their return.

Meeting minutes obtained by Coalition senators indicate Mr Burke declined formal aid requests from Save the Children executives for Australians stuck in northern Syria.

But the meeting notes also showed he “stated there may be a way to achieve the same outcome without government undertakings,” before Save the Children campaigner Kamalle Dabboussy asked “to speak frankly.”

“At this stage, I was asked to leave by the minister to enable a frank discussion to take place,” the Home Affairs official noted.

The official also noted Mr Burke had remarked that: “The thinking is if people are able to get out, there are no blockages to them returning.”

The typed summary captured Mr Burke stressing the “government doesn’t want to be perceived to have been paying to have them smuggled out” and expressing gratitude for the group’s media silence on repatriation plans.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has demanded Mr Burke explain what happened during this “secret” meeting.

“Were secret deals being done between the minister and the third party in that meeting?” Ms Ley said.

“We have a Prime Minister and a Home Affairs Minister who denied that this government was providing assistance to members of ISIS to return to Australia. So we urgently need answers to this question: what help was provided?”

Mr Burke said the notes and letter confirmed what the Government had consistently said.

“There was a request from Save the Children to conduct a repatriation operation. It was refused,” he said on Thursday.

“There was no repatriation and no assistance. Public servants did what they were legally obliged to do and no more.”

Save the Children had met Mr Burke in October 2024 and again on June 13 this year to advocate for the return of women and their children.

Save the Children chief executive Mat Tinkler and Mr Dabboussy told him in a letter two months later that the US military had offered to help repatriate the Australian women and their children stuck in northern Syria.

“Family members are seeking to take control of their own destiny and have recently confirmed that the US Government has offered to provide support for repatriations in the near term . . . this offer is a time bound one, with no guarantee of support beyond September,” they wrote in the letter dated August 15.

The support offer came from US Central Command’s Syria repatriations team, which was “specifically designed to facilitate the repatriation of foreign nationals and with a track record of doing so safely and securely”, the campaigners said.

But it came with the precondition that children and their carers possess appropriate travel documents as Australian citizens.

The commander of US Central Command, which directs American and allied military operations in the Middle East, Admiral Brad Cooper, used a speech to the United Nations in September to urge all countries with citizens in the camps to “supercharge” efforts to repatriate them.

About 37 Australian women and children remain in the Roj detention camp. It’s unknown whether any are still in the Al-Hawl camp.

Handwritten notes made by Home Affairs boss Stephanie Foster during the October 2024 meeting indicate that Mr Burke told the advocates that the “success of (the) first cohort will be great help after we’ve got them home”, but he “can’t see a way to navigate earlier”.

Separate notes typed up by a departmental official after the June 13 meeting notes show Mr Burke’s stance hardened as he told advocates the Government didn’t have a plan to get people out of the camps, couldn’t guarantee they wouldn’t face charges if they returned to Australia, and wasn’t considering giving any assurances that passports would be issued.

A group of two women and four children – who were not the subjects of the June 13 discussion – escaped from the nearby Al-Hawl camp to Beirut on June 6 and quietly returned to Australia in September.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Mr Burke have both said this group received no government support other than the issuing of passports.

In their August letter, Mr Tinkler and Mr Dabboussy said they were “deeply disappointed with this decision to refuse assistance to Australians in trouble overseas.”