A group of Australian men suspected of being former Islamic State fighters are among more than 5,000 prisoners transferred from Syria to Iraq, where they could face charges that could carry the death penalty.
Iraq’s Center for International Justice Cooperation confirmed last Friday that 5,704 ex-combatants from 61 countries, including citizens of Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US, had been detained.
There are unconfirmed reports overseas that 13 Australians are among the group, but it is unclear who they are and what charges they may face.
It is also unclear whether anyone will be deported to their home countries if no charges are filed.
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The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Dfat) said it was aware of the transfer and was seeking further details from the relevant authorities. It does not confirm how many civilians have been transferred or are being assisted.
At least one Australian has previously been executed in Iraq after being convicted of being a member of the Islamic State.
Iraq has consistently executed people convicted of terrorist crimes by hanging. It had the fourth-highest number of executions in the world in 2024, with 63 documented executions, mostly for terrorist offences.
There are no executions in 2025, but seven have already been recorded in 2026. There are also reports of secret executions not announced by the government.
Under Australian law, authorities are prohibited from providing legal assistance – including evidence or witness testimony – for any criminal investigation involving a capital offence. They can do so provided they are assured that the death penalty will not be imposed or carried out.
The Australian Federal Police has been contacted for comment.
The prisoner transfer was completed shortly before a group of 34 Australian women and children returned to a Syrian detention camp, released by Kurdish authorities to return to their homeland.
They were then banned from returning to Australia for a year or two, but the Australian government said it would not help the group’s repatriation.
‘Why are we not dealing with our alleged terrorists?’
International legal experts have expressed concern about a “legal black hole” of indefinite detention in Syria – where thousands of suspected fighters have been detained since the fall of IS’s so-called caliphate in 2019.
US forces said it took 23 days to transfer Islamic State prisoners from Syrian prisons to Iraq. Major General Kevin Lambert said the transfer operation “will help prevent the resurgence of ISIS in Syria”.
But Ben Saul, the UN’s special representative on counter-terrorism and human rights, told the Guardian the prisoner transfer was “completely irregular” and amounted to extraordinary post-9/11 demonstrations.
“Certainly because there’s no legal process against these people, we don’t know if they’ve done anything wrong, if they’ve committed any kind of war crimes or terrorist act,” Saul said.
“These prisoners were left alive at the end of the caliphate: civilians, victims of ISIS, slaves, boys removed from their parents as teenagers, as well as potential terrorists.
“This dominant political narrative that they are all terrorists is not correct because there is no legal process.”
Saul said Australia has a strong legal system, which is better than Iraq in providing a strong judicial process.
“Why are we not dealing with our alleged terrorists?” Saul said. “These are Australians who have been radicalized here, we’ve allowed them to go to Syria, I think there’s a fair argument that Australia can be a more responsible global security actor and help deal with this collective.”
Saul was among a group of UN experts who said they were alarmed by reports that the U.S. “launched a rapid, en masse … of alleged Islamic State prisoners into Iraq without publicly known screening or legal process, oversight or human rights protections.”
Since the territorial defeat of IS in Syria, reports of captured Australians have appeared sporadically.
Some of these men are presumed dead, while others’ families are in concentration camps in other parts of the country.
In February last year, the Guardian reported that Mustafa Haj-Obeid, who was wounded in the extremist group’s last battle and whose fate was publicly unknown, was alive and in custody in a prison in northeastern Syria.
He is one of a group of alleged IS members whose Australian citizenship was stripped and restored in 2022 after a legal challenge and has been reported missing for the past six years since IS’s military defeat.
The Iraqi government has been contacted for comment.
