Australia's opposition leader against bringing back detainees from Syria

ANKARA (AA) - Australia’s main opposition leader on Wednesday opposed the government’s proposed plan to bring back its citizens from a detention camp in Syria.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton, after a meeting with Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) Director-General Mike Burgess, said he believed that bringing back these women and children is a significant risk.

"I'm not going to go into the detail of what he's provided to me," ABC News quoted Dutton as telling reporters after his meeting with Burgess.

"I must say that I am more strongly of the view now that there is a very significant risk in bringing some of these people to our country that can't be mitigated, frankly - not to the level that we would require to keep Australians safe," said the opposition leader.

Around 20 Australian women and their 40 children are currently in a detention camp in Syria who were shifted there after the fall of ISIS/Daesh in 2019, according to the broadcaster.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's government is planning to bring them back to Australia as some officials visited Syria to verify the identities of those women and children earlier this year.

Many of them are the wives, widows, and sisters of ISIS/Daesh militants and some of them left Australia when they were teenagers.

These women and children are currently trapped in the squalid al-Hawl camp in northern Syria after their family members were killed or jailed after fighting alongside the ISIS/Daesh terror group, according to the report.

*Writing by Islamuddin Sajid