Australian father issues a desperate plea to rescue his ISIS bride daughter and her children from Syria - and says she was 'tricked' into fleeing to the warzone by her terrorist husband
- Kamalle Dabboussy has called on the Australian Government to rescue his family
- Mariam Dabboussy and her children are trapped at Al-Hawl detention camp
- Bankstown-born woman says she was forced into Syria by radicalised husband
- The United Nations has called on countries to repatriate citizens stuck in Syria
- The Morrison government has so far declined US offers to rescue its citizens
An Australian father has issued a desperate plea to the government to rescue his ISIS bride daughter and her children from a Syrian camp.
Bankstown-born Mariam Dabboussy claims she was tricked into entering the war-torn country in mid-2015 by her terrorist husband Kaled Zahab, who died shortly after they arrived.
Kamalle Dabboussy has called on officials to repatriate his daughter and grandchildren, aged two, three and five, to Sydney from the disease-ridden and overflowing al-Hawl detention camp in Syria's north-east.
'The red cross have said it is the most dangerous place on the planet for children, they are using plastic bags for toilets,' Mr Dabboussey told 9News.
Kamalle Dabboussy with his daughter Mariam Dabboussy (right) and her daughters Aisha (left) and Fatema in al-Hawl camp in north-eastern Syria
'My greatest fear is that she will die.'
Mr Dabboussy said the Australian Federal police knocked on his door five years ago to tell him that his daughter had been 'coerced' into entering the middle-eastern nation while on a family holiday to Turkey.
Her husband had been radicalised into joining the Islamic State by his older brother.
Two years ago, the United States offered to rescue coalition partner's citizens and return them home.
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However, the Morrison government has so far declined assistance, arguing the extraction mission would put Australians in danger and some of the women have been radicalised and would pose a risk to the country.
Kamalle Dabboussy is afraid that his daughter Mariam Dabboussy (pictured together) will die if she is left at the Al-Hawl detention camp in Syria
'If you take your children into the middle of a war zone it's very difficult for me to put our Australian soldiers and our officials at risk to go in there and extract people,' Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said previously.
Mr Dabboussy said there has never been any indication to the Australian Government or to law enforcement that his daughter went to Syria willingly.
There are currently 19 women and 47 children, most of them aged under five, trapped in al-Hawl in grim, unsanitary conditions with limited resources.
Matt Tinker from Save The Children said youngsters in the camp were suffering through ailments.
'There's an Australian girl with frostbite, there's Australian children with shrapnel wounds from the conflict, there's Australian children with pneumonia,' he said.
Ms Dabboussy is one of more than 60 Australians, most of them children, detained.
Her father said she is happy to undertake strict house arrest-like conditions if she is allowed home, including having her telephone monitored and regularly reporting to a police station.
Last week, the United Nations urged countries, including Australia, to take their citizens out of the war zone, with a focus on protecting children.
On February 21, the Australian Federal Police announced 42 arrest warrants had been taken out for Australian men and women who had travelled to Syria 'for alleged offences against Australian law,' the Guardian reports.
Some include women held at Al-Hawl.
Mariam claims she was duped and coerced into entering Syria and did not pose a threat to Australia. Her eldest child was born in Australia and the other two, in Syria (pictured is the al-Hawl refugee camp)
She said she was forced into the war-torn country while on a holiday with her husband and then 18-month-old daughter. She had her two younger children in the conflict zone (all three pictured together at al-Hawl)
UN Humanitarian Coordinator Mark Lowcock told the Security Council that at least 100 civilians were killed in February in air and ground strikes in the north-west, 35 of them children.
He reported that although people are trying to find shelter in increasingly crowded areas, nowhere is safe.
'Almost 50,000 people are sheltering under trees or in other open spaces,' he said.
'I am getting daily reports of babies and other young children dying in the cold. Imagine the grief of a parent who escaped a warzone with their child, only to watch that child freeze to death.'
Who is Mariam Dabboussy?
Mariam Dabboussy was not a devout Muslim but her life changed at 22 when she married Kaled Zahab (pictured). The woman who had been a childcare and migrant support worker went to the Middle East in mid-2015 with her husband and their 18-month-old child
Mariam Dabboussy was not a devout Muslim, but her life changed at age 22 when she married Kaled Zahab.
The woman, who had been a childcare and migrant support worker in Sydney, went to the Middle East in mid-2015 with her husband and their 18-month-old child.
Ms Dabboussy travelled to Lebanon with her husband only to be 'tricked' into going to Syria, she said.
It started off as a normal holiday,' Ms Dabboussy said.
'My husband had never left the country at the time. So, it was the first time he had agreed to take me overseas.
'We had a really nice holiday planned. We went to Malaysia, took me to Dubai, we went to Lebanon.'
Ms Dabboussy was initially taken from Lebanon to a house in southern Turkey near the Syria border.
From there, she was driven to a dusty patch of land.
'There was other people there and there was... there was a man there,' she said.
'And he started telling us, ''Run before they shoot, Run before they start shooting.'' And we didn't know what was going on.'
Kamalle Dabboussy warned it could be just days before it's too late to get Mariam (pictured) and the three minors - aged one, three and five - out of Syria's Al-Hawl camp
'I looked around, I'm thinking, ''What am I going to do?'' I'm in the middle of nowhere, I don't even know where I am. There's gunshots. Now I just started running.'
She didn't get far, with men bundling her into a car and taking her to a house, which had a black Islamic State flag.
'When I entered that house and I saw a flag, I saw a flag and I sort of asked around,' Ms Dabboussy said.
'Some women, they spoke very broken Arabic, they didn't really speak. They were sort of surprised I didn't know what was going on. Some of them laughed at me.
The man Ms Dabboussy married is now dead, after being killed by a coalition airstrike three months later.
The mother-of-three has since been forced to remarry twice more and claims life has only gotten harder.
