Two more women arrested and expected to be charged after a group of 13 with family links to IS landed back from Syria on Thursday

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

A woman who arrived back in Australia after spending more than seven years in Syrian detention camps has been charged in Sydney with allegedly entering a declared conflict zone and joining Islamic State.

Janai Safar, 32, was a member of a group of 13 women and children who arrived back in separate flights – one into Sydney and one into Melbourne – on Thursday evening.

Four women and nine children expected to return to Australia on Thursday with all apart from a mother and her child expected to go to Victoria

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Authorities in two Australian states are preparing to resettle children returning from squalid detention camps and life under Islamic State rule, as at least some of their mothers face possible criminal charges.

Four women and nine children are expected to return to Australia on Thursday, with all of them apart from a mother and her child bound for Melbourne.

Home affairs minister Tony Burke says government continues to refuse to help the group of 13

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Some of the Australian women linked to Islamic State fighters may face arrest and possible criminal charges on their return from Syria this week, with the government and federal police promising a hardline response when the group touches down.

The home affairs minister, Tony Burke, confirmed that the government was aware that four Australian women and nine of their children had begun the journey home, after more than a decade of planning by a joint Asio and Australian federal police counter-terrorism taskforce.

The Chinese captain of a ship that Sweden boarded this weekend over suspicions it belonged to Russia’s “shadow fleet” has been arrested, the Swedish prosecution authority said on Monday.

Sweden’s coast guard on Sunday boarded the 182-metre (597-foot) Jin Hui, suspected of sailing under a false Syrian flag. It was the latest of several boardings carried out by the Scandinavian country.

Moscow’s “shadow fleet” consists of vessels used to skirt Western sanctions.

They are often ageing ships in poor condition, without proper insurance and with opaque ownership, raising concerns about the risk of an accident.

The Jin Hui is on the sanctions lists of the EU, Britain and Ukraine, Sweden’s Civil Defence Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin said on Sunday.

The captain, a Chinese national, was arrested “on suspicion of using a forged document” and of violating Sweden’s maritime code regarding “lack of seaworthiness”, the prosecution authority said in a statement.

“An interrogation of the detainee will be held during the day and contact has been initiated with other authorities and countries,” the prosecutor leading the investigation, Adrien Combier-Hogg, said.

New government accused of ‘performative justice’ and making deals with suspects in 2013 Tadamon massacres

Ahmad al-Homsi is a deep sleeper, but when he was woken last month and told that Amjad Youssef, a Syrian intelligence officer who killed civilians in the 2013 Tadamon massacres, had been arrested, he bolted out of bed. He ran into the street to find other people already celebrating the news.

“We stayed out for almost three or four days celebrating. People from neighbouring areas sent camels, sheep, livestock for us to slaughter and distribute them to people. The tears of joy didn’t stop,” said al-Homsi, a 33-year-old activist with the Tadamon Coordination Committee, which documented the atrocities in the Damascus neighbourhood.

Kurdish Syrian man, 26, said he fled forced conscription by YPG militia because he ‘didn’t want to kill people’

An asylum seeker sent back to France under the controversial “one in, one out” scheme faces being returned to Syria after authorities in Paris ruled it was safe to do so, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind.

When the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, announced the “groundbreaking” deal in July 2025 to stop small boats crowded with asylum seekers from crossing the Channel – by forcibly returning one small-boat asylum seeker to France in exchange for bringing one in northern France legally to the UK – they emphasised that France was a safe country for returnees.

Syrian officials say a group Australians ‘awaiting a solution’ as Albanese government refuses to repatriate them

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

The Trump administration says it is in “active communication” with countries, urging them to repatriate citizens stranded in Syria, while the Australian government maintains its hardline stance towards Australian women and children detained since the fall of Islamic State.

A group of four women, their nine children and grandchildren left al-Roj camp, in Syria’s north-east, last Friday in a bid to return to Australia, with reports on Thursday morning that the Albanese government’s refusal to help them has left them stuck in Damascus.