Inside the mysterious way the final ISIS bride beat the government's 'two-year ban' to keep her out of Australia 'for national security reasons'

By CHARLOTTE KARP, SENIOR NEWS REPORTER Published: 15:07, 25 June 2026 | Updated: 15:14, 25 June 2026 The last ISIS bride will return to Australia, despite a temporary exclusion order which was supposed to stop her from coming home for national security reasons. Hodan Abby, 29, was the only Australian with links to Islamic State who was not allowed to fly back to Australia from refugee camps in Syria this year. She tried to board a flight from Damascus to Sydney with other ISIS brides in May but was turned away at check-in. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke confirmed at the time that she had been issued with the exclusion order which would keep her out of the country for two years. However, Burke revealed on Thursday the order was no longer in place because Ms Abby had formally requested to return to Australia.  She was granted a permit to return on Wednesday night. Her return date is unclear. Burke tried to explain the 'complex' situation in an interview with ABC's AM radio program on Thursday, saying the exclusion order only applied until the permit was requested. But he failed to explain why the order was issued in the first place when Ms Abby could easily get around it. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke announced on Thursday that the last ISIS bride would return home to Australia Pictured: ISIS brides attempting to travel from Al Roj refugee camp, in Syria's northeast, to the capital Damascus in February  'I can if I can take you through that because there's some complexity to this that your listeners won't be familiar with, so if I can explain,' he told the national broadcaster. 'The temporary exclusion order applies until a permit is issued and when a permit is requested, a permit lawfully has to be issued.  'I've been working through with my department, my agencies, Australian Federal Police and ASIO, and with the lawyers to see every possible condition we can put on that permit.' Ms Abby's permit to return will include a raft of monitoring measures that mean she will be subjected to 'significant and invasive surveillance'. 'We've checked with our agencies, they are ready,' Burke said. 'She will have to report where she lives, where she works, where she studies, if she books a ticket to anywhere.  'For telecommunications, she cannot use any telecommunications device without giving 24 hours notice. Even if you want to use a public phone, it's 24 hours' notice.  'Any social media, 24 hours' notice on everything has to be given so there will be a very high level of scrutiny and surveillance. Pictured: Kashmiri demonstrators hold up a flag of the Islamic State of Iraq in 2014  'And we have gone absolutely to the legal limit that we're able to.' Two cohorts of ISIS brides and their children returned to Australia in May. Four have since been charged with crimes against humanity offences. Ms Abby was among the first Australians to independently travel to Syria when war broke out. Aged 18, she and best friend Hafsa Mohamed, 20, lied to their parents about going on holidays in December 2014, before they boarded flights to Turkey and crossed the border into Syria in the hope of becoming jihadi brides. Ms Mohamed was killed in the conflict zone in 2015, leaving Ms Abby stranded at al-Roj refugee camp. Her nine-year-old daughter lives with disabilities and ongoing speech and movement impairments as a result of shrapnel wounds to her head, hip and back. 'ISIS brides' describes women recruited by the Syrian-based terror group Islamic State (IS) and moved to Iraq or Syria to marry fighters and raise their children between 2012 and 2016. Pictured: The squalid conditions at Roj Camp in Syria, where women and children live in tents What should be the limits when allowing former ISIS affiliates and their families back into Australia? What's your view?Some of the women have spoken about being tricked into living in Syria, with some experts suggesting recruiters painted a utopian view of life with the terrorist group. Following IS's fall in 2019, the women and their children were placed in Al-Roj refugee camp in far north-eastern Syria. The men were either executed or imprisoned. Boys held in the Al-Roj camp were transferred to adult prison once they reached their teenage years, sometimes slightly earlier. Two groups, each comprised of at least a dozen women and children linked to ISIS, returned to Australia in May. Eight orphaned children came back to Australia under Scott Morrison's government in 2019.  Four women and 13 children were then allowed into the country by the Albanese government three years later. No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual We will automatically post your comment and a link to the news story to your Facebook timeline at the same time it is posted on MailOnline. To do this we will link your MailOnline account with your Facebook account. We’ll ask you to confirm this for your first post to Facebook. 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