An Australian ISIS bride who was charged after following her husband to Syria a decade ago has escaped jail.
Mariam Raad, 32, traveled to Islamic State-controlled Syria in 2014 to join her husband Muhammad Zahab, who was believed to have been a senior member of ISIS.
Zahab, a former mathematics teacher, is believed to have been murdered in 2018.
Raad returned to Australia in October 2022 and was arrested three months later following a joint investigation between the Australian Federal Police and their counterparts in New South Wales.
She was accused of entering a region controlled by a terrorist organization, to which she pleaded guilty last month.
Wearing a pink scarf on her head and flanked by her supporters, Raad appeared at Goulburn Local Court in the New South Wales Southern Highlands on Wednesday for sentencing, where she was released on bail. ABC News reported.
He received no sentence, but must show good behavior for the next 25 months.
Former ISIS girlfriend Mariam Raad (pictured outside Goulburn court on Wednesday) has been conditionally discharged and must show good behavior for the next 25 months.
The mother was charged in 2023 with entering a region controlled by a terrorist organization. Raad (pictured with her late husband Muhammad Zahab) after following her husband to ISIS-controlled Syria in 2014.
Raad now lives in Young, in the Riverina region of New South Wales, in the south of the state.
Her lawyer Rose Khalilizadeh told the court during closing arguments that at the time of the crime, her client was a “vulnerable woman in a coercively controlling relationship” who was “conditioned not to question her husband’s decision-making.”
The court heard Raad had married her husband when she was 18 and still at school, “just as she came out of childhood”.
Khalilizadeh agreed that his client decided to remain in Syria, but said Raad was isolated in a foreign country with young children.
He added that it could not be proven that Raad “independently wanted or desired to remain in Syria.”
Crown prosecutor Sam Duggan questioned Raad’s account of how much knowledge the wife had of her husband’s activities.
He told the court that Raad sent text messages to members of her family while she was in Syria, saying she would “never leave” and that she “cannot leave the land of the caliphate.”
Duggan said the messages, as well as his two attempts to enter Syria, showed Raad held favorable views of ISIS.
His lawyer told the court that a psychologist’s report found that Raad was “likely experiencing… symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress disorder” during the time of his offending, which affected his ability to make decisions.
Khalilizadeh said Raad’s time in a Syrian camp had exposed her to “degrading and inhumane conditions,” and said she had been “basically imprisoned for years” and Duggan did not dispute this.
Raad lives in a family compound (pictured) outside Young, in the Riverina region of New South Wales.
Magistrate Geraldine Beattie accepted “the level of control and influence that her husband had over her”.
Beattie said Raad was alone in Syria, “a woman in a war zone”, which “raises the question: if she had wanted to leave, could she have left?”
The magistrate added that the mother had “very good prospects for rehabilitation” and “has demonstrated her remorse.”
Raad was one of four Australian women and 13 children who returned to Sydney from the Syrian Roj camp in October 2022.
All four women were married to ISIS fighters who have died or are in prison.
In 2021, Raad spoke to ABC from the famous Syrian camp and said she was forced to travel to Syria and knew nothing about her husband’s activities.
“I didn’t know that my husband was a senior official of the Islamic State and I didn’t even know anything about his work,” she said.
Raad was one of four people charged to date with entering a declared area.
Two other cases remain before the courts and the fourth has been withdrawn, an AFP spokesperson said.