What was this rugby league fan from the suburbs doing with ISIS?

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Hamza Elbaf’s journey from Sydney to a northern Syrian prison has left him totally disconnected from the outside world.

“Who’s the prime minister?” he asks.

“I want to know what’s happening in Australia. What’s happening with this coronavirus?”

For five years, Hamza has been confined to a single crowded room with about 30 other inmates — suspected jihadists detained in the aftermath of the so-called Daesh “Caliphate”.

They have no access to the outdoors, there are no organised activities, and no television.

They sleep on mattresses on the floor and infectious diseases are rampant.

A camera monitors their every move, as do members of the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Hamza can speak enough Arabic to get by but he wishes he had someone to speak to in English.

He is an Australian citizen.

Inmates at the Hasakah prison where Hamza is being held have no access to the outdoors and diseases are rife.(Supplied)

When the ABC’s Background Briefing catches up with him — in a small, hot building attached to the prison in Hasakah, in northern Syria — Hamza seems almost excited.

Barefoot, thin, and dressed in brown prison garb, he says he hasn’t had any personal visitors in the five years he’s been detained and he’s not heard from Australian authorities.

After all this time, he has not been tried and he does not know whether the SDF will charge him.

So how did this young Australian find himself languishing in a Syrian prison?

According to Hamza, it was never meant to turn out like this.

He says he only ever travelled to Syria and joined ISIS because he wanted to experience life under Sharia law.

He’s adamant he never undertook military training during his time in Islamic State territory.

“I feel like my life is now destroyed after 10 years of being in Syria. I actually wasted many, many years of my life,” he says.

Hamza Elbaf says he regrets ever going to Syria.(Background Briefing)

He’s agreed to this interview because he wants to return to Australia, even though he knows the odds are stacked against him.

“I actually feel like that, this prison, I’m actually going to be here for the rest of my life. There’s no movement, no signs of me going back. I have no idea how my future will be,” he says.

‘A normal, simple family’

On the face of it, there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about Hamza’s early life in Sydney.

He was one of six children — five boys and a girl — born to Lebanese migrant parents.

They were a close-knit, religious family. His dad worked up to six days a week as a taxi driver but Sundays were dedicated to family time.

The brothers were all rugby league fans and passionate supporters of the Canterbury Bulldogs.

“We were a normal, simple family. We always liked to go out together, to go to the park, to go to the beach. We were a very friendly family with each other,” Hamza remembers.

“I pray five times a day. The normal five pillars of Islam, I practise it. Praying, fasting, doing the Hajj, if possible.

“The mosque I used to pray in was mainly the mosque in Lakemba. There was no influence on me to join ISIS.”

Members of the Elbaf family, including Hamza, second from left. (Facebook: Supplied)

Growing up, Hamza says he wanted to study IT.

But Hamza’s older brother, Mohammed, who still lives in Sydney, says that after Hamza finished high school he became aimless.

“He was jobless for quite some time. I think that’s when the depression would have crept in and his self-confidence was at an all-time low,” he told Background Briefing.

About this time, Hamza remembers seeing reports about ISIS on the television news.

In July 2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced the creation of the caliphate to the world. Three months after this speech, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State spokesman, released a video urging believers to kill Australians and other Westerners.

The Caliphate soon spread to cover vast swathes of Syria and Iraq, ruling over 8 million people.

Hamza says he remembers how — while all that was going on far away from his home — one day his oldest brother, Omar, came home with a proposal that would change his life.

Hamza Elbaf says he grew up in a “normal, simple family”.(Supplied)

Omar claimed he’d won a trip to Thailand and he was going to take three of the brothers with him for a holiday.

“Omar was just about to get married, and he wanted to take [us] on a trip together to go on a final holiday before he gets busy with his life,” Hamza said.

In October 2014, Omar, 28, Bilal, 25, Hamza, 23, and Taha, 17, flew out of Australia to Thailand.

But after a few days in Thailand, Hamza says his brother Omar had a change of heart and said he didn’t like the place.

“He proposed that he would take us to Türkiye,” he said.

“I always thought Türkiye in the videos and the environment was very beautiful. So we all agreed that he wants the trip. So he decided to take us to Türkiye. So we started a tour around Türkiye, and then we decided to start touring in the countryside.”

Entering the Caliphate

The brothers travelled to Urfa, a city in south-eastern Türkiye, close to Syria’s northern border.

Around this time Urfa was a dangerous place – one of the main meeting points for international jihadists waiting to be smuggled into Syria.

It was a far cry from your average tourist hotspot.

An Islamic State fighter in Syria’s Raqqa province in 2014.(Reuters: Stringer)

In Hamza’s telling, the fateful crossing happened quite suddenly.

“All of a sudden a car comes up. And the car, the windows were all well covered,” he said.

Hamza says he was forced into the car, and then his brothers revealed the real plan.

“This is when they said that they want to cross into Syria,” he said.

“They start explaining we will experience Islamic law under this group ISIS. And if we didn’t like it, we’ll come back.”

Masked gunmen drove the siblings from Urfa to Tel Abiad in Syria, crossing smoothly over the Turkish-Syrian border.

They arrived at a safe house which was guarded by gunmen.

Here, recruits were waiting to be deployed to military training centres where they would learn to fight against the Syrian regime, local tribes, the Kurds and anyone else who opposed them.

At the safe house, things turned bad for the brothers.

“They stripped us of our belongings, our passports, our money, everything,” Hamza said.

The brothers stayed in the safe house for a few weeks before they were separated.

It was the last Hamza saw of his siblings and what became of them is unknown.

“That’s what I always think about. I don’t know why they separated us,” he said.

“I actually don’t know the fate of my brothers. If they are alive or dead? That is one question that I ask myself every day.”

Now in the hands of ISIS, Hamza says he was alone in one of the most dangerous places on Earth. And to make matters worse, with limited Arabic, he had trouble talking to anyone.

An ‘assistant’ to an ISIS cook

What happened during Hamza’s time inside the Caliphate is almost impossible to verify.

Under the Caliphate rule, you have to pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — the Supreme leader.

Hamza says he’s not sure whether he pledged allegiance because his Arabic was too weak to understand what was being asked of him.

“I never pledged allegiance because I don’t even understand what they were telling me at the time,” he said.

“Maybe there were times they thought I pledged. I actually don’t remember any procedure.

“I was actually scared to go against anything they were trying to tell me because if you go against them, they put people in prison. I was very scared of actually entering the prison.”

Islamic State fighters on the streets of Syria.(Reuters)

During these early days of ISIS, when men arrived inside the Caliphate, they would be sent to military training camps, but Hamza says he became ill so he never attended training.

“I was sick with this hepatitis A. I think it was the food and the water was very unclean or something, very sick. So they took me to the hospital. I stayed there for around four weeks,” he said.

After he recovered he was put to work, but he says he had limited skills to offer.

“I couldn’t actually offer anything. I was planning to study IT. In Australia, I actually hardly worked. Back in my old life, my skills were very little,” he said.

Hamza claims he was sent to work in a kitchen but he admits he didn’t have any cooking skills.

“I actually never cooked. I was more of the assistant to the cook. All the ingredients he would need to cook, I would just bring it from the storage towards him and he would cook,” he said.

He says the first couple of years under ISIS were what he described as “normal Islamic practice”.

“Everyone loved ISIS. After two years, they started to increase the security on people. Some people left the Islamic State so they started reinforcing surveillance,” he said.

When Hamza started asking for his passport, he says they became suspicious.

At one point, ISIS soldiers detained him in prison for interrogation, but he says he was released as he posed “no harm”.

But Hamza says he was terrified of what could happen to him.

ISIS was notoriously cruel to defectors and spies. Its soldiers would drop them into vats of acid or drown them in cages lowered to the bottom of a pool.

They would document these punishments in horrifying videos.

Hamza says he left his job in the kitchen and wanted to return home, but he was alone, without his passport and with no money.

Around this time smugglers were charging US$5,000 to take people from Syria into Türkiye.

Hamza says he started sleeping in a mosque and would go to charities to get money for food.

The end of the Caliphate

By March 2019, the Islamic State was on its last legs. A global coalition of 85 countries, led by the United States and including Australia, had all but defeated them.

The battle for Baghouz: the last stronghold of Islamic State in 2019.(Supplied: AP)

What was left of the Caliphate — a few thousand hardcore fighters and their families — had been driven into a tiny pocket of land at Baghouz, a village in eastern Syria.

Hamza was among them.

“[In] the final days of battles, there was nothing I could do. Everybody around me was just trying to survive for food and trying to protect their wives and their children,” he said.

“And we’re trying to avoid all the crossfire and explosions happening from the air strikes. It was very, very, very quick, very crazy, like a movie.

“All of the bombings were very stressful and a very scary experience. And I don’t want to talk about, think about, this very, very, very bad trauma experience.”

Hamza says during the battle, he did not fight but was waiting to be rescued.

“I actually never fought in Baghouz. It was more just like waiting there inside the trenches of the camps,” he said.

A Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) fighter walks inside a tent encampment that was occupied by Islamic State militants in Baghouz in March 10, 2019.(AP: Maya Alleruzzo)

In the final bloody days of the Caliphate’s last stand, Hamza was among the thousands of fighters and their families who surrendered to the SDF.

Rodger Shanahan is an expert in Australian jihadism and the author of the book, Islamic State in Australia.

He doubts Hamza’s explanations.

“The fact that somebody ends up in Baghouz as well, at the end of the Islamic State project, it raises a series of questions. How did they get there if they weren’t committed to the project?” he said.

In March 2019, Hamza was captured and soon transferred to a makeshift prison in Hasakah, where he has remained ever since.

Women and children arrive at a screening point near Baghouz in Syria as Islamic State’s stronghold on the region crumbles.(ABC News: Tom Hancock)

A long way from home

Even if everything Hamza said was true, he would have broken at least one Australian law.

The Federal government’s Declared Area Offence came into force in December 2014, effectively making it illegal for a person to enter areas controlled by ISIS unless they had a legitimate reason.

The maximum penalty for this offence is 10 years imprisonment.

Meanwhile, Hamza says he’s been offered no assistance or even been contacted by Australian authorities.

Sources within the Australian government say that, in time, he may be able to return.

Dr Shanahan believes it won’t happen soon.

“The current government said it’s unlikely to be addressed in this current term of the government. But I don’t see any short-term prospects of him returning to Australia any time soon,” he said.

And Dr Shanahan says it remains to be seen if Hamza could pose a security threat if he was to return.

“It’s impossible to say until people have had a chance to examine him in Australia, and to get a better sense of exactly what he did when he was in Syria with Islamic State,” he said.

Hamza now says that living under ISIS was not what he expected.

“When I came to experience it, it wasn’t the way that I thought it was, because the group currently running the Sharia Law, they didn’t run it correctly. It was a bit extreme at the time,” he said.

“They also had some faults, which they were very extreme in. A lot of people being forced to do things that they didn’t want to do.”

Hamza says he’s been punished enough.

“I don’t believe I’ve done anything wrong because we were just going for the experience,” he said.

“We were planning to come back and because we weren’t allowed to come back, this is what forced me to stay there.

“I never took part in anything. It was just going to experience Sharia law and it was impossible to leave, I got stuck.”

Inmates at the makeshift prison in Hasakah.

For now, Hamza remains in no-man’s land, sealed off from the outside world.

The prison he’s being held in is run by Kurdish authorities. They are not an internationally recognised government, but they receive some funding from the US to run the prison and others like it.

There are up to 4,000 foreign fighters — including Australians — detained in these prisons as suspected ISIS fighters, but none have ever faced trial.

In recent years, these makeshift facilities have become targets for jihadists.

In January 2022, Islamic State sleeper cells launched a brazen, large-scale attack on the prison where Hamza is being held, resulting in scores of prisoners escaping.

Though many of the escapees were later arrested, the episode highlighted the limited resources the local Kurdish authorities have to manage the incarceration of so many suspected jihadists.

Kurdish-led SDF fighters take their positions near the prison in Hasakah after it was attacked by ISIS militants.(AP: Hogir Al Abdo)

The head of the UN’s Office of Counter-Terrorism observed that the episode underlined “the need to bring [the prisoners] to justice as soon as possible, and ensure accountability to break the cycle of violence”.

Countries including France and Belgium have repatriated some of their citizens.

In 2019, Australia repatriated eight children from Syria — family members of terrorists who had died fighting for Islamic State. Then, three years later, a further four Australian women and their 13 children were flown back to Australia.

To date, no male Australian adult citizens who are being held as suspected ISIS fighters have been returned.

Hamza’s brother Mohammed says they’ve received no support from the Australian government.

“No support from DFAT. It’s all about us giving information but no information in return. It’s dire straits,” he says.

“Other countries have been taking their citizens back, but unfortunately Australia have been letting them rot in a prison that’s foreign with no human rights or dignity. It’s sad. Very sad.”

Hamza Elbaf says his future lies in the hands of the Australian government.(Background Briefing)

A Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesperson told Background Briefing its ability to provide consular assistance to Australians in Syria is severely limited due to the security situation.

“If requested, the Australian government provides consular assistance to the families of Australians detained in Syria,” they said.

And for Hamza, there’s a growing sense of urgency. The prison where he is being held is experiencing an outbreak of tuberculosis.

“A lot of people are dying from TB, tuberculosis. And I’m actually scared that one day that person will actually be me,” Hamza said.

He says his fate now lies in the hands of Australian authorities.

“My future? I wouldn’t have a clue. It all depends on what the Australian government has planned. If they’re going to take me back or not,” he said.