Families urge government to reconsider rescuing Australians in Syria

Family members of Australian women and children trapped in north-eastern Syria’s al-Hawl camp say the situation in the conflict zone remains unpredictable but has stabilised under a ceasefire. They’ve argued that the repatriation of civilians is possible, and urged the Australian government to reconsider rescuing its citizens.

The UK, Belgium, France and Germany have been seeking ways to repatriate women and children from displacement camps during the “pause” in fighting agreed to by the advancing Turkish military.

But the Australian government has reiterated its position that it will not send Australians in to assist those trapped in the camp.

“We’ve had direction from the government that no official … be put in harm’s way in relation to the women and children in al-Hawl,” the home affairs official Linda Geddes told the Labor senator Kristina Keneally during Senate estimates.

Related: Australia says it won't risk more lives trying to rescue citizens from northern Syria

The Department of Home Affairs has had no contact with Kurdish authorities which currently control the camp, Geddes said.

At least 66 Australian women and children are currently caught in the camp, which is outside the ‘safe zone’ being proposed by Turkey, but which is at risk of being caught in the counter-operations of Syrian forces advancing from the south. Of those, 44 are children.

The British government has confirmed to the Guardian it is currently exploring ways to get women and children out of the camps.

The foreign office said: “We are looking at orphans and unaccompanied minors who bear UK nationality and whether they can be provided safe passage to return to the UK. We will examine every single case where we are asked for consular assistance, but this process is far from straightforward.”

The Kurdish administration is understood to be “extremely supportive” of future repatriations. The US has also repeatedly asked other countries to repatriate its nationals from Isis prisons and internally displaced people’s camps. Moving civilians over the border from Syria into Iraq is quick and safe, Save the Children has said.

The Sydney man Kamalle Dabboussy, whose daughter Mariam and three young grandchildren became trapped in the camp after Mariam was coerced into travelling to Syria in 2015, has become a spokesman for the Australian cohort trapped inside, and their families.

Dabboussy said the situation had “stabilised” inside al-Hawl with the cessation of hostilities, but the families’ situation remained precarious and their future uncertain. The ceasefire is due to expire on Tuesday.

“Some of the international NGOs have had their staff go back in – their fear is dissipating. We note journalists and others have gone into north-eastern Syria, and other countries have taken advantage of the ceasefire, working through third parties and charities, to try to repatriate citizens without having to use troops.”

He urged the Australian government to use the relative – and potentially brief – peace brought by the ceasefire to explore options to repatriate its citizens.

But the home affairs secretary, Mike Pezzullo, told Senate estimates the five-day ceasefire brokered by the US, and agreed to by Turkey, had not changed his department’s advice to government.

With the invasion of north-eastern Syria by Turkey, “an extremely dangerous situation has become exceedingly dangerous”, Pezzullo said.

“You should take from that the advice we’ve given to ministers is that the change in circumstances is not sufficiently material to give us comfort at all that the risk has been lowered sufficiently.”

The Centre Alliance senator Rex Patrick said he’d spoken with NGO Save the Children which argued if the government signalled it would take care of these people if they made it to the Iraqi border, they could be moved out of Syria without any other Australians needing to be involved.

Related: Australian families trapped in Isis camp in Syria plead with government to rescue them

Pezzullo said the situation remained too unpredictable.

“It’s badlands there, and you’d want to be very, very confident that you had a comprehensive view of all of the risks being manifest by each individual actor and their interactions,” he said.

“All of the outcomes are unattractive, high risk, and regrettable, and it would have been better for certain adults not to take certain decisions to travel: no one’s putting that on young children under five.”

Al-Hawl camp is home to about 60,000 women and children with links to Isis and 10,000 displaced civilians, but is guarded by only about 400 Kurdish-controlled Syrian Defence Force troops.

Since Donald Trump’s sudden announcement that US troops would withdraw from north-eastern Syria – also known as Royava – the camp has been especially volatile, with reports of murders by radicalised women of others accused of not adhering to Isis’s fundamentalist ideology.

The US has been widely criticised for pulling out of the region: Trump’s departure has been cast as an abandonment of the Kurds, who led the fight against Isis.

But on Monday, Trump defended US assistance to the Kurds but said he had given “no commitment” to protect the Kurds “for 400 years”.

“We helped the Kurds, they’re no angels, but we helped the Kurds,” Trump said in the Cabinet Room.