As the horror that was the Islamic State collapses, there are approximately 800 fighters, 600 women and 1,200 children being detained in Syrian camps. It’s difficult to say how many of them are Australian. It is estimated that 70 children born to Australian nationals are in the displacement camps.

There are men such as Mohammed Noor Masri and Mahir Absar Alam begging to have themselves and their families bought home to Australia, and there are numerous women and children who face destitution and potential death if they are left to the turmoil of conflict zones. It is important to be cognisant that refugee camps can be some of the most dangerous places in the world.

But in the numerous moral equations that have been put forward to argue for the return of Australian expats from Syria, at no point have we considered the rights or welfare of the Syrian people in our calculations. To engage ethically with the question of Australians returning we must reflect on the needs of the Syrian people and perhaps more importantly what crimes may have been committed against them by Australian citizens.

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This is not an uncomplicated conversation about rights, second chances and compassion. The only uncomplicated decision to be made here is the one about children – there is no legal ground and certainly no ethical framework that would allow for the abandonment of children in what may become a conflict zone again. Both our own laws and international human rights obligations place an onus on Australia to bring child citizens home. There are no safety considerations for Australian officials that cannot be meaningfully addressed.

In regard to adult expats there is also no legal or moral argument that would justify leaving them in Syria. The only ethical position and the one small act of restitution that we could make to the Syrian people is to bring Australians home.

Right now, the government continues to argue that it will not bring Australian fighters back nor “… put Australian lives at risk to facilitate the re-entry of people who went to fight against our country and its values”. Therein lies the problematic logic that has defined our approach to this issue: from the very beginning we have held that we won’t take Australian fighters back because it will risk Australian lives, but this pivots on the acceptance that it is tolerable for these Australians to risk Syrian lives. From the beginning, our politicians appear to have been untroubled by the question of what role have Australians played in the killing, sexual violence, displacement of Syrians and the demolition of the Syrian nation.

It is precisely this disregard for Syrian lives that took Australian Muslims to Syria in the first place – these Australians believed that they had a right to participate, influence and direct Syrian lives and sovereignty. Australians, like other foreigner fighters, were instrumental in changing a political conflict in Syria to an armed one. No Australian Muslim foreign fighter that I am aware of was of Syrian descent – this always made them Western invaders in the eyes of Syrians. For those unaware of how hard Syrians struggled to keep their conflict non-violent, Anand Gopal details the commitment of Syrians to non-violence and the devastation wrought by foreigners, extremist groups and the Assad regime.

Our determination, both at the national level and the individual level of the expats and their families, to evade responsibility for the horror we participated in and inflicted on the Syrian people is so profound that we are even prepared to use the gender argument – that women are less responsible because they are women.

The socio-political vulnerability of women does not render them incapable of making moral choices nor does it exempt them from the moral responsibility of travelling to be “housewives” in a society that was being razed to the ground, possibly by their own husbands. To argue that they carry no moral relationship to the war that raged outside their home while they lived under the protection of the Islamic State may not be illegal, but it is profoundly unaccountable.

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Despite the prime minister, Scott Morrison, and the attorney general, Christian Porter, making much of the potential threat of the returned fighters and their families, this type of assessment can only be made by police, not by politicians. Australia has more accountable and professional security infrastructure to contain this type of threat than the Syrian people do. It is also important to note that those accused of being foreign fighters in Syria are unlikely to be dispensed with a form of justice that would be either ethical or acceptable – they are likely to be subjected to torture and extra-judicial killings.

The more difficult questions here is about culpability and accountability of expats that have returned. It is difficult to see how our legal systems will establish whether Australians participated in criminal behaviour or even war crimes. For those who have not committed obvious crimes but demonstrated a wanton disregard for the life of the Syrian people, we can’t as a society hold them to account. This is something only they can do for themselves.

Australia is not the only nation that failed to protect Syrians from its citizens, and Australians were not the only foreigner fighters in Syria. But this does not negate our responsibility to act now. The only ethical stance our government can take is to bring Australians home and hold them to account where appropriate.

• Joumanah El Matrah is the CEO of the Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights and PhD student at Western Sydney University