Updated May 28, 2026 — 6:26pm,first published 2:16pmThe return of Islamic State-linked women to Australia has opened up new avenues of investigation for federal police, leading to fresh charges against a Melbourne woman who arrived back from Syria eight months ago.Australian Federal Police arrested Rayann El Houli, 34, on Thursday and charged her with terror offences, citing evidence they had obtained since the return of four other so-called ISIS brides earlier this month.AFP commissioner Krissy Barrett told a Senate Estimates hearing that police initially did not have enough evidence to charge El Houli, but an ongoing “six-month investigation, plus the recent return of four women and their children from Syria three weeks ago, has collected new relevant evidence”.Barrett did not elaborate on how the evidence was collected, but said it “enabled a number of search warrants” to be carried out in Broadmeadows and North Fitzroy.Police charged El Houli with entering or remaining in a declared area and being a member of a terror organisation. These charges carry a maximum 10-year sentence.El Houli fronted the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on Thursday afternoon, and will apply for bail on Monday. Her defence counsel Peter Morrissey, SC, said she suffered from a significant post-traumatic stress disorder.Morrissey said El Houli cared for four children who were “doing well” since they escaped from Syria camp with her and returned to Australia in September.“My client is a mum [who] is very much caught up in [her children’s] life,” Morrissey said. “The reality of their situation is they too have come out of the camps.”Sources close to the families has said one of El Houli’s children was wounded by a gunshot in the final days of the so-called caliphate in 2019.Prosecutor Andrew Sprague told the court he wanted to play five videos during next week’s hearing that depicted El Houli’s children and showed battle scenes with music in the background. Morrissey said his client “was very distressed at the prospect of being shown any images” with her children in them.“She suffers from significant post-traumatic stress disorder,” Morrissey said. “It’s a touchy difficult thing, your honour.”El Houli returned to Australia from Syria with her sister last September after the pair paid people smugglers to escape the al-Hawl detention camp and made their own way to Lebanon. They were issued with a passport at the Australian embassy in Beirut and returned to Melbourne.The charges against El Houli are the same as those laid against another woman, Janai Safar, who returned to Sydney from Syria earlier this month.None of the six so-called “ISIS brides” who returned on Tuesday to Sydney and Melbourne have yet been charged, but AFP commissioner Barrett flagged the possibility of further arrests, telling estimates that eight separate joint counter-terror team investigations were underway.“Those who have returned from internally displaced persons camps in Syria are subject to a range of investigative strategies and will be held to account if they are found to have breached Australian laws,” Barrett said.“Any perceived delay in charges does not indicate investigations have ceased.”AFP deputy commissioner of national security investigations Hilda Sirec.Alex EllinghausenAFP Deputy Commissioner Hilda Sirec declined to answer a question about whether women who had returned from the camps would be interviewed and asked for evidence against each other.“I won’t outline our operational strategies or who could face charges in the future, but I will confirm investigations are continuing in all recent adult female returnees who spent time in internally displaced persons camps in Syria.”She said the latest arrest should be seen as a sign of the agency’s determination to continue “highly complex” investigations for as long as it took.“I also want to underscore that a period of time without charges being laid is not an indicator that the investigations have ceased,” Sirec said, announcing the charges against El Houli.Police needed to be able to take the time and effort to make sure that the evidence was admissible and to a legal standard, she added.She also would not comment on what terror threat was posed by Hodan Abby, who was prevented from leaving Syria this week because of a temporary exclusion order imposed by the Albanese government.Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said extensive community consultation had been done ahead of the return of the Islamic-State linked women who have returned to Australia from Syria.“The government is not involved in settling people at all. We have had citizens return, as we’ve had citizens have self-managed returns before we came to office, including 45 men who had gone there to fight,” Burke said in question time.“But in terms of the consultation with the community, I can give examples of consultation that has been very powerful that has happened in the lead up to when it was first reported that these individuals might seek to return,” he said, which included the Assyrian and Chaldean Catholic communities.“I’d also add to that, probably no meeting more powerful than when a delegation came here from Wagga, from the Yazidi community, which involved one woman who, from memory, she would have been 19, had herself effectively been a slave,” he said.Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.Michael Bachelard is a senior writer and former deputy editor and investigations editor of The Age. He has worked in Canberra, Melbourne and Jakarta, has written two books and won multiple awards for journalism, including the Gold Walkley.Connect via X or email.Lachlan Abbott is a crime reporter at The Age. He was previously a city reporter and covered breaking news.Connect via email.Matthew Knott is the foreign affairs and national security correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X, Facebook or email.Brittany Busch is a federal politics reporter for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.From our partners