An Australian woman facing terrorism charges, including allegedly grooming her young children with Islamic State propaganda, has been released from custody on bail. Rayann El Houli, 34, returned to Australia last year and was subsequently charged after residing in the community for months.
El Houli was charged with one count of entering or remaining in declared areas and one count of being a member of a terrorist organization. She appeared in Melbourne Magistrates’ Court via video link and was expected to be released. The Australian Federal Police (AFP) had strongly opposed her bail, asserting she remained a threat to the community.
AFP Senior Constable Paul Sherlock told the court that no bail restrictions could adequately mitigate the risk El Houli posed. The court heard allegations that El Houli travelled from Melbourne to Syria in September 2014 with her husband and two infant children. She remained in ISIS-held territory for approximately three years, during which time she had two more children and married two additional members of the group, both of whom were later killed.
Prosecutors allege El Houli appeared in at least three videos between 2015 and 2016. In these videos, she is heard prompting her children with scripted questions about violence and religious duty, against a backdrop of jihadist chanting. One video from May 2015 allegedly shows El Houli repeatedly asking her eldest child, then very young, who the 'mujahideen' were and what happened to those the group deemed 'disbelievers.' The child was allegedly prompted to answer: 'Hellfire.' El Houli also allegedly asked her child, 'Did you see how the mujahideen killed the kuffar, the infidels, with the knife? Look at me - how do they sword them with the knife? How do they slaughter him with the knife?' and 'How do they slaughter the apostate? Show me how.'
A second video, recorded in March 2016, reportedly shows El Houli exposing two of her children to extremist material, including French and Arabic language propaganda. A third video, filmed days later, allegedly captured El Houli instructing a child on how to hold a toy gun 'like a terrorist' and asking the child to demonstrate how fighters 'slaughter' opponents with a knife.
The AFP alleges these recordings were not passive exposure but a deliberate and repeated pattern of behavior, with El Houli allegedly using her own children as subjects in extremist media over approximately ten months. The videos were reportedly discovered years later on the phones of her relatives in Australia.
Between 2019 and 2020, AFP investigators executed search warrants on family members' homes, seizing devices that revealed years of WhatsApp communication between El Houli in Syria and her family, including the videos and images allegedly showing her children in a room with an assault rifle. The court heard El Houli had initially declined counseling to deradicalize upon her return to Australia.
Her barrister, Peter Morrissey SC, stated at an earlier hearing that his client had since rejected the Islamic State group and wished to distance herself from it. "She renounces ISIS and violent jihad, she wants nothing to do with it. Not now, not in the future, not directly, not indirectly. Not for herself, not for the people she loves and specifically not for her children," he said.
El Houli had been held by Kurdish authorities since March 2019 following the collapse of the Islamic State and was residing in al-Hawl camp with family members. Police allege she traveled to Syria with several individuals, including a man believed to be imprisoned in the Middle East. The return of other women linked to ISIS in May also led to El Houli being charged.
In his decision, Magistrate Brett Sonnett accepted that El Houli would likely experience hardship in custody due to anticipated delays in bringing her to trial. She had already spent two months in detention. Mr. Sonnett noted that El Houli now suffers from depression and is suspected to have multiple sclerosis, and stated that any risk she might pose to the community could be managed through strict bail conditions.