An Australian man who travelled to Syria to fight against Islamic State has challenged the Australian federal police to charge him for breaking Australia’s foreign fighters law, or leave him alone.
“If I’m the bad guy, then fucking charge me,” Queenslander Ashley Dyball told ABC’s 7.30 program. “I don’t care. I’ll do my time.”
Dyball joined Kurdish militia the YPG – People’s Protection Units – in May 2015, fighting in Rojava in northern Syria.
On a break from the conflict in Germany, he was deported from that country because he was on an Interpol watch list, and returned reluctantly to Australia in December.
Dyball was interviewed by the AFP at the airport – and had his passport confiscated – but was released without charge.
Nearly a year later, he remains under investigation by the police.
He had his passport returned to him to allow him to go on a family holiday to Fiji earlier this year, but then, in June, he was detained at Brisbane airport holding a one-way ticket to Sweden.
His passport was cancelled again.
Dyball said he went to Syria to assist in humanitarian work and to help civilians caught in the conflict.
But he ended up fighting on the front lines for the YPG against Isis before progressing to the “sabotage team”, clearing mines and booby traps left by retreating Isis soldiers.
He fought alongside fellow Australian Reece Harding who was killed by an improvised explosive device.
Dyball said he knew before he left for Syria it was “frowned upon” by the government for Australians to travel there to fight.
But he argued the government’s investigation into his activities showed a double standard in the federal government’s position.
“You [the government] say we can’t fight for them [the YPG], but yet you fund them,” he said.
“You’ll airstrike for them. You’ll aid them. So how is it OK for you to aid them and I can’t aid them?”
In a statement to 7.30, a spokesman for the attorney general, George Brandis, said: “The Australian government has, for a number of years, strongly and consistently discouraged Australians from travelling to conflict zones such as Syria and Iraq to participate in hostile activities.
“It is dangerous, it puts others’ lives at risk, and it may constitute a criminal offence.”
