Singapore/Jakarta: Australian authorities have turned back 13 Iraqis who travelled by boat from Indonesia, according to a local police chief in the South-East Asian nation’s southernmost province.

Australian Border Force has not intercepted a vessel from Indonesia in almost three years, but the wooden boat was reportedly stopped in Australian waters at Ashmore Reef, 600 kilometres north of Broome, on Sunday.

The 13 Iraqis and three Indonesian crew were returned to Indonesia on this vessel.

Police in Rote Ndao, a regency in Indonesia’s East Nusa Tenggara province, said the 13 Iraqis and three Indonesian crew onboard had been taken to the local police station after arriving at Rote island on Wednesday.

They were returned on a different boat, called Rushani, to the one on which they had set out for Australia. The original vessel was seized, the crew told police.

“The information is that it was held back by the Australian customs,” Rote Ndao police chief I Nyoman Putra Sandita said. “The boat crew said the wooden boat was held back, they were moved by customs, and three days later they were sent back on the Rushani vessel.”

He said according to one of the Iraqis on board, the group had left Iraq on November 11 and had travelled to Jakarta and Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi province, before heading to Rote Ndao, from where they departed for Australia.

Police said there were six women and three children on the boat, the youngest of them a one-year-old boy.

The police chief also released information officers had received from the wife of one of the Indonesian crew members.

Nurhalima Ain, 28, whose husband Isro Pello was on board, told them the Australian navy had brought them back to Indonesian waters.

He had called her with a satellite phone when they had made it to Australian territory, she told police, and again to seek help on the way back because they were running out of fuel.

Australian Border Force was contacted for comment, but it typically does not confirm maritime patrol operations until weeks later, in monthly reports published online.

According to those reports, a boat has not been intercepted from Indonesia under Operation Sovereign Borders since January 2020.

The only boats that have been intercepted since then have come from Sri Lanka, after hundreds of people boarded rickety fishing vessels this year to escape the hardship of a crippling economic crisis. The majority of the boats were rounded up by Sri Lanka’s navy, but 183 people made it to Australian waters on six boats between May and August, and were returned by air and sea to Colombo.

The arrival of the first boat near Christmas Island on May 21, the day of the Australian federal election, triggered a scandal when the Morrison government went against protocol for ongoing operations and leaked news of it to journalists.

There are more than 14,000 registered refugees in Indonesia, which accepts asylum seekers, but as a non-signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol, restricts their rights there – including to work.

More than half are Hazara, a persecuted ethnic minority in Afghanistan, and most face the likelihood of never being resettled by a third country as a result of limited and falling intakes around the world.

Australia’s refugee allocation is 13,750 for 2022-23, down from a cap of 18,750 in 2018-19, although an extra 16,500 spots for Afghans have been set aside for the next four years following the Taliban’s takeover in Kabul in August 2021.

Australia does not, however, accept refugees who registered in Indonesia after July 1, 2014 – a rule implemented to disincentivise illegal boat travel when the turnbacks policy was put in place.

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