NAURU – A refugee family split between Sydney and Nauru is desperate to reunite.

“At the beginning they said we’ll transfer you to Darwin and if your treatment takes longer, we’ll bring all your children,” says Nasreen, the wife and mother of the familyof five.

“But they lied, and when I realised they lied I was crying and screaming.”

Nasreen sits in a recliner at the edge of her tidy kitchen in Sydney. Her small body is covered with a blanket, her face framed with a scarf.

She cries, covering her face with her hands, as she recalls fleeing Afghanistan with her children to follow her husband to Australia, ending up in Nauru and then Sydney – separated from a son and a daughter.

“One night some men came to my home – I assumed they were Taliban – and they hit me in my back. I don’t remember if it was a stick or a gun butt,” she says through a translator.

“They tried to steal my son Daryoush and I tried to save him and they hit my back. I was screaming.”

They crossed the border to Pakistan, then into Indonesia, before finding someone to take them by boat to Australia in 2013. But Nasreen was afraid of the water.

“My children said we had two options – we die in the water or we get to Australia and have a life. But we didn’t know we’d be stuck with a slow death.”

The Hazara family of five – all of whom have been found to be refugees – has been split three ways, with no chance of reunification in sight.

In 2014 Nasreen and her daughter Mahboubeh were transferred to Darwin and then Sydney so Nasreen could be treated for the severe injuries stemming from the Taliban beating.

Her other two children, Daryoush and daughter Narges, remained on Nauru. They haven’t seen each other since.

Her husband, Mohammad, who has lived in Australia since 2011, is banned from living with them.

Her son and daughter left on Nauru both suffer from serious mental illness and physical ailments.

Narges has twice attempted suicide. She can no longer talk to her sister on the phone because of a years-long ear infection that she says hasn’t been properly treated. It gives her headaches and recently began affecting her hearing.

Guardian Australia revealed earlier this month multiple expert recommendations have been made over the past three and a half years that the siblings be transferred to Australia. The government dismissed them all.

It has been seven years since the father Mohammad has seen his other two children.

“Do you have children? If you have children, you understand,” he says, also through a translator.

Nasreen interrupts: “Even if they don’t have a child, they are human and they have feelings and they understand.”

But her husband shakes his head. “If you don’t have a child, you can’t understand.”

He sits restlessly. Arriving a few years before his family, Mohammad spent seven months in detention on Christmas Island before being granted refugee status and residency in Australia.

He lives 40 minutes away by bus, with five single refugee men. He is not allowed to live with his wife and daughter or stay overnight.

“Why is a five-member family separated into three?” he asks. “Six of the best years of the best part of their lives has passed. They wish to study and enjoy their life, but it’s gone, in pain.”

The tangled web of Australian government refugee policy has worked to ensure there are no loopholes allowing people who sought asylum by boat to settle in Australia, but it has created a number of tragic catch-22s.

“It’s hard to understand just how gut-wrenching and soul-destroying that must be – to be so, so close to finally seeing the people you love the most, and yet still be so painfully far,” says Daniel Webb, the director of legal advocacy at the Human Rights Law Centre.

“There are only a handful of families in this situation. It’s an absolute no-brainer. Families should be together.”

The government stance on bringing refugees like Narges and Daryoush to Australia is well known.

It’s medically impossible for Nasreen to return to Nauru with Mahboubeh, where at least four of them could be together.

The four could apply for US resettlement – under a deal which has so far moved more than 200 people from Manus and Nauru – if the Australian government allowed Nasreen and Mahboubeh to do so from Australia, but Mohammad couldn’t join them.

“We are in limbo at the moment,” says Mahboubeh. “Even if they say, ‘you guys can go to US’, my mum, she can’t go back to Nauru. When she has a hip replacement, she has another problem in her back which they can’t fix, so how can she go?

“It’s torturing us. I don’t know why they do it. Every day we are hoping, ‘okay maybe tomorrow, next week, next year, we will be reunited’ – but it never happens. It’s been years. Why? We are not bad people, or do anything wrong.”

The Department of Home Affairs was asked how a family split up between Australia and Nauru could be reunited, seeing that the Australian-based members are medically unable to return to Nauru.

But the department said only: “Individuals who are transferred to Australia for medical treatment should return to Nauru as soon as reasonably practicable.”

When asked in Senate estimates whether refugees had to return to Nauru to apply for US resettlement, the department’s head, Michael Pezzullo, said “in general” that was the expectation, but there could be case-by-case considerations made “for compassionate reasons”. Those reasons are yet to be found for a single case.

A spokeswoman for the UNHCR Regional Representation in Canberra said that for the “very few” families in a unique situation like this, reuniting in Australia was the only option which made sense.

“Refugees forcibly transferred to Manus Island and Nauru but with close family in Australia have been placed in an impossible dilemma by the government’s refusal to bring them together,” she says.

The only way this family can ever be together again is if the federal government lets them, says Webb.

“The worst thing about this family’s anguish is how easily our government could fix it,” he says.

“If Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Dutton just say the word, this family could be hugging each other tomorrow night. They could finally go to sleep without that awful knot in their stomach and without being woken up by those waves of panic that maybe they’ll never see each other again.”

- Guardian