The mother of British-born Islamist ‘Jihadi Jack’ has pleaded for him to be brought home rather than stay in a Syrian prison camp.
Sally Lane, 61, said her son Jack Letts, 29, who fled to Syria to allegedly become an Islamic State fighter as a teenager, should be brought home to Britain or Canada so he can be tried in their courts.
It comes after Letts — a Canadian originally from the UK — gave an interview with CTV News’ from a Kurdish prison denying he had ever been an IS member.
Speaking to The Mirror, Ms Lane said the decision to block her son’s return to England undermined British values of opposing ‘illegal imprisonment and exile and its promise of access to swift and impartial justice’.
Ms Lane, who now lives in Canada, told the newspaper: ‘Jack was denied all of this when he was stripped of his British citizenship without any fair, open, transparent judicial process or even an opportunity to respond.’
She compared her son’s imprisonment to British volunteers captured by Russia while fighting for Ukraine.
She said if he had been a ‘naïve teenager going to Ukraine and was captured by Russia’ there would be ‘instant condemnation from government officials’.
Ms Lane accused the UK’s institutions of being ‘hypocritical’ and said ‘human rights apply to everyone equally’.
Sally Lane, 61, said her son Jack Letts, 29, who fled to Syria to allegedly become an Islamic State fighter as a teenager, should be brought home to Britain or Canada so he can be tried in their courts
Sally Lane (pictured with young Jack Letts), the mother of British-born Islamist ‘Jihadi Jack’
Jack Letts, 29, a Canadian originally from the UK who has been detained for seven-and-a-half years among suspected Islamic State members in northeastern Syria
Letts, who was brought up in Oxfordshire, fled to Syria in 2014 using money given to him by his parents to visit a friend in Japan.
He reportedly told his parents he intended to learn Arabic and study the Koran on a three-month trip in Kuwait, but joined ISIS in Raqqa.
After being captured by Kurdish authorities in 2017, he begged to be allowed back to the UK but the Home Office tore up his British passport in 2019, making him the responsibility of the Canadian government.
He has been detained for seven-and-a-half years among suspected Islamic State members and was found by a television crew in a prison near Raqqa.
The bombshell interview with CTV News’ W5 programme is the first time Letts has appeared on camera or been allowed to speak to media since 2019.
In Saturday’s interview, Letts denied he had ever been an IS member, but told how there were things he couldn’t say as he was still behind bars.
Speaking to W5’s Avery Haines, the prisoner said he would have ‘no problem’ being taken back to Canada — even if it meant he had to spend 100 years in jail.
‘At least let me rot in a prison in Canada,’ he said.
Ms Lane previously told Middle East Eye she had seen a clear deterioration in his condition in the past five years.
‘I was shocked at Jack’s condition, and how distressed and clearly traumatised he is,’ said Ms Lane.
The bombshell interview with CTV News’ W5 programme has now become the first time Letts has appeared on camera or been allowed to speak to media since 2019
After converting to Islam at 16, Letts travelled to the Middle East in 2014, where he married an Iraqi woman
‘I am so angry at the Canadian and British governments that they think it’s okay to completely destroy him as a human being. Jack is going to die if they don’t repatriate him.
‘They know this, and still they do nothing’.
After converting to Islam at 16, Letts travelled to the Middle East in 2014 aged 18, where he married an Iraqi woman.
He was captured and jailed in 2017 by forces fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) terror group.
In an interview with Sky News in 2019, Letts confessed to fighting against the Syrian regime but said he regretted being with the ‘wrong people’.
He also said he felt guilty for what he put his parents through, after they were found convicted of funding terrorism after they sent him cash.
They were sentenced to 15 months imprisonment, suspended for 12 months.
Sally Lane and John Letts, who is Canadian, had sent £223 to their son while he was in Syria despite learning he had joined IS, and later tried to send a further £1,000.
They said: ‘We’ve been convicted for doing what any parents would do if their child was in danger.’
Lane (right), a former Oxfam fundraiser, and father John Letts (left), 62, became the first British parents to be charged with terrorism offences after sending money to their son in Syria
Following an Old Bailey trial, they were found guilty of entering into a funding arrangement for terrorism purposes and given 15-month suspended sentences
At the time of the trial, they said: ‘We’ve been convicted for doing what any parents would do if their child was in danger.’ Pictured: John Letts with his son
Letts is one of tens of thousands of people, many of them foreign nationals, detained by Kurdish-led forces in formerly IS-controlled Syrian territory and held in camps and prisons for years without charge.
He has previously said he was tortured in detention, but Kurdish authorities say they operate in compliance with international human rights laws.
Letts’ case is similar to that of Shamima Begum, the 15-year-old from Bethnal Green, east London, who fled to Syria to join ISIS.
She was one of three schoolgirls who travelled to Syria to join ISIS – was stripped of her British citizenship after she was found, nine months pregnant, in a Syrian refugee camp in February 2019.
The Londoner fled the UK in February 2015 and lived under ISIS rule for more than three years where she married a Dutch jihadi.
She now lives at the al-Roj camp in northern Syria, run by the Syrian Democratic Forces, which she described as ‘worse than a prison’ in her desperate bid to be re-accepted into Western life.
Shamima Begum also lost her UK passport after she was found, nine months pregnant, in a Syrian refugee camp in February 2019
In the memoir, Reasonable Cause to Suspect, Ms Lane explains that her son’s tutors were concerned about his bad behaviour at college, adding she wonders whether it was her fault for not taking ‘a firm enough hand with him’, according to The Times.
Explaining her ‘self-recrimination’, she said she regrets staying with lodgers when Letts was young, adding that they lived with ‘an aggressive heroin addict whose friends regularly robbed the place’.
She also describes the guilt she felt for not taking her son’s obsessive compulsive disorder ‘seriously enough’ and that he perhaps was given ‘too much agency at an early age’ so he grew up thinking he could ‘change the world’.
She added: ‘Perhaps he had been traumatised when, at the age of three, his father and I separated for a couple of years and he had spent formative years in a chaotic household.
‘Over and over again, I’ve raked over all the incidents of his childhood where I could have been better, or acted differently.
‘All these guilty thoughts and doubts I have lived with daily.’