Britain’s ‘Jihadi Jack’ has pleaded to be repatriated to Canada so he can ‘rot in jail’ there instead of staying in a Syrian prison camp.
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, 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.
The Muslim convert had held duel UK and Canadian citizenship but declared himself an ‘enemy of Britain’ after fleeing his Oxfordshire home to fight in Syria in 2014.
After being captured by Kurdish authorities in 2017, he begged to be allowed back to the UK.
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.
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
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
Letts, a muslin convert, had held duel UK and Canadian citizenship but declared himself an ‘enemy of Britain’ after fleeing his Oxfordshire home to fight in Syria in 2014
Letts’s mother, Sally Lane, who has been calling for the Canadian government to repatriate all of its own citizens held in Syrian camps and prisons, told Middle East Eye that there seems to have been 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 Lane.
‘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’.
Haines revealed in a W5 report that when she and her team located Letts after a days-long search, she was led ‘blindfolded and handcuffed’ into a basement ‘soundproof interrogation room’ by masked guards, noting that Letts was shoeless upon arrival.
Asked by Haines if he had been a member of IS, Letts replied: ‘Was I an ISIS member? No. A lot of things I said a long time ago because I was scared.
‘I can’t say everything because I am still in prison.’
He said that ‘naivete had played its role’ in his decision to go to Syria, saying he had been motivated by watching ‘videos of people being blown to pieces’ and a desire to help people.
‘I spoke to people who gave me the impression that ISIS wasn’t what people said it was… As soon as I got there, I realised they weren’t what I thought,’ he said.
Letts said he had become an enemy of the group. He had been imprisoned three times and told he would be killed.
‘Without exaggerating, more than 20 of my close friends were killed by ISIS,’ he said.
After converting to Islam at 16, Letts travelled to the Middle East in 2014, where he married an Iraqi woman
The prisoner told W5 that after so many years in detention, he no longer gave any thought to what would happen in the future.
‘It’s like being in a desert. Every time you come to a dune, there is another dune after it. So I stopped thinking,’ he said.
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.’
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.
Sally Lane (pictured with young Jack Letts), the mother of British-born Islamist ‘Jihadi Jack’
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
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.
