OTTAWA TURNS ITS BACK ON SO-CALLED ‘JIHADI JACK’ IN SYRIA.
For the first several months, the messages suggested Canada was willing, even eager, to get Jack Letts out of a Kurdish prison in northern Syria.
Global Affairs Canada discussed possible routes for moving the former resident out of ISIL-controlled Raqqa after his release. They asked the joint British-Canadian citizen’s jailers to provide him medical help, and said they were “extremely concerned” by reports he had been tortured.
“We are working diligently on your son’s file,” consular officials insisted to Letts’ UK-based parents.
Then earlier this year, the diplomats’ tone changed abruptly, the same officials saying their hands were tied by a lack of Canadian presence in Syria. Their ability to help the Muslim convert dubbed “Jihadi Jack” by British media was “extremely limited,” they now said.
The change in tone amid a 16-month exchange of emails — copies of which were obtained by the National Post — has left parents John Letts and Sally Lane deeply frustrated — and wondering if outside powers have gotten to the Canadian government.
Clive Stafford Smith, a prominent human-rights lawyer helping the family, said a senior Canadian political source told him the UK government had asked Ottawa “to do nothing (about Letts) without British consent.”
“As a British citizen myself, I have to apologize to the Canadian people for that kind of paternalism, and encourage you not to bow to British pressure,” Stafford Smith said Monday by email.
Global Affairs spokesman Stefano Maron did not respond to a question about possible U.K. intervention. But he said the security situation on the ground in Syria — even the relatively peaceful Kurdish-controlled enclave where Letts and others Canadians are being held — makes it difficult to provide them much assistance.
Diplomats have, however, set up a “communications channel” with Kurdish authorities to verify “the whereabouts and well-being of Canadian citizens,” he said.
The fate of Canadians linked to ISIL is also a politically volatile issue, with the Liberals accused of being too hesitant to repatriate and charge ex-fighters.
The opposition Conservatives say the government should, in fact, do nothing more on the Letts case, unless it collects enough evidence to prosecute him.
“We don’t want Jack Letts in Canada,” MP Pierre Paul-Hus, the Tories’ public safety critic, said Monday. “And I think a majority of Canadians feel the same way.”
Jack Letts, who grew up in Oxford but is a joint citizen like the rest of his family, travelled to the Middle East in 2014 after converting to Islam. He lived in ISIL-controlled Iraq, married a woman there, then ended up in Raqqa, Syria, the de-facto capital of the short-lived ISIL caliphate.
His parents say he never joined the Islamic State, came to vehemently oppose it, and eventually escaped Raqqa, only to be captured by the Kurdish forces who worked with a U.S.-led military coalition to defeat ISIL.
A British newspaper had called him Jihadi Jack, and the name stuck, evoking images of other Western ISIL members videotaped taking part in atrocities. There appears to be no evidence that Letts himself committed any violent acts. But he and his parents have said he would be willing to face prosecution and even prison in Canada if a case against him emerged.
Meanwhile, his organic-farmer father and book-editor mother now face charges themselves of attempting to fund terrorism, after trying to send their son the equivalent of $2,900 he said he needed to escape Raqqa.
In his limited communication with the outside world, Letts has indicated he is in deteriorating physical and mental health, kept in harsh, crowded conditions.
With the British government refusing to help, the parents turned to Canada last year. John Letts grew up near Chatham, Ont., and Sally Lane’s family moved to Ontario when she was a child, but the couple moved back to England after meeting here.
Global Affairs officials did note from the start that working in the semi-autonomous Kurdish area of Rojava would be difficult. But they promised to do their best to at least get Letts to a third country, his prison being almost on the border with Turkey, a NATO member.
“Once in Turkey and if he decides to go to Canada, we will try to assist him with this,” Andrew Carroll, a consular case management officer, emailed in July 2017.
Government officials sounded even more co-operative in phone calls, making it clear “that we were working to the same goal,” John Letts said in an interview.
But the tide had turned by the time he and Stafford Smith — one of the first lawyers certified to represent prisoners at the U.S. government’s Guantanamo Bay facility — met face-to-face with Global Affairs employees in Ottawa this April.
“I have to say that I have never been to a more dispiriting meeting in the 35 years I have done this work,” Stafford Smith said in a letter afterward to one of the GAC officials.
The parents say the standard Canadian response now — “there have been no Canadian officials in Syria since 2012. Our ability to provide consular assistance in Syria is extremely limited” — is strikingly similar to what British authorities have long told them.
Letts believes the British are worried about the impact on the parents’ terrorism-funding case if Letts gets out and makes it clear he’s no terrorist.
“I think it would scupper our trial,” said the father. “It’s better to keep Jack in there, completely unable to speak to anyone.”