Mother fighting to free son held in prison in Syria
Family say man dubbed `Jihadi Jack' has no links to ISIS
He is reviled in the media as “Jihadi Jack,” but to Sally Lane he is a son who is suffering.
Lane remains indefatigable in her campaign to free her son, Jack Letts, from a Kurdish prison. She is no less immovable in her opinion that her son has been unfairly tarred as an ISIS adherent by the British media.
Lane, a British-canadian dual national who now calls Ottawa home, brought her campaign to the Brockville Public Library last Saturday, assisted by Matthew Behrens of the Canadian advocacy group Stop Canadian Involvement in Torture.
Lane read from her book, Reasonable Cause to Suspect: A Mother's Ordeal to Save Her Son from a Kurdish Prison.
Jack was a teen with British and Canadian citizenship when he converted to Islam and later went to the Middle East, driven by idealism, the pair said.
Jack “wanted to do his bit in the Arab Spring against Assad,” she added, referring to the civil war against Syrian President Bashar al-assad.
At age 18, he was on a holiday in Jordan, and “he hopped on a plane,” ending up in Syria, said Lane, who was then living in Oxford, U.K.
Events that followed led many to conclude that Jack became a convert to ISIS, a “Jihadi” extremist.
What is not in dispute is that Jack Letts remains in a prison in Syria. The seventh anniversary of that detention is drawing near.
The pair said Jack was escaping ISIS territory when he was captured. He is now being detained by the Kurdish YPG Militia.
Lane and her husband were briefly imprisoned in Britain; they were convicted of funding terrorism for sending their son money, though they claimed they had permission from British police to send Jack money to help him escape from Islamic State territory. The couple received suspended sentences.
Nonetheless, the U.K. stripped Jack of his citizenship. Lane came to Canada in 2020, and started her campaign to get the Canadian government to repatriate him.
Behrens told the audience that Letts's Kurdish captors in fact want the foreign nationals in their custody to be sent back to their countries of origin, and Global Affairs Canada would need to fly someone there to sign a document.
Behrens accused the federal government of discrimination based on religion. He said Letts is one of at least 26 Muslim Canadians arbitrarily detained in Syria but Canada is preventing their return.
Leeds-grenville-thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes MP Michael Barrett declined to comment on the matter to Postmedia.
As of press time, Global Affairs Canada was in the process of formulating a response to a Recorder and Times inquiry about the case.