From Richard Pendlebury

Anaturally, Kotey is pleased at her progress. But circumstances mean he remains very much a hands-off parent. The letter arrived not via the Royal Mail but the International Red Cross. This is because Kotey, 35, is in custody in northern Syria.

He tells me he has done little to warrant this detention. Others like him might have done wrong; it is for God to judge. But he himself, he says, is no more than an ‘over-rated and over-stated’ international ‘scapegoat’. The world nonetheless continues to regard him as ‘Jihadi Ringo’, one of the so-called ‘Jihadi Beatles’ — Mohammed emwazi (John), aine Davis (Paul)and el Shafee elsheikh (George) — who got the nickname because of their British accents.

This was the quartet of Islamic State extremists who came to personify the worst excesses of the murderous caliphate which, between 2014 and 2016, conquered vast swathes of Syria and Iraq.

Countless thousands were killed, raped or enslaved in its name. Footage of gruesome executions of Western hostages and other prisoners was broadcast to the world.

Kotey’s close friend from West london, Mohammed emwazi, aka ‘Jihadi John’, was said to be the man who wielded the beheading knife in several of these atrocity videos. emwazi was later killed in a targeted air-strike.

Kotey has been accused of torturing IS hostages. It has been reported that the Crown Prosecution Service has enough evidence to charge him with five murders.

When did he realise he had been identified (by surviving foreign victims) as a major player in the death cult? ‘When my photograph appeared on the front page of the Daily Mail,’ he grimaces. He took immediate action. ‘I had to change my appearance. I bought spectacles with non-prescription lenses and swapped my combat gear and military caps for a hood and arab robe. I knew then I was a marked man.’ From Rambo to geek. and now to prisoner with a very uncertain future.

This week, I spent several hours with Kotey — the longest one-onone interview with a member of the ‘Beatles’ — in a small, guarded room somewhere in this war-ravaged scrap of Mesopotamia. I also talked to another British Islamist prisoner, a former porter at the King edward VII hospital, in Central london, where the Queen had knee surgery and the Duchess of Cambridge was treated for morning sickness.

The tales they tell of their roles in the nightmare caliphate are markedly different. But they have one thing in common.

In april 1945, the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn wrote a scathing essay on the refusal of the Germans she had met to admit any complicity with adolf Hitler’s defeated regime. ‘no one is a nazi. no one ever was,’ the piece began.

denial of personal participation in, or responsibility for, the state’s organised barbarity can also be heard today across the camps and prisons of north-east Syria.

Here, large numbers of the fighters, followers and families of the defeated IS are being held, following the caliphate’s last stand earlier this year. about 1,000 men from outside the region, 4,000 wives and widows and 8,000 of their children.

Several hundred of these are thought to have gone to Syria from the UK or were born of British parents. But what is to be done with these foreign radicals?

The question has become a diplomatic hot potato. Who on earth would want these people back?

Certainly not the vast majority of the British public who have seen a number of mass attacks in this country by IS sympathisers.

and yet earlier this month, U.S. Defence Secretary Mark esper visited london to urge the British government to repatriate its own nationals. Their continued presence in the Middle east was destabilising the region, he said. This seems unlikely to happen soon. The UK Government has recently revoked the citizenships of a number of prominent IS adherents, including Kotey, ‘Jihadi Jack’ letts, the son of an Oxfordshire farmer, and teenage east londoner Shamima Begum, who gave birth to a child in a refugee camp.

But there is an alternative solution; one which is being examined by a cross-party delegation of British politicians who visited northern Syria this week and were given access to letts on Thursday.

The authorities here are lobbying for the setting up of a branch of the Hague-based International war crimes tribunal. ‘We want it here because the crimes were committed here and all the evidence and witnesses are here,’ Dr abdul Karim, co- chairman of autonomous north east Syria’s Department of external affairs, tells me. another issue is the IS families. ‘We want them to be delivered back to their countries of origin. Unfortunately, the countries are afraid of them. not only the governments but the populations.

‘ But it is wrong to let them remain,’ Dr Karim argues. ‘The children are growing up in camps where they are being taught the ideology of IS. It is a ticking bomb. a new IS, more dangerous than before, will threaten the whole world. It is not just our problem.’

Which brings us back to Jihadi Ringo. Some people associated with monstrous acts are said to radiate an ‘aura of evil’. That could not be said of Kotey, who is skinny and nondescript.

at first, he thinks I am the travel writer eric newby because I have with me one of his paperbacks. newby died in 2006. Does Kotey have his own reading matter in custody? ‘I wish,’ he sighs.

It is only when he begins to relax and discuss IS, offer his ‘objective analysis’ of the Koran and set out his future legal defence — ‘the FBI refused me a lawyer’ — that one begins to feel a little sick and then angry. He relaxes because we talk at first not about his friend ‘Jihadi Jack’ but Kotey’s own past.

It began in Trellick Tower, the 322ft tall block of council flats built in london’s notting Hill in 1972.

‘It’s a listed building now,’ he says and laughs at the absurdity.

‘The area was a changing place then, with Yuppies dressing down