Mother of Jihadi Jack: Was I too liberal a parent?
THE mother of ‘Jihadi Jack’ has told how she has guilty thoughts – and fears her liberal parenting led to him joining Islamic State.
In her memoir, Sally Lane, 60, said she wonders if his ‘chaotic’ childhood in Oxford led her son to travel to Syria to enlist with the terrorists.
Jack Letts, 28, left his home in 2014 holding dual UK and Canadian citizenship. Using money from his parents, he said he was visiting a friend in Jordan but joined IS in Raqqa. In her book, Ms Lane writes: ‘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.’ Ms Lane says her British-born son’s college tutors had been concerned at his bad behaviour and she wonders if it was her fault for not taking ‘a firm enough hand with him’.
She also writes of her guilt at not taking her son’s obsessive compulsive disorder seriously enough and fears he was given ‘too much agency at an early age’ so he grew up thinking he could ‘change the world’.
In Reasonable Cause To Suspect, she talks of ‘self-recrimination’ and regrets taking in lodgers when Letts was young. These included ‘an aggressive heroin addict whose friends regularly robbed the place’, reported The Sunday Times. Letts was captured by Kurdish authorities in 2017 and begged to come back to the UK but the Home Office withdrew his British passport in 2019, making him the responsibility of Canada.
He has remained at a Kurdish prison in Syria ever since
‘Perhaps he had been traumatised’
but Ms Lane, a former Oxfam fundraiser, and his father John Letts, 62, have not heard from him in two years.
In 2019 they were convicted of entering into a funding arrangement for terrorism purposes after sending £223 to their son and given 15-month suspended sentences
Last month the Canadian authorities were told by a federal court to repatriate Letts but the Ottawa government is appealing.