British ‘Jihadist Jack’ has asked to be repatriated to Canada so he can ‘rot in jail’ there rather than being sent to a Syrian prison camp, in his first television interview in years.
Jack Letts, 29, a Canadian originally from the United Kingdom who has been detained for seven and a half years among suspected members of the Islamic State in northeastern Syria, was found by a television crew in a prison near Raqqa.
The explosive interview with CTV News’ W5 became the first time Letts has appeared on camera or been allowed to speak to the media since 2019.
The Muslim convert had British and Canadian citizenship, but declared himself an “enemy of Britain” after fleeing his home in Oxfordshire to fight in Syria in 2014.
After being captured by Kurdish authorities in 2017, he pleaded to be allowed to return to the UK.
In Saturday’s interview, Letts denied being a member of IS, but said there were things he couldn’t say because he was still behind bars.
Speaking to W5’s Avery Haines, the prisoner said he would have “no problem” being brought back to Canada, even if it meant having to spend 100 years in prison.
“At least let me rot in a prison in Canada,” he said.
Jack Letts, 29, a Canadian originally from the United Kingdom who has been detained for seven and a half years among suspected members of the Islamic State in northeastern Syria, was found by a television crew in a prison near Raqqa.
The explosive interview with CTV News’ W5 became the first time Letts has appeared on camera or been allowed to speak to the media since 2019.
Letts, a Muslim convert, had British and Canadian citizenship, but declared himself an “enemy of Britain” after fleeing his home in Oxfordshire to fight in Syria in 2014.
Letts’ mother, Sally Lane, who has been calling on the Canadian government to repatriate all of its own citizens detained in Syrian camps and prisons, said Middle East Eye that there appears to have been a clear deterioration in its condition over the past five years.
“I was shocked by Jack’s condition and how distraught and clearly traumatized he is,” Lane said.
“I’m so angry at the Canadian and British governments who 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 it and yet they don’t do anything.”
Haines revealed in a W5 report that when she and her team located Letts after a days-long search, masked guards took her “blindfolded and handcuffed” to a basement “soundproof interrogation room,” noting that Letts He was barefoot when he arrived.
When Haines asked him if he had been a member of ISIS, Letts replied: ‘Was I a member of ISIS? No. I said many things a long time ago because I was afraid.
“I can’t say everything because I’m still in prison.”
He said that “naivety had played a part” in his decision to go to Syria, stating that he had been motivated by seeing “videos of people being blown to pieces” and a desire to help people.
“I talked to people who gave me the impression that ISIS was not what people said it was… As soon as I got there, I realized they were not what I thought.”
Letts said he had become an enemy of the group. He had been imprisoned three times and told he would be killed.
“Without exaggeration, more than 20 of my close friends were killed by ISIS,” he said.
After converting to Islam at age 16, Letts traveled to the Middle East in 2014, where he married an Iraqi woman.
The prisoner told W5 that after so many years of detention, he no longer thought about what would happen in the future.
‘It’s like being in a desert. Every time you come to a dune, there is another dune behind it. “Then I stopped thinking,” he said.
After converting to Islam at age 16, Letts traveled to the Middle East in 2014 when he was 18, where he married an Iraqi woman.
He was captured and imprisoned in 2017 by forces fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorist group (Isil).
In an interview with Sky News in 2019, Letts confessed to having fought 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 guilty of financing terrorism after they sent him cash.
They were sentenced to 15 months in prison, with the sentence 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 then tried to send a further £1,000.
They said: “We have been condemned for doing what any parent would do if their child was in danger.”
Letts is one of tens of thousands of people, many of them foreigners, detained by Kurdish-led forces in Syrian territory formerly controlled by IS and held in camps and prisons for years without charge.
Letts has previously said he was tortured in detention, but Kurdish authorities say they operate in accordance with international human rights law.
Sally Lane (pictured with young Jack Letts), the mother of British-born Islamist ‘Jihadi Jack’.
Lane (right), a former Oxfam fundraiser, and his father John Letts (left), 62, became the first British parents to be charged with terrorism offenses 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 traveled to Syria to join ISIS; She 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 jihadist.
She now lives in 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 reaccepted into Western life.