UK’s ‘Jihadi Jack’ pleads to be sent to Canadian jail instead of Syria | World | News
A man who left the UK to join the barbarous ISIS regime has pleaded to be moved from his prison cell in the Middle East so he can see his mum more.
Jack Letts, who has duel British-Canadian citizenship, declared himself an “enemy of Britain” after he fled from his home in Oxfordshire in 2014 to join the murderous death cult which was carrying out atrocities across Iraq and Syria.
But when coalition forces virtually destroyed ISIS by 2017, Letts was captured by Kurdish forces and has been languishing in captivity ever since.
Letts was interviewed by CTV News’ W5 programme this weekend, the first time he has spoken publicly since 2019. In the programme he denied having joined ISIS and claimed he had just said he was because he “was scared”.
He told the channel: “At least let me rot in a prison in Canada. At least I could see my mum once a year. Was I an ISIS member? No. There’s a lot of things I said a long time ago because I was scared.
“I can’t say everything because I’m sitting in prison. Maybe this is my last chance to get the truth across.”
Letts’ mother, Sally Lane, said she was “so angry” with the British and Canadian authorities and she told Middle East Eye her son’s condition had deteriorated.
She said: “I was shocked at Jack’s condition, and how distressed and clearly traumatised he is. I am so angry at the Canadian and British governments that they 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 this, and still they do nothing. The feeling of outrage and powerlessness in this situation is something I live with every single day.”
Last year Letts begged to be allowed to return to the UK, insisting he had “no intention” of killing Britons. The British government stripped his citizenship in 2019, making him the responsibility of the Canadian government.
The family have long stated that there is no evidence that he was an ISIS fighter and say he was imprisoned by ISIS and spent much of his time in Syria in hiding before escaping from territory controlled by the militant group in 2017.
Letts is the one of the most high-profile former jihadis who left this country when ISIS, otherwise known as Daesh, began their ruinous campaign of slaughter across the Middle East.
Shamima Begum, who left the UK in 2015 to join ISIS, is also still held by the Kurdish Syrian Defence Force (SDF) in the same region of Syria as Letts. Begum is in a camp for female former jihadis around 60 miles to the north.
