LONDON: A British-born man being held in the Syrian Arab Republic should be repatriated to Canada or the UK, his mother has said.
Jack Letts, 30, joined Daesh aged 18 and was captured by Syrian-Kurdish forces in 2017. He has been held for nine years without trial.
Recent fighting between Syrian government and Kurdish forces has raised concerns about security in the region, with Letts one of 7,000 prisoners who could be moved to more secure locations.
Last week, US Central Command said it had begun to airlift prisoners out of Kurdish-run prisons.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio thanked Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani on Sunday after revealing that 150 of the most dangerous detainees had been sent to “secure facilities” in the neighboring country.
Letts’ mother Sally Lane said she is “frantically trying to find out as much as possible” about her son’s situation.
“We’ve heard absolutely nothing. They think we don’t deserve to know,” she said. “I can’t see that western governments will allow their citizens to be put on trial in Iraq where they have the death penalty and flawed trials.”
Letts was stripped of his UK citizenship in 2019, leaving him with Canadian citizenship as it is the country of his father’s birth.
He has had no contact with his family in the intervening years, but has been interviewed a number of times by Western news outlets.
“I’m not going to say I’m innocent. I’m not innocent. I deserve what comes to me. But I just want it to be … not just haphazard, freestyle punishment in Syria,” he told ITV in 2019.
In a later interview with a Canadian broadcaster, he claimed to have been a victim of Daesh, saying he was imprisoned by the group on three occasions after rejecting its ideology.
Lane said Letts should be returned to the UK or Canada to stand trial if terror charges can be brought. “If there’s evidence, put them on trial. But there is no evidence,” she added.
Rubio and Al-Sudani discussed “ongoing diplomatic efforts to ensure countries rapidly repatriate their citizens in Iraq, bringing them to justice,” the US State Department said.
Lane said she does not believe that her son is significant enough to have been transferred as part of the priority airlift, but voiced concerns after Centcom said it plans to complete the operation in “days not weeks.”
She added: “Jack’s small fry. He’s mostly been held in local prisons. He’s high profile only because he’s been in the news.”
UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper told the BBC last week that she had been “in touch” with Rubio to discuss the situation in Syria, with “shared interests in countering terrorism and extremism” on the agenda.
The news came after revelations that the UK had repatriated six women and 10 children from Kurdish-run prison camps in northern Syria in recent years, with 55 more people still in detention.
