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Biography & Autobiography Social Activists

Reasonable Cause to Suspect

A Mother's Ordeal to Save Her Son from a Kurdish Prison

by (author) Sally Lane

Publisher
Dundurn Press
Initial publish date
Feb 2023
Category
Social Activists, Arab & Middle Eastern, Terrorism
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781459750968
    Publish Date
    Feb 2023
    List Price
    $12.99
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781459750944
    Publish Date
    Feb 2023
    List Price
    $23.99

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Description

In a story of deceit, betrayal, and injustice, two parents are tried as terrorists for attempting to rescue their son from a Syrian war zone.

On September 2, 2014, Jack Letts, an idealistic eighteen-year-old British Canadian, phoned his mother saying, “Mum, I’m in Syria.” Those chilling words from a raging war zone set in train his family’s eight-year-long battle to rescue Jack from his disastrous mistake.

When an unscrupulous journalist invented the term “Jihadi Jack,” a false image of Jack spread throughout the world. Sally and John, Jack’s parents, faced the mammoth task of persuading a hostile public that their son was the victim of a smear campaign. He should, they argued, at least be allowed home to face a fair trial to address the claims against him.

But the Canadian and British governments had other plans. Jack is currently detained in a Kurdish prison, while the Canadian government claims it doesn’t know if he is alive or dead. This is his parents’ story of their painful struggle to persuade the world to save the son they love.

About the author

In 2019, Sally Lane and her husband John were convicted of supporting terrorism and sentenced to 15 months in prison, for trying to help their British son escape a war zone. She now lives in Ottawa.

 

Sally Lane's profile page

Excerpt: Reasonable Cause to Suspect: A Mother's Ordeal to Save Her Son from a Kurdish Prison (by (author) Sally Lane)

Introduction
Soon after being captured by the YPG (the Kurdish People’s Protection Units) in northern Syria in May 2017, our son, Jack Letts, was kept in solitary confinement in a cell he described as a dungeon. There was no ventilation and only a tiny window with two layers of bars at the top of the wall. It was here that he spent thirty-five days, with only his brain for company, fearing he was going insane.
Abandoned by both his governments (he was a dual British/ Canadian citizen) and believed by the world to be a fearsome jihadi — based on a sensation-seeking media that printed lies and assumptions — Jack was trying to come to terms with his fate. “This sounds weird,” he told a Canadian consular officer ten months later, in January 2018, “but in solitary, I wrote letters to the management. The last one I signed with my own blood, after scratching my face, thinking someone is going to listen. But no one listened.… I knew I was going out of my mind.”
When Jack was first captured, he was allowed to speak to us, his parents, via a phone app, for half an hour every other day. It was then we learned that initially the Kurds had treated him well, offering him cigarettes and telling him they were negotiating his freedom with Britain. They had their own spies in Raqqa, they told him, who had reported back that he was “one of the good guys.” They knew he had stood against ISIS — even refuting them in religious arguments in the street, right outside the police station — and told him he would be freed in three days’ time.
Over five years later — 2022, at the time of writing — this assertion seems like a sick joke. Britain, it seemed, and then Canada, had no interest in letting back any of their nationals to their home countries, preferring they remain indefinitely— in legal limbo, and in cramped, squalid conditions —where they were. After two months of frequent contact with Jack, all communication suddenly ceased. We didn’t know if he was alive or dead, and no one seemed to be able to help us find out. “We advise against all travel to Syria,” was the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s reply to our desperate pleas. “We have no consular access in Syria, and are unable to assist Jack Letts while he remains in that country.” FCO staff, it appeared, were even incapable of picking up a phone to speak to Jack’s captors, whose contact details we had provided them with.
How did any of this happen to a bright, lively, linguistically talented teenager from Oxford — only eighteen when he went to Syria—who had a love of the Arabic culture, language, and religion? Astonishingly, even a YPJ fighter, whose childhood friend worked in the prison Jack was in, and with whom I was in sporadic correspondence, described him as “charming.” How could it be that he went from being the class clown with a sense of fun and a wide circle of friends to being the world’s “most wanted” in the space of under a year?
Official sources of help, such as human rights NGOs or the Labour party opposition, which, in normal circumstances, could be relied upon to challenge the government’s intransigent position, also professed an inability to do anything. Jack, it seemed, was “politically difficult.” In an age of mass and instant technology, no one in the world seemed able to reach a British youngster, who had gone to Syria believing he was assisting the Syrian people against a brutal dictator, but had ended up locked in a foreign jail, and then forgotten.
As Jack’s parents — his only supporters, apart from a small circle of friends — we were prevented from running a full-scale, public campaign to negotiate his release, by strict contempt-of-court rules. In January 2016, we had been arrested under a charge of fundraising for terrorism after we’d tried to send Jack Åí1,000 to escape Raqqa, Syria, with the help of a people smuggler. Three and a half years later, we were still on bail, and newspapers and broadcasters were threatened with a hefty fine for contempt of court if they published anything revealing what we knew about Jack’s activities in Syria. Ostensibly, this was to prevent the possible prejudicing of a jury in our forthcoming trial (although the newspaper stories about “Jihadi Jack” had done that very well already). In actuality, the threat of contempt of court acted as a gag order on us so that we were unable to defend Jack against the lies that had been circulated about him, or campaign vigorously for his release.
Eventually securing a meeting with the Foreign Office in June 2017 — after screaming uncontrollably down their “emergency” phone line — I asked the Head of Special Cases how he would feel if it were his own son.
“I can see that it is very distressing for you,” he said.
“And how would you feel if it was your own son, and you were faced with someone like you?” I pursued.
“At least you would know you had done all you could do,” was his reply.
The Head of Special Cases was wrong. We were nowhere near saying that we had done all we could do. Our battle for justice for Jack had only just begun.

Editorial Reviews

(An) impassioned document…not an unbiased account of a complex, high-profile case, but instead a chronicle of pain and fury from a mother who has lost her son and the life she once knew.

Quill & Quire

I have been witnessing the pain and courage of the Letts for many years. Sally, Jack’s mother is a mother everyone should have. This book is another step in that fight for justice for Jack and others. Western citizens, so long consumed by a narrative of Muslim terrorism, have allowed the powerful to take liberties with our liberties. More of us need to stand with the parents and young people who were or are caught between Islamicists and state agents.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, journalist and author

Reasonable Cause to Suspect takes you on a gut-wrenching journey through the eyes of a devoted mother, Sally Lane. As she weaves her way through the legal and political systems and the unimaginable atrocities in Syria, Sally is determined to hold her son, Jack, in her arms again. At every turn, you need to remind yourself this story has not been dreamt up as fiction but rather is a real-life nightmare where despair and hope clash. You will never forget Jack’s story and his mother’s unwavering love and fierce commitment.

Sam Laprade, host of The Sam Laprade Show and CityNews Ottawa 101.1 FM

This book details deep loss in a Kafkaesque political landscape with surprising clarity, ironic humour and sobriety. Sally Lane lost her son to a war zone, and then to religious fervour, and now governmental inaction leaves him in an unending prison sentence — showing our democratic government's totalitarian stance on those it accuses as terror suspects, who once labelled, suffer an ongoing suspension of due process and are forever seen as guilty without trial. Who among us would not try to bring a family member home? The family has not given up.

David Gow, Canadian playwright, Relative Good

This book is a courageous refusal to submit to the violence of cold, indifferent bureaucracy. For this simple drive to hold onto that which is so dear to her, Sally and her family have been effectively unpeopled by the well-oiled stigmatising mechanisms within this society. She lays out in detail the sophisticated system of manipulation that rendered her family rightless. Bring Jack home. Enough is enough.

Lowkey, rapper and activist

This is an extraordinary tale…a testament to an ordinary parent’s unconditional love for a child told with candour and courage. A gripping read.

Adrian Harewood, Canadian journalist and professor

A nightmare, all around, told in this compelling memoir.

Globe and Mail

A timely and compelling account...Whether as a story of family solidarity and trust or as a case study in issues of justice and the rule of law, Reasonable Cause to Suspect is worth reading.

Winnipeg Free Press