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.