Jack Letts, the 21-year-old British Muslim convert who is suspected of going to Syria to help to build an Islamist state, has escaped from the Isis stronghold of Raqqa and is now a prisoner of the Kurdish militia.
Three years after Letts, known as “Jihadi Jack”, called his parents who live in Oxfordshire to tell them he was in Syria, he has managed to flee Isis-held areas, apparently after being guided by resistance fighters across a minefield.
His parents, Sally Lane, 55, a book editor, and John Letts, 56, an organic farmer, said that they were “elated” by the news which, they said, came after Letts had become disillusioned with Isis.
“We are immensely relieved. It’s the first time we’ve known that he might have survived all this,” Ms Lane said in an interview with The Oxford Times.
She and Mr Letts are themselves due to stand trial after trying to send money to their son. They say that he requested it to pay smugglers to help him to escape, but the transaction was blocked by the UK government, which feared that it would go to fund terrorism.
Advertisement
He has been speaking to his parents from a Kurdish prison cell, where he said that he wanted to come home to “explain some things” to his parents.
Letts, who went to Cherwell School in Oxford, converted to Islam as a teenager. In 2014 he went on holiday to Jordan, but then called his parents to tell them he had instead travelled to Syria, to territory held by Isis.
The Mail on Sunday reported that it had seen messages sent to his parents, which show that, during his time in Syria, he became increasingly troubled by the disconnection between his idea of an Islamic state and the brutal reality of murders and mass rape.
His father told the paper that on receiving these messages he had been terrified that his son, who was by this time trying to avoid the Isis secret police, could be captured and put to death.
“There are hundreds of thousands of people in Raqqa, and so many are in anguish, so many have been killed. Worst of all was the thought he could be tortured. What does Isis do with so-called apostates? You know the answer, and all the time I lived with the thought that they could do this to him,” he said.
Advertisement
In more recent messages to his parents, Letts says that he was indeed captured, but that the Isis courts released him because he had not broken any Islamic laws. “I was argumentative when I was in an Isis prison threatened with death. I walked out of the Isis court when the judge annoyed me, and so I got jumped on by loads of different people,” he said, in claims that cannot be independently verified.
“[I] made it clear to the Isis judge that I thought he was not a Muslim . . . I’ve been in ten different prisons in a year and a bit.”
Now Mr Letts and Ms Lane, who face up to 14 years in prison if convicted, hope that their son can make his way back to Britain. They said, however, that the Foreign Office has not yet provided the assistance it said it would to help them to achieve this.
A spokeswoman for the Foreign Office said that it did not have the resources to search for and help Letts.
“The UK advises against all travel to Syria and parts of Iraq,” she said. “As all UK consular services are suspended in Syria and greatly limited in Iraq, it is extremely difficult to confirm the whereabouts and status of British nationals in these areas.”