A Syrian smuggler who tried to buy the Oxford-born “Jihadi Jack” from his Kurdish captors says he was told the young Isis recruit was of too high a value — because people believe he is a top-level killer.
Jack Letts, who was dubbed Jihadi Jack after he went to Syria in 2014 at the age of 18, has claimed in messages to his parents that he has never committed any violent acts. He fled the caliphate last month.
Abu Jassem — the pseudonym of a smuggler who runs a network of spies stretching from Turkey through Isis territories — revealed to The Sunday Times last week that Isis contacts had told him Letts was a “slaughterer” who had replaced the notorious fellow Briton Jihadi John when he was killed in 2015.
There is no publicly available evidence to support the claim that Letts was lined up as the heir to Jihadi John — which Letts’s mother described yesterday as “bullshit”. But a western intelligence source said last week Letts was certainly an Isis member. The source said he is believed to have been a fighter and is suspected of committing criminal acts.
Jassem, a former rebel fighter who helps to smuggle Isis members out of the caliphate, has given accurate information in the past.
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Letts, who converted to Islam at school, has said that, after running away to the Isis caliphate, he was dismayed by its brutality. It is understood he spent more than a year in hiding before escaping. He is being held captive by the YPG, a Kurdish militia that is fighting Isis.
Jassem claims he tried to buy Letts from the YPG. He reasoned that the white convert could provide him with valuable information before being sold to his family for a lucrative sum. But the YPG refused to sell.
Intrigued, Jassem delved into Letts’s background, sending messages to Isis fighters in Raqqa who are former members of his own rebel battalion to ask why he was not for sale.
“They told me to be careful,” said Jassem. “That the Kurds did not talk about him. That he had replaced the British Kuwaiti Emwazi.”
Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwaiti-born former rapper from west London, became notorious as Jihadi John after appearing in videos in which western hostages were beheaded. He was killed in a drone strike.
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Jassem said he had been told that Letts was Emwazi’s replacement. “He was a slaughterer,” Jassem said. “They were going to use him in propaganda.”
Letts, who appeared in no Isis videos, has told the BBC from his cell that he hired a smuggler to help him escape the caliphate by motorbike before walking through a minefield into YPG territory.
Jassem said he had been told that the smuggler was supposed to take Letts into areas controlled by Arab rebels, from where he would be taken to Turkey. Instead he was betrayed and the smuggler sold him to the Kurdish militia.
Officials believe he is being debriefed by the YPG. It is not known whether US special forces, who have a heavy presence in the area where he is being held, have taken part in his interrogation. If Jassem’s claims are true, the convert could yield a wealth of information.
His parents, John Letts and Sally Lane, have complained that the Foreign Office reneged on a promise to return their son home once he left Isis territories.
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The authorities say his situation is complicated by the fact that he is being held by a militia, not a state, in a country where British consular services have been suspended.
I want to explain things to my mother
Nearly three years ago, in September 2014, Jack Letts told his mother he was in Syria. He has claimed that he was infatuated by the idea of an Islamic state, but that a year later the sheen began to fade.
“I believe that the Islamic State teaches the people a huge creedal mistake,” he said in a message.
It is thought that by December 2015 he was hatching a plan to be smuggled out of Raqqa and head to the border, but it failed.
Life was becoming dangerous. “I stand out a mile. Obviously I’m not Syrian. Some time they’re going to get me,” he said in a message to his parents.
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Letts was later arrested and is thought to have spent more than a year in Isis cells before his release.
“I was argumentative when I was in an Isis prison [and] threatened with death,” he told his parents.
“[I] made it clear to the Isis judge that I thought he was not a Muslim.”
Last month he revealed that he had escaped from Raqqa and was being held in a Kurdish prison.
“I found a smuggler and walked behind him through minefields,” he said in a series of messages to the BBC. “[We] eventually made it near a Kurdish point where we were shot at twice and slept in a field.”
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He told Al-Araby television that he wants to be freed. “I have no idea what is going to happen to me now. It’s the future, no one knows except for Allah,” he said.
“I want to see my mum and explain to her some things.”
@louiseelisabet