LONDON: The mother of a Daesh extremist known as ‘Jihadi Jack’ has said that she has “guilty thoughts” about whether his “chaotic” childhood led him to join the terrorists as a teenager.
In an autobiography, Sally Lane says her “over-liberal” parenting style may have led her son, Jack Letts, to leave the UK at the age of 18 bound for Syria.
Lane said that she lived with a group of “lodgers, including an aggressive heroin addict whose friends regularly robbed the place” during Letts’s childhood.
Letts, now 27, left the UK in 2014 after his parents paid for him to visit a Muslim friend in Jordan.
He had informed them that he would travel onwards to Kuwait to improve his Arabic but instead ended up in Raqqa, the seat of power for the extremist group.
He was later captured by pro-western forces and had his British citizenship revoked on national security grounds.
In her book, “Reasonable Cause to Suspect,” Lane describes a meeting about her son’s uncontrollable behavior with tutors at a further education college in Oxford.
“I wondered if they thought Jack’s problems stemmed from his over-liberal parents who hadn’t taken a firm enough hand with him,” she wrote.
“Later on, a portion of the general public certainly believed this to be the case.
“I’ve wondered this myself during my constant internal discussions. Over and over again, I’ve raked over all the incidents of his childhood where I could have been better, or acted differently.”
She said she was tormented with “self-recrimination” and criticizes herself for not taking her son’s obsessive compulsive disorder “seriously enough.”
The former charity worker questions whether Letts’s conversion to Islam at 16 was to find “another, larger family in a Muslim network” as his own relatives lived far away in North America.
“Was he given too much agency at an early age so that he grew up with the belief that he could, as an individual, change the world?” she asks.
“Or perhaps he had been traumatized when, at the age of three, his father and I separated for a couple of years and he had spent formative years in a chaotic household that he, his younger brother and I shared with a group of lodgers, including an aggressive heroin addict whose friends regularly robbed the place?
“All these guilty thoughts and doubts I have lived with daily.”
Lane, 60, and her organic farmer husband, 62, were found guilty in 2019 of sending money to their son in Syria despite being warned by the police that it could be used to fund terrorism.
The couple, who said they were trying to help their son escape Daesh, received suspended sentences for funding terrorism. Lane said she was placed on a “no-fly” list after being convicted.
Letts has been held in an overcrowded prison managed by the Syrian Democratic Forces since 2017, but a court in Ottawa ruled that he must be repatriated to Canada because he has Canadian nationality through his father, John Letts. The Canadian government says it will appeal against the decision.
Lane left the UK in early 2020 and now lives in Ottawa.