I received a note the other day from Sally Lane, the mother of Jack Letts, the British teenager who went to Syria in his gap year and who remains uncontactable in a Kurdish prison camp, along with tens of thousands of others, suspected of involvement with Islamic State. Sally has written a book, Reasonable Cause to Suspect, about Jack’s five years of incarceration and the family’s efforts to have him freed to face justice at home.
I met her a few years ago, with her husband, John Letts, and wrote about the trial in which the British government thought it worthwhile to prosecute them for “funding terrorism” (they had sent £223 to Jack, to buy a new pair of glasses and to try to find a way of getting back to the UK). She knows that there are plenty of people with little sympathy for her son, who was 18 when he went to Syria without their knowledge in 2014.
