Please sign and share: https://www.change.org/p/children-forced-to-eat-sand-sign-to-free-jack-letts-43-canadian-kids-women-men-in-syria Last week, my son, Jack, marked his 27th birthday in a Syrian dungeon, arbitrarily detained in conditions the UN has described as ‘meeting the threshold for torture’. I haven’t seen him since he was an idealistic 18-year-old who went off to Syria to do his bit for the Arab Spring by assisting victims of the brutal Assad regime.
This was the sixth birthday he has woken up to the same nightmare of his unjust imprisonment without charge, not knowing how long his torment is going to last and believing the world has forgotten about him. A staunch opponent of Daesh (aka ISIS) and imprisoned by the terrorist group on multiple occasions, Jack was fleeing ISIS in 2017 with a group of other refugees when he was detained by Canadian-allied Kurdish forces in northeast Syria.
Jack now has the unenviable distinction of being the longest-held of 40+ Canadian men, women and children in the series of camps and prisons colloquially referred to as “Guantanamo on the Euphrates.” The dire conditions there have been well-documented by the likes of Human Rights Watch and Save the Children.
In a word, they are unimaginable. The camps for women and children are beset by violence, fear, misery, and death. Malnutrition, dehydration, illness and disease are rife, with no alleviating medical care. Flimsy tents provide little protection against the harsh winter weather, and are under constant threat of sewage flooding or fire. The men’s prison cells are packed with bone-thin prisoners, who are denied daylight for months on end and blocked from any contact with the outside world.
Save the Children reports that youngsters they interviewed say their lives are “simply wasting away” with violence and illness a daily risk.
One would think a Canadian government aware of such conditions would want to save its own citizens from such daily brutality. But Canada appears to be digging in its heels, refusing to meet the very simple request of the Kurdish detainers: send an official representative to sign handover documents and issue travel documents. We’ve been forced to go to Federal Court in December seeking an order to repatriate our loved ones.
In January 2018, Jack told a Canadian consular officer that he had been tortured and tried to end his life because he believed this was ‘preferable to his mother seeing him insane’. How can any mother hear those words and not go insane herself? When I shared this with Global Affairs Canada (GAC), they told me the Canadian government was doing everything it could to secure the release of my son, and that it took allegations of torture very seriously.
That promise was nearly five years ago. Since then, the government has done precisely nothing to secure Jack’s release; they have, in fact, actively prevented and opposed it. After the return last month from Syria of two Canadian women and two children, a high-profile former US diplomat, Peter Galbraith, tweeted that one of those women could have been rescued with the assistance of a US military jet 8 months ago, but access to her camp had been deliberately blocked by the Canadian government.
It is difficult to understand why the government insists on keeping Canadian citizens, including children, in torture conditions. When I asked GAC if I would be told if Jack were no longer alive, they said they could not guarantee this information would be relayed to me. The sheer cruelty of this is beyond belief.
Every night, I have to think of Jack lying on a concrete floor, as he has done for the past 5 ½ years, going to sleep hungry and in despair. I wonder if his kidney stones are causing excruciating pain, and whether he has managed to persuade the guards to get him medical treatment. I wonder if he has tried again to end it all, having lost all hope of release.
Jack’s freedom from an inhuman dungeon is only possible via the intervention of Global Affairs Minister Melanie Joly. We have seen from last month’s repatriations that this is not ‘too difficult’ or ‘too impossible’, as the government falsely claimed before. Jack’s fate, and that of the other 40+ detainees, lies in her hands. Rather than fighting us in court, it’s time she invited us to the table to find a way out of this nightmare.
Thank you for your support.
Sally Lane, Jack's mum