Canada has been ordered to repatriate 23 Canadian citizens held in Islamic State prison camps in Syria – reportedly including British-born Muslim convert Jack Letts.
Letts, who had dual British and Canadian nationality, left his family home in Oxford in 2014 to allegedly fight with ISIS as a teenager.
He previously told Sky News he wanted to be released from prison to join the fight against Islamist radicalization.
Known as “Jihadi Jack”, Letts was stripped of his British citizenship in 2019 by the Home Office.
In a ruling on Friday evening, Canada’s Federal Court said the government must repatriate four Canadian men – after an agreement was reached earlier this week to repatriate six women and 13 children also detained in camps in the northeast of Syria.
This follows a lawsuit filed against the government by relatives of the detainees who argued that preventing them from returning to Canada would violate their constitutional rights.
Federal Court Judge Henry Brown ordered the government to seek the men’s repatriation as soon as reasonably possible and provide them with passports or emergency travel documents.
The Canadians detained in Syria are among many foreign nationals in prison camps in the war-torn region, which are run by Kurdish forces who recaptured the territory from IS.
Judge Brown said a federal government official was to travel to Syria to facilitate the return of the men after their captors agreed to hand them over.
Letts, who converted to Islam aged 16, was arrested by Kurdish authorities who have been holding him prisoner since 2017.
The decision to strip British citizenship from Letts, who is a Canadian national because his father was born in Canada, follows the UK citizenship revoked for IS wife Shamima Begum in February 2019.
In a meeting With Sky News, Letts confessed to fighting against the Syrian regime but said he regretted being with the “wrong people”.
