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‘I was simply luckier’: Holocaust survivors warn against forgetting Nazi atrocities

Survivors of Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp, laid flowers and candles at the memorial site on Tuesday, as commemorations marking its liberation 81 years ago took place around Europe and beyond. Marking International Holocaust Memorial Day, Jewish leaders across the continent warned against forgetting the extermination of millions, while some of the few remaining survivors urged ordinary people to stand up against populism and extremism. One survivor, Tova Friedman, 87, who is due to address the German parliament on Wednesday, said she would be speaking directly to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland in her speech and asking them: “How dare you? Who do you think you are?” The official day of remembrance of Soviet troops’ liberation of the few surviving prisoners of Auschwitz in 1945 from the clutches of their Nazi German captors is 27 January. It was declared the official German day of remembrance in 1996, and officially adopted by the United Nations in 2005. At the Auschwitz memorial site 24 former prisoners braved freezing temperatures to lay wreaths at the “death wall” where German soldiers killed mainly Polish political prisoners. Polish president Karol Nawrocki later joined survivors for a ceremony at nearby Birkenau, the huge site to which Jews from across Europe were transported to be murdered in gas chambers. About 1.1 million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz alone, as well as Poles, Roma and others, including people persecuted for their religious or sexual orientation. At the snow-covered Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in central Berlin, a sea of grey concrete blocks built as an indelible symbol of Germany’s contrition, candles were lit and white roses laid on the slabs. Elsewhere events were held at museums, schools and railway stations across the country while informal gatherings took place in towns and cities across Europe at Stolpersteine, small brass plaques cemented into pavements marking former residences of Jews who were deported to concentration camps. Present-day inhabitants laid candles and flowers on them. In Terezín, site of the former Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic, where thousands of Jews were collected and died or were sent from there to Auschwitz and other death camps, a candlelit procession was due to take place on Thursday evening. The Netherlands marked its national Holocaust memorial day on Sunday with a silent procession through Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter. In Ireland, the government announced more funding for Holocaust education in schools after a survey found 15% of young people had never heard of it and 10% of those aged between 18 and 29 thought it was a “myth”. An estimated 196,600 Jewish survivors are believed to still be alive globally, compared to the 220,000 estimated to have been alive a year ago, according to the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Friedman, who is due to address the Bundestag on Wednesday, was five when she and her mother were deported from their home in Gdynia near Gdansk in Poland, to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She likely survived due to a technical malfunction of the gas chambers and, during death marches in January 1945, hid among corpses. “I represent one and a half million children who were murdered and who are not here to speak for themselves,” Friedman told German media. “My story is representative of all their stories because we all had similar experiences. I was simply luckier than them, because I survived.” Together with her grandson, Aron Goodman, 20, who also accompanied her to Berlin, Friedman has a TikTok account called “TovaTok”, in which the two talk about her experience and warn against the growth of antisemitism. Goodman is one of a growing number of surviving relatives choosing to take on the vital task of telling the stories of their parents and grandparents. Friedman, who emigrated to the US where she became a successful therapist, warned against the rise of the populist far-right in Europe. She said she would directly address the AfD, which is up for election in five states this year and is predicted to do well in at least three of them. The anti-immigrant party, which backs policies such as the mass deportation of non-naturalised citizens, has repeatedly called for an end to what it calls “Schuldkult” or a “culture of guilt”, to describe the perpetuation of the memory of Nazi crimes. “I want very much to face up to them, not to hide away from them,” said Friedman. Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat warned that antisemitism was more rampant than at any time since the Holocaust, and was “taking on new and disturbing forms”. She also warned of AI-generated content which was being deliberately created “to blur the line between fact and fiction, distort historical truth and undermine our collective memory”. The Frankfurt-based Anne Frank Educational Centre drew attention to a “flood” of AI-generated content being used like propaganda, in which the victims were ridiculed, with the aim of denying or trivialising them. Representatives of the Jewish community across the world, including Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, urged people to show “civil courage” and stand up for democracy at a time when there was a considerable and growing swell in favour of “pushing us as a Jewish community out of public life”. “These forces will continue to grow stronger if society fails to stop these threatening developments,” he warned. Police said they were investigating who was behind the weekend vandalism attack of a memorial in front of the remains of the synagogue in the northern port city of Kiel, which was destroyed in the state-sanctioned attacks on Jewish property in November 1938. Flowers and candles laid at the site were crushed and scattered, local media reported.

Mexico’s president says cancellation of oil shipment to Cuba is ‘sovereign’ decision

Mexico has cancelled a shipment of oil to Cuba, the country’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, appeared to confirm on Tuesday, but she insisted the decision was “sovereign” and not a response to pressure from the US. Fuel shortages are causing increasingly severe blackouts in Cuba, and Mexico has been the island’s biggest oil supplier since the US blocked shipments from Venezuela last month. On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Pemex, Mexico’s state oil company, had “backtracked” on plans to send a much-needed delivery to Cuba this month. Asked whether she denied the report in her daily press conference, Sheinbaum said: “It is a sovereign decision and it is made in the moment when necessary.” The cancelled shipment comes amid reports that the Mexican government had been privately reviewing whether to keep sending oil to Cuba amid fear of reprisals from the US. After the US captured and renditioned Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela at the start of the year, it appeared to turn its attention to Cuba, Venezuela’s longstanding ally, with Donald Trump writing in a 11 January Truth Social post: “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO!” Sheinbaum sidestepped a question about whether the cancelled shipment is a one-off or could represent a more lasting suspension of oil shipments, while restating Mexico’s longstanding stance against the US blockade on Cuba. “Cuba has been under a blockade for too many years now. And this blockade has caused supply problems on the island,” said Sheinbaum. “Mexico has always shown solidarity and Mexico will continue to show solidarity.” The issue of oil shipments to Cuba is a fraught one for Sheinbaum, who is striving to show the Trump administration that Mexico is a partner on trade and security without alienating the left wing of her party, Morena. The Trump administration has recently repeated its threats of unilateral military strikes on drug trafficking cartels in Mexico, just as the two countries begin to renegotiate the trillion-dollar USMCA North American free trade agreement. “Whenever Sheinbaum gives mealy-mouthed answers, it’s not for lack of preparation,” said Alexander González Ormerod, a political analyst. “It’s because it’s probably an answer made by committee on the best way to avoid upsetting all the different constituencies within the Morena and the US-Mexico coalition.” “When the answer’s easy, she’s decisive,” he added. “When it’s not, she’s evasive.”

Spain approves decree to regularise half a million undocumented migrants

Spain’s socialist-led coalition government has approved a decree it said would regularise 500,000 undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, rejecting the anti-migration policies and rhetoric prevalent across much of Europe. The decree, expected to come into effect in April, will apply to hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and people in Spain with irregular status. To qualify for regularisation, applicants will have to prove they do not have a criminal record and had lived in Spain for at least five months – or had sought international protection – before 31 December 2025. Announcing the decision after Tuesday’s weekly cabinet meeting, Elma Saiz, Spain’s minister for inclusion, social security and migration, said it was a “historic day”, adding the initiative was designed to “break the bureaucratic barriers of the past”. Saiz said the programme, which is being brought in by royal decree meaning it does not require parliamentary approval, would benefit Spain as a whole. “We’re reinforcing a migratory model based on human rights, on integration and on coexistence that’s compatible with both economic growth and social cohesion,” she said. The decree followed pressure from the socialists’ former allies in the leftwing Podemos party, which has a fraught relationship with the government. “We reached a deal with the [socialist party] for the extraordinary regularisation of undocumented people,” Podemos’s leader, Ione Belarra, wrote on social media on Tuesday morning. “No one else has to work without rights … Today and always, yes we can!” In recent years, Spain has become a European outlier on migration. Addressing parliament in October 2024, the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said the country was at a demographic crossroads and needed migration to grow its economy and sustain its welfare state. “Throughout history, migration has been one of the great drivers of the development of nations while hatred and xenophobia have been – and continue to be – the greatest destroyer of nations,” he said. “The key is in managing it well.” The announcement was welcomed by the Brussels-based Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (Picum). “Today’s decision by the Spanish government to adopt a broad regularisation measure is a powerful reminder that regularisation is not only possible – it works, and it’s the right thing to do,” said Laetitia Van der Vennet, a senior advocacy officer at Picum. “For thousands of undocumented people who have built their lives in Spain, this could mean dignity, stability and access to basic rights. At a time when a hostile environment against migrants is spreading on both sides of the Atlantic, this move shows both humanity and common sense. We hope more governments will follow this example and invest in policies that protect, empower and include people, and make societies stronger.” The decision also drew approval from Spain’s Regularisation Now! movement, which added it had come “in an international context marked by the tightening of immigration policies, border closures, and the criminalisation of migrants in much of Europe”. However, the move has been bitterly criticised by the conservative People’s party (PP) – even though the party ordered similar initiatives when in government – and by the far-right Vox party. The PP’s leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, accused the prime minister of using the announcement to deflect attention from the government’s response to last week’s deadly rail crash, in which at least 45 people died. “Sánchez’s first response is a massive regularisation to distract attention, to increase the pull effect and to overwhelm our public services,” he said. “In socialist Spain, illegality is rewarded.” Vox, which is rising in the polls and outflanking the PP on the right with an explicitly anti-migrant discourse, went further by using familiar tropes about the great replacement theory and urging the mass deportation of migrants, euphemistically referred to by the far right as “remigration”. “Five hundred thousand illegals!” said its leader, Santiago Abascal. “Sánchez the tyrant hates the Spanish people. He wants to replace them – that’s why he’s using a decree to promote the pull effect and to accelerate the invasion. He must be stopped. Repatriations, deportations and remigration.” Regularisation programmes have long been used across the EU, with 43 put in place by more than a dozen countries between 1996 and 2008. In Spain, nine such programmes have been carried out since the country’s return to democracy, with the PP conducting more regularisation programmes than any other party. The roots of the current push lie in a citizens’ initiative, signed by more than 700,000 people and backed by about 900 social organisations, presented to parliament in 2024. Unemployment levels have fallen to their lowest since the 2008 financial crisis, and Spain’s economy is outperforming those of its neighbours. Sánchez hailed the unemployment news in a post on X on Tuesday, saying: “For the first time since 2008, unemployment falls below 10%. Spain has almost 22.5 million people with jobs, a new record.” Even some of the most ardent critics of immigration have conceded its necessity: in June, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, the far-right leader who has long called irregular migrants a threat to Europe’s future, said her government would issue nearly 500,000 new work visas for non-EU nationals in the coming years, in addition to the 450,000 granted since she took power.

EU-India deal ‘accelerated’ over past six months amid Trump’s tariff threats – Europe live

That concludes our live coverage for today. India and the EU have finalised a landmark free trade agreement, which the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, hailed as the “mother of all deals” (9:36, 9:43, 9:52). The deal is expected to open up India’s vast and traditionally tightly guarded market to the 27 nations in the bloc, with a focus on manufacturing and the services sector (12:40). Talks about the agreement accelerated with gusto over the past six months (10:13) in the face of heavy punitive tariffs by Trump’s administration in the US and joint concerns over China’s monopoly over global manufacturing (10:44). In other news, Europe has marked the International Holocaust Remembrance Day (16:59). The prime ministers of Denmark and Greenland said they would visit Berlin and Paris today and tomorrow to shore up support over US president Donald Trump’s recent push to take over the Arctic island (11:09, 15:41, 16:30). A unit of US immigration and customs enforcement agents (ICE) will have a security role in the upcoming Winter Olympic Games in Italy, sparking uproar and petitions against the deployment (11:56, 15:13). And that’s all from me, Jakub Krupa, for today. If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at jakub.krupa@theguardian.com. I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.

The US drew up a plan to invade Canada in 1930. Now Trump is reviving old fears

First, American forces would strike with poison gas munitions, seizing a strategically valuable port city. Soldiers would sever undersea cables, destroy bridges and rail lines to paralyze infrastructure. Major cities on the shores of lakes and rivers would be captured in order to blunt any civilian resistance. The multipronged invasion would rely on ground forces, amphibious landing and then mass internments. According to the architects of the plan, the attack would be short-lived and the besieged country would fall within days. The target was Canada, part of a classified 1930 strategy – War Plan Red – for a hypothetical war with Great Britain where the US would seek to deny it any foothold in North America. But the invasion plans, once dismissed as a fumbling historical quirk, have taken on fresh relevance as the US pivots its foreign policy to an increasingly aggressive view of its “pre-eminence” in the western hemisphere and turns its sights on both foes and allies. In early January, the fusion of economic nationalism and belligerent foreign policy championed by Donald Trump was on full display when his government ordered the capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and the US president announced on social media the US would seize control of the South American country’s oil. Days after, both Trump and prominent officials spoke openly of using military force to invade and capture Greenland for its strategic position and its immense mineral wealth. In late January, the Globe and Mail reported that Canada’s military had modelled a hypothetical invasion of Canada, suggesting guerrilla tactics, similar to those used to repel both Russian and US forces in Afghanistan, would supplant conventional war. With declarations from US officials that regional dominance is their main geostrategic objective, threats from Trump that he intends to annex Canada have rattled the country. Last year, Trump said the centuries-old border between the two nations was no more than an “artificially drawn line” that, with force and persuasion, might be redrawn. “Somebody drew that line many years ago with, like, a ruler – just a straight line right across the top of the country,” Trump told Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney – adding a unified continent was “the way it was meant to be”. On 20 January, Trump posted an altered image on his social media account that features the US flag covering Canada, Greenland and Venezuela. His comments, condemned by Canadian lawmakers, nonetheless exposed a deep and persistent anxiety that the country, despite decades of tight economic integration, remains vulnerable to US aggression. War Plan Red, first devised in 1927 and then approved in 1930, was drawn up amid fears from American military planners that Britain could launch a war against the US where Canada would be the most likely theatre for battle. US planners conceded that if they lost, Canada would “demand that Alaska be awarded to her”. But the plan highlighted both how Americans believed Canada, with the vast majority of its citizens clustered along the shared border, would fall quickly – and the broader flimsiness of political alliances. “I’ve always felt that Canada was this incredibly ‘ridiculous’ country, geographically and demographically – and this makes us one of the most vulnerable states in the world,” said Thomas Homer-Dixon, a Canadian conflict researcher. “We’ve been critically dependent on the friendship and benignness of the United States, and all of a sudden, both those things have just disappeared. They’ve vanished and I worry that only now Canadians fully appreciate what this means.” Homer-Dixon, who runs the Cascade Institute, a Canadian thinktank that studies global crises, says battle designs such as War Plan Red underscore fears within Canada of its continued vulnerability to US military action. After seizing Venezuela’s president in a brazen night-time attack, the focus of the Trump administration shifted to Greenland, a territory controlled by Nato ally Denmark. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark is not going to be able to do it,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. His vice-president, JD Vance, also chimed in on the issue, telling reporters that Denmark “obviously” had not done a proper job in securing Greenland and that Trump “is willing to go as far as he has to” to defend American interests in the Arctic. Homer-Dixon says the pursuit of Greenland – where the US already has the unfettered ability to build military bases – represents “outright avarice and greed” from the White House. “It is a vanity project because there’s absolutely zero security justification for this,” he said. With Canada, Homer-Dixon warns Trump and his allies could deploy a sustained campaign to “demonize” Canada by warning the 5,500-mile (8,850km) border has grown increasingly lawless and drugs are “pouring across” in order to shift how Americans perceive of their northern neighbour. Alternatively, he worries that a fledgling secession referendum in Alberta could fail but Trump could argue the results were “fake” and the US would move troops to the northern Montana border and tell the rest of Canada that Alberta must be allowed to join America as the “51st state”. Last year, the then prime minister, Justin Trudeau, warned business leaders Trump’s threats to annex Canada were a “real thing” and the president wanted to access the country’s critical minerals. “Canadians need to understand that our neighbour has desires and ambitions and goals under the current administration that no other administration in American history has had,” Bob Rae, Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations, recently told the Globe and Mail, calling the threats “existential” to Canada’s future. A 2025 poll found that 43% of Canadians believed a military attack by the United States within five years was at least somewhat likely, with 10% deeming it highly likely or certain. Calls for a “whole-of-society” response have grown and in May, a directive signed by Canada’s chief of the defence staff outlined how the military could train federal and provincial employees to handle firearms, drive trucks and fly drones in order to bolster the country’s supplementary reserve. The Canadian military currently has 4,384 personnel in its supplementary reserve, which is largely made up of inactive or retired soldiers. But the Canadian Forces suggest new plans could boost that figure to 300,000. The Cascade Institute also released a plan that suggests a “bare-bones” national service program could be delivered for C$1.1bn, with a more robust plan costing C$5.2bn. Homer-Dixon said that in addition to funding a civil defense, Canada needed to both deepen its relationship with Scandinavian allies and to adopt their longstanding approach: “If you attack us, you may ultimately succeed, but it’s going to really hurt. “At the end of the day, we spent decades building a deep economic, social and cultural relationship within a country that can change its character very quickly. Economists told us integration would make two countries incapable of harming each other,” said Homer-Dixon. “But this idea of ‘might makes right’ has always been this recessive cultural gene of the United States. And we fooled ourselves into thinking it had gone away. But it has re-emerged to the surface because it never left.”

‘Enemy of Europe’? How Trump’s push for Greenland spooked far-right allies

Donald Trump’s attempted Greenland grab has driven a wedge between the US president and some of his ideological allies in Europe, as previously unstinting enthusiasm and admiration collides with one of the far right’s key tenets: national sovereignty. Trump’s subsequent disparaging remark that Nato allies’ troops “stayed a little off the frontlines” while fighting with US forces in Afghanistan has only deepened the divide, piquing far-right patriotic sentiments and prompting an avalanche of criticism. The US president last week stepped away from his drive to seize Greenland, pledging he would not take it by force or impose tariffs on nations opposing him. Faced with a fierce backlash, he also appeared to walk back his swipe at non-US Nato troops. But for radical-right populists – who lead or support governments in a third of the EU’s member states, are vying for power in others, and who saw in Trump a powerful ally for their nation-first, anti-immigration, EU-critical cause – he is increasingly a liability. The divide could jeopardise the goals of his administration’s national security strategy, which set a US policy objective of “cultivating resistance” to Europe’s “current trajectory” by working with “patriotic allies” to avert “civilisational erasure”. Just over a year ago, Europe’s far-right leaders were effusively welcoming Trump’s return to the White House. A few months later, they gathered in Madrid to applaud his America First agenda under the banner “Make Europe Great Again”. More recently, some have been having second thoughts. Polling consistently shows Trump is hugely unpopular in Europe. Most Europeans, including many far-right voters, see the US president as a danger to the EU and want a stronger bloc. Polling published on Tuesday by the Paris-based European affairs debate platform Le Grand Continent suggested that between 18% and 25% of far-right voters in France, Germany, Italy and Spain consider Trump as an “enemy of Europe”. Asked to define his foreign policy, between 29% and 40% of supporters of the National Rally (RN), Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Brothers of Italy (FdI) and Vox parties chose “recolonisation and the predation of global resources”. Perhaps most remarkably, between 30% and 49% of voters for far-right parties in the four countries said that if tensions with the US over Greenland were to increase further, they would support the deployment of European troops to the territory. Trump’s expansionism, and his willingness to use economic clout to achieve it, puts Europe’s far right in a tough position. Leaders in France, Germany and Italy have all criticised his plans, some sounding very like the mainstream politicians they despise. In a European parliamentary debate last week, typically pro-Trump, far-right MEPs overwhelmingly backed freezing ratification of an EU-US trade deal because they were so uneasy at his approach, calling it “coercion” and “threats to sovereignty”. Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen’s protege and the president of France’s RN, who only weeks ago described Trump as “a wind of freedom”, called the US president’s pledge to seize Greenland “a direct challenge to the sovereignty of a European country”. He told the debate: “When a US president threatens a European territory using trade pressure, it’s not dialogue, it is coercion.” Greenland was “a strategic pivot in a world returning to imperial logic”, he said. “Yielding would set a dangerous precedent.” Normally a fierce critic of alleged EU overreach, Bardella instead urged the bloc to unite and fight back with the toughest weapons in its arsenal. “This isn’t escalation, it’s self-defence,” he said. “The choice is simple: submission or sovereignty.” Alice Weidel, a co-leader of Germany’s AfD, which had hailed Trump’s national security strategy as the dawn of a “conservative renaissance” in Europe, said in Berlin that he had “violated a fundamental campaign promise – not to interfere in other countries”. Even Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK and a Trump loyalist, described as “a very hostile act” a US president “threatening tariffs unless we agree he can take over Greenland … without even getting the consent of the people of Greenland”. Wary of retaliation, far-right and populist leaders who are in office rather than bidding for it were not quite so outspoken. Italy’s “Trump-whispering” premier, Giorgia Meloni, criticised the deployment of European troops to Greenland, but even she eventually said she had told the US president in a call that his Greenland threats were “a mistake”. Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s illiberal prime minister and perhaps Europe’s leading Trump fan, dodged the question. “It’s an in-house issue … It’s a Nato issue,” Orbán, who has long vaunted his friendship with the US president, said of Trump’s Greenland plans. Likewise, Poland’s nationalist, Trump-aligned president, Karol Nawrocki, said last week that Greenland tensions should be solved “in a diplomatic way” between Washington and Copenhagen, without recourse to a broader Europe-wide debate. Nawrocki stressed the US was still his country’s “very important ally” and he called on western European leaders to tone down their objections to Trump’s conduct. In the Czech Republic, too, the prime minister, Andrej Babiš, warned against a transatlantic row. But if some leaders were wary of openly criticising Trump over Greenland, there was near-universal outrage at the US president’s comments on Nato allies’ troops in Afghanistan, which Meloni described on social media as “unacceptable”. The Italian prime minister said her country had borne “a cost that cannot be called into question: 53 Italian soldiers killed and more than 700 wounded”. She said Italy and the US were “bound by a solid friendship” but that “friendship requires respect”. Nawrocki said there was no doubt that his country’s soldiers – more than 40 of whom lost their lives in Afghanistan – were heroes. “They deserve respect and words of gratitude for their service,” he said. Babiš was equally critical. Fourteen Czech soldiers had died in Afghanistan, the Czech prime minister said, adding that he knew Trump “likes to provoke and doesn’t mince words, but what he said about the mission in Afghanistan was way off the mark”. Analysts said it was too soon to say if the divide would last. Daniel Hegedüs, of the German Marshall Fund, said domestic electoral considerations meant many far-right parties would be forced to respond to any continued threats to sovereignty. But he said Trump and his European ideological allies “can always unite forces again, around issues where they can cooperate”, such as immigration. Pawel Zerka, of the European Council on Foreign Affairs, said far-right leaders would not lose out. “Far-right leaders in France, Germany and Britain are unlikely to lose points,” Zerka noted. They “demonstrated timely criticism” of Trump’s excesses, while mainstream leaders and the EU “generally failed to display strength, unity and assertiveness”.

Mother of man jailed in Syria for Islamic State links calls for his repatriation to UK or Canada

The mother of a British-born man detained for nearly nine years without trial in Syria has called for his repatriation to the UK or Canada as the US plans to airlift 7,000 Islamic State-linked prisoners from Syria to Iraq. Sally Lane, the mother of Jack Letts, 30, said she was “frantically trying to find out as much as possible” and that it was unclear if he would face the death penalty in Iraq or remain in Syria – or be sent to Canada or the UK in line with US demands. Neither the Canadian nor British government has updated her after an outbreak of fighting in Syria last week left the future of Letts and other prisoners from up to 70 countries uncertain. “We’ve heard absolutely nothing. They think we don’t deserve to know,” Lane said. But she said the UK and others could not easily ignore the issue after the US intervention. “I can’t see that western governments will allow their citizens to be put on trial in Iraq where they have the death penalty and flawed trials.” She said if the authorities in Canada or the UK wanted to, they could charge Letts with terror offences on home ground as a condition for his return. “If there’s evidence, put them on trial. But there is no evidence,” Lane said. Oxford-raised Letts travelled to Islamic State-controlled territory in Syria and Iraq aged 18, during the early phases of the terror group’s caliphate. He had converted to Islam aged 16 and dropped out of sixth form because of mental health problems. He was captured by Syrian Kurdish forces fighting against IS in May 2017 and has been held without trial ever since. British ministers removed his UK citizenship two years later, leaving him a Canadian national, the birth country of his father, John. Letts’ only contact with the world has been through a handful of television interviews. “I’m not going to say I’m innocent. I’m not innocent. I deserve what comes to me. But I just want it to be … not just haphazard, freestyle punishment in Syria,” he told ITV seven years ago. His last known location was in a prison near Raqqa in November 2024, when he was interviewed by Canadian television. Then he said he had not been a member of IS and he had rejected their Islamist ideology shortly after he arrived. “I was imprisoned by them three times,” he added. Lane has not known exactly where her son has been since then and has had no personal contact with him for more than a decade. But she believes he was or is being held in the Gweiran – or Panorama – prison in Hasakah, run by the Syrian Kurds. Last Wednesday, US Central Command (Centcom) unexpectedly announced it had started a planned airlift of prisoners previously held in Kurdish-run detention centres after the Kurds sustained a succession of battlefield defeats by the Syrian government. About 150 of the most dangerous inmates were flown out that day. Lane said she did not know if her son was one of those who had been rendered across the border but she believed he probably would not have been. “Jack’s small fry. He’s mostly been held in local prisons. He’s high profile only because he’s been in the news,” she said. On Sunday Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, spoke to Iraq’s prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, and thanked him for expediting the transfer of IS prisoners to “secure facilities” in Iraq. The two men also discussed “ongoing diplomatic efforts to ensure countries rapidly repatriate their citizens in Iraq, bringing them to justice”, according to a readout from the US state department after the call. Last week Centcom said the prisoner transfer would take “days not weeks”. Prisoners would be handed to the Iraqi authorities, Centcom added, but the US military would not confirm if Letts was being transferred from Syria. Yvette Cooper, the British foreign secretary, said in a BBC interview last Thursday that she had been “in touch” with Rubio about Syria. She said the UK and US had “shared interests in countering terrorism and extremism”, though she did not directly refer to the prisoner transfer. The UK has repatriated six women and 10 children since 2022. About 55 men, women and children with British links were believed to be in Kurdish detention before last week’s Syrian government offensive. One of those is Shamima Begum, still held at al-Roj camp, in one of the last Kurdish-controlled areas in Syria. • This article was amended on 27 January 2026. An earlier version, owing to an edit, described Jack Letts as having “travelled to join Islamic State” aged 18; this has been changed to describe him as having “travelled to Islamic State-controlled territory”, because of the uncertainty about Letts’ intentions for the trip.