Should we help bring him home.?

Teenagers flew in the battle of Britain. Are they somehow less mature now?

Good post Monica and I agree with you.

The only thing I can add is...
'Once a parent always a parent'
I would be wanting mountains shifted if it was my child or my grandchild.

I think he has said he wants to come home. He had tried to leave and hasn't been heard from since. I think his parents want our government to try and trace his whereabouts.

Does he actually want to come home I wonder?

Well said, MOnica. Teenagers are indeed strange creatures at times.

He might not want to come home.

Teenagers can be very funny (peculiar) the surging mix of hormones, not just testosterone, can leave them as mixed up and as uncertain, as some women who have a difficult menopause.

We see this with children who commit suicide, get mixed up with drugs. In a confused and difficult world, especially if there are cultural dissonances, sects and political cliques that offer simple and strong answers to the complexity of life can be very attractive.

If the home atmosphere is open to new ideas, as HildaW describes then the children will definitely keep such thoughts to themselves, say they are visiting friends, having sleep-overs. No different really to children groomed online and disappearing to meet their young handsome boyfriend (they suppose) or eloping with a teacher.

The parents of these children may well have no inkling what is happening. An interest in Islam and even conversion do not equate with terrorism.

There is a case in Oxford, an English lad, about 18 converted to Islam, went to Syria several years ago thinking he was going to live in a Caliphate that was the pure muslim message on earth. He soon realised his mistake. There is no evidence that he was involved in the fighting. He seems to be a pacifist, or near it, and risked his life to get out of the ISIS area. He is now in a Kurdish prison and his parents have asked for help getting him home.

You do not stop loving and caring for your children because they have acted like idiots and got themselves into deep trouble. Were I in their shoes,I too would be begging for help.

If the FO do help, I hope they will draw up an account of the cost of their negotiations and his rescue and present it to the lad and show just what the cost of his naivety was,and expect that some of it must be repaid when he has a job at a rate, I do not know, say of £25 a week.

I hate to be cynical and I'm sure to be shot down but I wonder if they are desperate to get him back before the Government shuts the door, which it surely must, on radicalised individuals returning from the Middle East to promote their ideologies in this country again. I feel for his mother, but can't imagine that they didn't have any idea if the influences he was coming under before he left, even if they weren't from his home environment.

Does he genuinely want to come home/back to UK? Can we risk admitting someone who may well have been further radicalised and have seen and potentially done awful things. I know I'm sceptical but he won't be a young innocent any more.

He is only 21 now....left here in 2014.
I have just been trying to think how this could happen - my children were independently minded but there were always discussions about most things....and they both developed even handed views on the world. We had a similar background/location to this family and neither of my children would have had sympathies or interest with any terrorist group and I just cannot get my head around how this young lad could leave home, leave the country and end up where he did.

How old is the son?