Evidence is displayed in the courtroom during the trial for the Brussels attacks, which took place on 22 March 2016, at the Justitia building in Brussels. AP Pool
Brussels, Belgium: On Wednesday, defendants on trial for the 2016 Brussels attacks described their rage at the international coalition’s aircraft bombardments of the Islamic State organisation.
Nine defendants are now on trial over the suicide bomb attacks on 22 March 2016, claimed by the terrorist organisation that murdered 32 people at Brussels airport and the city’s metro.
Investigators think the IS cell responsible for the assaults has ties to the organisation responsible for the 130-death attacks in Paris in November 2015.
Sofien Ayari, already sentenced to 30 years in jail over the Paris attacks, went to fight with IS in 2014 before being wounded and hospitalised in the Syrian city, Raqqa.
“What I experienced in Raqqa was not a war, it was something else, it was bombs falling on men, women, children,” the 29-year-old Tunisian said.
“It was a tipping point for me. I had never felt such hatred, such incomprehension. I was mad with rage.”
He claimed Western leaders showed “no consideration for human lives” in IS territory.
“I have the impression that only one side is being condemned,” he said.
Ayari fled after the Paris attacks but was detained in the Belgian capital just before the Brussels bombings.
“When I see people suffering, of course, it doesn’t make me happy,” he said of the victims of the Brussels attacks.
“Today I am not at peace with everything.”
Co-defendant Salah Abdeslam, the sole surviving member of the unit that carried out the Paris attacks, linked his actions to “disastrous decisions” taken by the heads of the anti-IS coalition.
Like Ayari, Abdeslam was in custody on the day of the Brussels attacks and denies being involved.
“The pilots of the planes on Raqqa and Mosul will never find themselves in the dock to answer for their abominable acts, they have been rewarded,” said the 33-year-old Frenchman, who did not go to Syria.
He said, “The wave of attacks in the West was not carried out to raise the black flags of IS on European territory, but in response to the bombings”.
Another suspect Bilal El Makhoukhi, a 34-year-old Belgian-Moroccan former IS fighter, said that in Syria he had spent “the best moments of his life, even if it was hard”.
“I felt more alive there than here. I felt I was serving a purpose,” he said.
The questioning of the defendants is set to run until late Thursday.
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