Brussels Attack Suspects Say West's Bombing of IS Was ‘Tipping Point’

Defendants on trial in the 2016 Brussels attacks recounted on Wednesday the anger they felt at the bombing of the Islamic State group by an international coalition.   Nine defendants are on trial in the March 22, 2016, suicide bomb attacks claimed by the jihadi group that killed 32 people at the Brussels airport and the city's metro.  Investigators believe the IS cell behind the attacks was linked to the group that carried out the November 2015 Paris attacks, which left 130 dead.  Sofien Ayari, who has already been sentenced to 30 years in jail in the Paris attacks, went to fight with IS in 2014 before being wounded and hospitalized 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.  "The wave of attacks in the West was not carried out to raise the black flags of IS on European territory,” he said, “but in response to the bombings."  Another suspect, Bilal El Makhoukhi, 34, a 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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