Open Source: As Western Bombs Fall on Syria, Western Jihadists Defend Their War on Assad

The American-led coalition’s bombing campaign against Islamist militants in Syria has focused new attention on the Westerners among their ranks.

In television interviews broadcast this week, American, Australian and Dutch citizens who traveled to Syria to take part in the jihad against President Bashar al-Assad’s government expressed bitterness at the airstrikes their nations have carried out against Islamist rebels.

In an interview with CBS News conducted recently inside Syria, a Somali-American who calls himself Ibn Zubayr explained that he joined the Nusra Front, an Islamist group affiliated with Al Qaeda, two years ago, moved by the plight of the Syrian people under attack by their own government. Nusra fighters whom Ibn Zubayr called “close friends” were killed in the first wave of American airstrikes late last month.

Still, he told the CBS correspondent Clarissa Ward, “I don’t hate America, that’s my home, that’s where I grew up.” Asked if he could say honestly that none of the Nusra fighters killed in the airstrikes intended to attack the West, he replied, “Can you tell me honestly that these hits, these hits won’t create people that will want to come and hit America?”

Pressed to say if he would support a terrorist attack on the United States, Ibn Zubayr said: “I wouldn’t consider it a terrorist attack. If anything happened there I would consider it a reaction to this action.”

“What I consider a terrorist attack is these Tomahawk bombs being shot from wherever they being shot from and killing innocent people,” he said.

That sentiment was echoed by Abu Ousama, an Australian volunteer with another Islamist brigade, Jund al-Aqsa, in an interview broadcast Friday by Australia’s Seven News. The Australian jihadist, who serves as the brigade’s combat medic, told the British freelance journalist Tam Hussein that the beheading of American journalists by Islamic State militants paled in comparison to the killing of civilians in Western airstrikes.

“What is the difference,” the self-described “true blue Aussie” asked, “between a missile that hits into a house which kills 15 kids, compared to one — you know, a man dying, getting cut by a throat?”

In the interview broadcast one day after Australia’s defense ministry confirmed that it had launched its first strikes on Islamic State militants, the medic said: “I am sad to see Australia taking that step — coming into a place that it doesn’t need to be, because it will cause a reaction. It will cause people to hate it.”

Mr. Hussein also spoke with several Dutch volunteers who explained their motivations in fluent English in a video report broadcast Thursday night by the Dutch television program Nieuwsuur.

The brigade operates independently of the group known as the Islamic State but shares its goal of carving out a nation to be run according to a strict interpretation of religious law shared by Sunni Muslim fundamentalists. “All the brothers that are carrying a weapon for Allah are my brothers, and we are standing on one line with Doula,” one of the Dutch fighters said, using the Arabic word for “State,” which other jihadists commonly use as shorthand to refer to the group known as the Islamic State.

In another part of the CBS News report filmed inside Syria after the start of the American-led campaign against the Islamists, a Dutch fighter of Turkish descent, who goes by the name Yilmaz, told Ms. Ward that the focus on war crimes by Islamic State militants was misguided, given the slaughter carried out by forces loyal to the Syrian government. “War crimes? And what’s a war crime?” he said. “More than 200,000 dead is not a war crime? Barrel bombs, chemical attacks, not a war crime?”

The jihadist, who also defended the Islamic State and was outraged by the attacks on the Nusra Front, said that the strikes were evidence that the United States was engaged in a war on Muslims. “The American government, the American lobby that’s waging this crusade against the Muslims all around the world, they’ve always been our enemy,” he told Ms. Ward.

Yilmaz, a former soldier in the Royal Netherlands Army who has documented his jihad on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr, was the subject of a profile by Nieuwsuur earlier this year.

In that previous interview with Dutch television, conducted as Yilmaz trained other foreign fighters to shoot, the jihadist said that he had no intention of returning home to carry out a terrorist attack. “I would just eat,” he said in January, “maybe some sushi, have some Dr Pepper and give my mother a big, warm hug.”

Before his Twitter account was suspended last month, however, he had decried the American intervention in angry terms and wrote that he was outraged that the Dutch government had joined the bombing campaign.

Speaking to Ms. Ward later, the Dutchman said that the strikes could well provoke retaliatory terrorist attacks in the West. “If you keep on poking and cornering a wild dog that wants nothing but its freedom,” he said, “he will bite you, and he will bite you hard.”