“Can you tell me honestly that ... these hits won’t create people that will want to come and hit America?”

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.”