After Saif/Seifeddine Rezgui was identified as the man who carried out the attack on the beach at Sousse in Tunisia on 26 June, we heard from his family members and neighbours.

His father, Hakim Rezgui, said: ‘My god, I am so shocked. I don’t know who has contacted him, influenced him or who has put these ideas in his head… I feel the loss of the families so strongly. I feel like I have died along with the victims. I am so ashamed for me, for his mother, for all our family.’ Rezgui’s mother, Radhia Manai, spoke of his gentleness. A neighbour who had known Rezgui since he was a child said: ‘He was good, good, good!’

Today it is the tenth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks in Central London, when four suicide bombers killed 52 people, on three underground trains, and on a bus near Euston station. Afterwards, family members, neighbours and friends expressed the same disbelief, in almost the same words, about these ‘nice’ four young men. Parents and teachers at Hillside Primary School in the Beeston area of Leeds praised Mohammad Sidique Khan for his contribution to the school between March 2001 and December 2004. Head teacher Sarah Balfour said: ‘He was great with the children and they all loved him. He did so much for them, helping and supporting them and running extra clubs and activities.’ Khan was the leader of the suicide bombing group.

Fellow bomber Hasib Hussain was described as a ‘gentle giant’. Thoroughly Westernized sports fanatic Shehzad Tanweer tried to play cricket every day of his life. His cousin, Safina Ahmad, said of Tanweer: ‘He felt completely integrated and never showed any signs of disaffection.’ Germaine Lindsay (who took the name Abdullah Shaheed Jamal when he converted to Islam at 15) was also devoted to sports. Theresa Weldrick, who went to school with him, said that everyone who’d known him was in shock: ‘He was really nice – one of those people who didn’t get into trouble. He was so good.’

Chérif Kouachi, who carried out the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo with his brother Said, was described afterwards by a neighbour in Genneviliers, Eric Bade, as ‘well-behaved, friendly, polite, clean-looking’. Bade added: ‘above all, which is very important, he was willing to help old and disabled people’. Bade told the BBC that Chérif Kouachi ‘wasn’t aggressive – he wasn’t a crazy zealot, he was a calm person’.

The Kouachi brothers were married. Khan and Jamal from the 7/7 group, were married with children. These men don’t fit in with the ‘loser-loner-psycho’ image many of us have of mass murderers. In the case of students Shehzad Tanweer, one of the younger 7/7 bombers, and 24-year-old Seifeddine Rezgui, they were doing well academically.

If we want to stop these atrocities from happening, we have to understand why they happen in order to prevent them. They’re clearly not simply the logical culmination of Islamic teaching, otherwise the majority of Western Muslims would be in armed revolt, rather than a tiny handful. They’re clearly not simply an example of organised crime. The prosecution, harassment and mass surveillance of Muslims is not working. (There’s evidence that these kinds of repressive actions are just increasing the appeal of ‘radicalization’.)

These kinds of mass killings have a logic to them, however difficult it is to understand, the logic of preventive revenge. Under the laws of war, the doctrine of ‘belligerent reprisal’ allows one party to try to stop its enemy from carrying out criminal actions by using the same or similar criminal acts against them.

Two months after the 7/7 attacks, al-Jazeera broadcast a video made by the lead bomber, Mohammad Sidique Khan, in which he said: ‘Your democratically-elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security, you will be our targets. And until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight.’

A year after the attacks, another video was released, this time from Shehzad Tanweer. The 22-year-old said: ‘To the non-Muslims of Britain, you may have wondered what you have done to deserve this. You are those who have voted in your government, who have in turn and still continue to this day continue to oppress our mothers, children, brothers and sisters from the east to the west in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Chechnya. Your government has openly supported the genocide of over 150,000 innocent Muslims in Fallujah…. What have you witnessed now is only the beginning of a string of attacks that, inshallah, will continue and become stronger until you pull your forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq and until you stop your financial and military support to America and Israel, until you stop all financial and administrative support to the US and Israel, and until you release all Muslim prisoners from Belmarsh and your other concentration camps’.

Tanweer warned British non-Muslims: ‘You will never experience peace until our children in Palestine, our mothers and sisters in Kashmir, our brothers in Afghanistan and Iraq live in peace.’

While the targets for many recent al-Qa’eda- or ISIS-inspired attacks in the West have had little immediate connection with these foreign policy issues, it’s clear that Western aggression against Muslim peoples has been a key part of the road to becoming a terrorist for most of these young Muslims. Amedy Coulibaly, who killed four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris at the same time as the Charlie Hebdo massacre, was recorded during the supermarket siege. Coulibaly said: ‘Me, I was born in France. If they [Muslims] weren’t attacked elsewhere, I wouldn’t be here’. He referred to the French military intervention in Mali and Western tolerance of the Assad regime in Syria, as well as laws against veiling and the imprisonment of Muslims ‘for nothing’.

Chérif Kouachi told a French television station: ‘[W]e don’t kill women. It is you that kill the children of Muslims in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Syria. That’s not us. We have a code of honour, us, in Islam.’ (In fact, the attack on Charlie Hebdo did kill a woman, columnist Elsa Cayat, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.)

However bizarre and twisted their logic, such suicide terrorists seem to be motivated in large part by a desire to protect other Muslims, a world-wide family of oppressed people. Their violence against civilians in the west is intended somehow to help prevent Western violence against Muslims around the world – when in fact their violence makes Western violence more likely.

It is not enough to recognise the insanity of this logic. If we want to stop these attacks from happening, we are going to have to remove or at least lessen these sources of grievance, we are going to have to stop Western invasions and drone terrorism and torture and rendition.

Milan Rai is a Peace News editor.

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