An Iraqi court sentenced to death the Belgian citizen Bilal Abdoul-Aziz al-Marshouhi (aka “Abou Fadhil al-Belgiqi”) for his membership of the Islamic Emirate terrorist organization (Daesh is known in the West as Islamic State or by its English acronym, ISIS).

“I was born in Belgium and have Belgian nationality, despite my Moroccan origins (…) I studied engineering at the University of Antwerp. I became a jihadist after becoming friends with someone who read books that preached radical Islam, ” he explained.

Accused of having set up a pornographic website, Bilal Abdoul-Aziz al-Marshouhi received military training from the al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda in Syria), but then left to join Daesh. From then on he was successively a member of the military police, the criminal police and the moral police of Daesh in the occupied part of Aleppo and finally joined the general administration of Daesh in the Syrian city of Raqqa, then considered the capital of the Caliphate.

According to the television channel Kurdistan24, the Belgian citizen now facing the death penalty declared during his trial in Iraq that his Daesh group used chemical weapons – specifically mortar shells laden with chlorine – in the Raqqa district and in a camp [1].

The UN has received reports of at least 216 suspected chemical attacks in Syria. The Western powers attribute every chemical attack to the Syrian Arab Republic while the latter and the Russian Federation accuse the jihadists. The inspectors of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed some chemical attacks did take place without determining who perpetrated them. However, the latest OPCW report on events in the city of Douma exonerates the Syrian authorities.