A man who helped young men travel to Syria to fight has broken down in tears in a Sydney court as he described loving Australia and his regret at helping the would-be jihadists.

Hamdi Alqudsi, 42, was found guilty last month after a jury heard he had organised for seven men to make a border crossing from Turkey and meet up with the well-known Australian fighter Mohammad Ali Baryalei between June and October 2013.



Giving evidence about the offences for the first time, Alqudsi cried and said it wasn’t fair he was put in the same classification as terrorists in jail.



He said he should have stuck to taking donations for Syrian civilians through registered organisations and would regret helping the would-be fighters for the rest of his life.



“As an Australian I should have minded my own business,” the south-west Sydney man, whose Palestinian family migrated to Australia when he was a child, told the New South Wales supreme court in Sydney on Wednesday. “I love Australia, I always have.”

Alqudsi faces a maximum 10 years for each of his seven counts of providing services with the intention of supporting hostile acts.



He told his sentence hearing he had never encouraged the “boys” to go to Syria and that he did not know how many of those who made the border crossing are still alive.



They had all sought him out and expressed a desire to head to the country to protect civilians from government forces, he said.



His trial heard a large cache of intercepted calls, including one in which Baryalei described the horrors of battle and people being stuck in a tank as it repeatedly exploded.



“You knew these men were going to be out in the fields of Syria engaging in warfare,” the prosecutor, David Staehli SC, said on Wednesday.



“Yes,” Alqudsi replied.



At least two of the men Alqudsi helped have been widely reported as dead. He told the court he had met one of the presumed-dead men, Tyler Casey, at a court appearance for his wife, Carnita Matthews, who eventually won an appeal against a conviction for making a false statement that a police officer tried to remove her face veil.

He met four of the other men at a Bankstown mosque, the court heard.



Another man was a friend he made while studying a bachelor of Islamic studies through Charles Sturt University, the court heard, and he had only spoken to the last man on the phone.



Baryalei was fighting with Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as the al-Nusra Front, when the first men arrived in Syria but he later changed allegiances to what was then Islamic State.



Alqudsi told the court that he had thought at the time that Isis would help civilians and was happy to see the young men go to a group that would strictly observe their religion.



One of the men Alqudsi helped was stopped at Brisbane airport as he tried to leave the country.



The sentence hearing continues.

