PHOTO: A volunteer with Syria’s White Helmets rescues a wounded child after an airstrike


Janine di Giovanni writes for Newsweek:


On a warm morning in December, a few dozen Syrians from Aleppo and Idlib — former students, teachers, vegetable sellers and farmers — gather in an abandoned firefighting training center near the Syrian-Turkish border. They have come here to learn advanced rescue skills that they will use to teach newly recruited emergency workers back home. They are members of the Syrian Civil Defense, known as the White Helmets — the largest civil society group in Syria and one that is non-sectarian, neutral, and unarmed.

The site looks like a deserted campground, aside from the burned-out bus in the middle of a neighboring field and collapsed concrete buildings that they use for simulation exercises. The exact location of their training center is undisclosed, and most of them ask to be identified by only their first names, because the White Helmets have received death threats. They also know there are sleeper cells of the Islamic State militant group in the area, and there have been shootings and bombings nearby.

It’s Week Three of training, and soon the men will go home. The mood is somber — a recent bombing in Idlib killed more than 50 people — but there is a sense of deep bonding here. Some of these men have known one another since childhood, and they are bound by this vital and perilous work they have undertaken.

Their first exercise involves building a huge oil fire near the ruins of the bus, then extinguishing it. As they pull on protective gear, including gas masks, and unravel hoses, they make a few jokes and talk about their lives before the civil war and people they know in common. One of their trainers has “better than nothing” scrawled on the back of his jacket. Khaled, a father of four from Idlib, explains, “We have a strange gallows humor. We’ve seen so much. It’s a way of releasing tension.”

“Tell her about the sheep market in Aleppo,” one man says. Samer Hussain, 30, responds, “A bomb hit the market when it was most crowded—people had come out to buy food. The animal flesh was mixed with humans,” he says. “We found arms, legs, heads. We lost around 25 people that day. Some of them were beyond recognition because of the bombs. You could no longer describe them as human.”

Several other men work on building up the fire. Then they take a break, pull off their helmets and masks and take out packs of cigarettes. They exist, they say, on cigarettes and coffee. “It’s not like we worry about dying from cigarettes,” says one. “We probably have the most dangerous jobs on earth.”

A shell explodes near a group of White Helmets rescuers, January 2016

The Volunteers Risking Their Lives

With the war in Syria now in its fifth year, average life expectancy there has dropped by two decades. More than 250,000 people have been killed and more than 1 million injured, according to the United Nations. Millions more have been driven from their homes, including more than 4 million who have fled the country as refugees.

There are more than 2,800 White Helmets, including 80 women, all volunteers who work full time and get paid a $150 monthly stipend. So far, according to Raed al-Saleh, 33, the founder of the White Helmets, they have saved more than 40,000 lives.

Although they operate largely in rebel-held areas of Syria, the White Helmets don’t discriminate between victims on one side or the other. “To save one life is to save humanity” is their motto, and from the rubble they have dug out members of Hezbollah or Iranians fighting on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad, as well as Free Syrian Army opposition fighters. But most often, they save civilians. For those who live in frequently targeted areas, the Syrian Civil Defense, or Difaa Midani in Arabic, is a symbol of hope in an exceedingly bleak conflict.

Rescuing a baby from rubble after an airstrike

This is a war that has attracted limited international humanitarian assistance, given the risks of operating in Syria, so the civilian population has suffered terribly. Nearly all structures of society have broken down, from education to health care. Schools have not functioned for years, and if you have a chronic disease, such as cancer or diabetes, you most likely die without treatment.

The White Helmets formed in 2013 as a grassroots operation funded by the British, Danish and Japanese governments to recruit first responders. It has a budget of $30 million a year, much of which is spent on equipment, such as heavy diggers to remove bodies from under concrete that has collapsed, and the stipends.

After initially working with foreign advisers, it is now an entirely Syrian operation, with around 20 to 30 new recruits coming forward each month. “The very fact that this exists in communities gives people more of a sense of security,” says James le Mesurier, a former British soldier with Mayday, a nongovernmental organization that along with skilled Turkish rescue workers helped set up and train the first cadre of White Helmets.

So far, 110 White Helmets have died on the job, and four times that many have been seriously wounded. The average age is 26, although one elderly man joined the day after he buried his son, who was a White Helmet. The youngest is 17. They work at all hours of the day and night, and their centers, although in secret locations, are frequently targeted, as are their vehicles, including their ambulances. They say this has happened with more alarming frequency since Russian airstrikes in support of Assad began on September 30.

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