The White Helmets leader: ‘We can anticipate the scale of destruction based on the sound of the plane’
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Version 0 of 1. These days, Raed al-Saleh doesn’t have to see a warplane to know what kind of bombs it drops. He just needs to hear it. “It’s very depressing,” Saleh says. “Based on its sound, we can predict the kind of airplane, and then anticipate the scale of the destruction.” He has reached the stage where he hopes for the rumble of a Mig-29, rather than a Su-24. It’s the Su-24s that carry the cluster bombs. In rebel-held Syria, where the Syrian regime and its Russian allies are dropping more bombs than ever before, Saleh isn’t the only person who has learned to discern between the roar of different warplanes. But he is among the best practised. He’s the head of the Syrian civil defence, a team of 2,700 civilian rescue workers that saves people from the rubble of airstrikes across rebel-held Syria. Known internationally as the White Helmets, after the colour of their hardhats, they are the subject of a new Netflix documentary; the winners of the Right Livelihood award, known as the alternative Nobel peace prize; and nominees for the real thing. And understandably so: at least 130 White Helmets have been killed in the course of saving more than 60,000 lives. “Anyone need saving?” asks Khaled Farah, a builder turned rescuer, during a moving new documentary about the Syrian civil defence. “Anything you need, we’re the White Helmets.” I meet Saleh on the sidelines of the recent UN general assembly in New York. He has donned a shirt and tie for his meetings with diplomats and politicians, but still looks out of place. He’s a man of action transplanted to a parallel reality of suits and lanyards, of grand talk but few decisions. At the UN headquarters down the road, diplomats publicly maintain that a Syrian ceasefire is still in play. From out in the real world, Saleh has just learned of another round of regime attacks on rebel-held Aleppo. The news seems to exhaust him. There are big bags under his eyes, which he spends several moments rubbing. “There are no signs of improvements,” Saleh says. “Today in Aleppo, 12 people were killed by the airstrikes. There are hundreds of thousands of civilians under siege who need supplies. For the past month, nothing has entered Aleppo, so we expect that in less than a month, the supplies will run out.” During his time in New York, things will worsen still, and hundreds more will die. The bombing raids reach an unprecedented intensity, the regime attempts a ground invasion, and the White Helmets’ bases fall under attack. Yet inside the UN, Russia and the US cannot agree on how to end – or even pause – the bloodshed. “New York is another world,” Saleh sighs. “We hear a lot of talk about peace and war and terrorism and refugees and UN convoys. But we don’t see decisive actions. We don’t see the political will to address the roots of the problem. And we don’t understand why that is.” On the ground, the humanitarian effort is largely left to groups of volunteers such as the White Helmets. Before the war, most of them knew little about rescuing bomb victims. Saleh himself was an electronics salesman, buying Chinese-made gadgets from wholesalers in Aleppo, and selling them in western Syria. Another man featured in the documentary, Mohamed Farah, was a tailor. Khaled, Mohamed’s brother, was a builder. To begin with, these men formed disparate rescue teams, without a central command. They were united by a desire to stay out of the fighting. “It’s better to do humanitarian work than to be armed,” says Farah during an interview in the film. “Better to rescue a soul than to take one.” To begin with, they were untrained, and so less effective. In 2013, not long after Saleh first joined a rescue team, they arrived at a bombsite in a market in Darkoush, north-west Syria. At least 112 people were killed. “The smell of burnt bodies was everywhere and the first responders felt like they were helpless,” Saleh says. “We rescued just two or three people, and it was depressing.” Across the border that year, Turkey began to invite different rescue teams for training, and Saleh was chosen by his colleagues as their representative. Again, it was a sobering experience. He was tasked with finding corpses in a mock-up bomb site – and found no one. “Then the trainers turned the lights on and guided us to the people underneath the rubble in the room,” says Saleh. “We were shocked. The trainers told us: this is the difference between a trained rescue worker and an untrained one, between a blind person and a person who can see. And, at that moment, we made a pledge that we had either to quit then and there, or be fully committed to learning all the required skills in order to go back and rescue our people.” It was in the months that followed this experience that the Syrian civil defence was formed. Gradually, the different rescue teams in northern Syria began to coordinate. In 2014, they started standardising their uniform – a beige jumpsuit – and agreed to work as a unified entity. At a meeting of 69 different branches, Saleh was elected director. There are few reasons for hope in Syria, but the rise of the White Helmets is one of them. Over time, the rescuers have got steadily better at finding people in the rubble. When a series of strikes hit Darkoush last year, they rescued more than 120 people in 24 hours. One of the most uplifting scenes in the film comes when the Farah brothers spend 16 hours digging through rubble to find – against all odds – a baby boy. “Do you know that feeling when you have a seed and it grows into a beautiful bush?” asks Mohamed. “That’s how we feel knowing that this baby is still alive.” But Saleh cautions that there is often little to celebrate, and that however angelic his work seems to outsiders, it is in fact highly traumatic. “Some may think what we are doing is heroic,” he said during a recent talk in Washington. “But, in fact, it is devastating and depressing beyond belief. You are pulling corpses from the rubble. You don’t know if one day that body will belong to your sister, your brother or your friend.” Regime apologists also question the White Helmets’ heroism – by claiming that they are in cahoots with extremists. It’s a ridiculous smear, says Saleh. “That’s a normal reaction from the regime,” he says. “The regime accuses millions of Syrians of being terrorists and extremists. For the regime, anything that emerges independently from the people is classified as an extremist organisation.” For their supporters, the White Helmets remind us that the vast majority of Syrians aren’t soldiers or jihadis, but ordinary civilians. “There are armed groups in the liberated areas, which have been formed in reaction to Bashar al-Assad’s terrorism,” says Muhammad Fadila, the governor of rebel-held Aleppo. “But there are also many civilians, and we have universities and hospitals and schools, administrations and directorates, a ministry of education, and of electricity. And the Syrian civil defence.” Some of them, like Saleh, have the option of a more peaceful life in Turkey. But they have sacrificed their safety to protect the people left behind. “At the end of the day, this is my country,” he says. “If Syrians don’t help Syrians, who else will come?” |