The White Helmets are often presented by the western press as a humanitarian search-and-rescue NGO and occasional ‘freedom fighters’ against Assad, however, it has ties to al-Qaeda, Nusra Front and other extremist groups that have occupied parts of Syria for going on six years now. (Rebels which are, incidentally, also backed, funded and trained by western military and intelligence agencies). It is widely believed the White Helmets are a propaganda outfit with terrorist sympathies masquerading as a humanitarian organisation.
The history of the White Helmets
The White Helmets, otherwise known as the Syria Civil Defense, are often presented as an independent humanitarian NGO, but in reality it was founded by a former British intelligence officer, receives millions of dollars in funding from the US, UK, Qatar, Denmark and the Syrian opposition party and material support and training by many EU member nations.
The White Helmets were set up by security specialist and former British military intelligence officer, James le Mesurier who played a key role in some of NATO’s most dubious interventions including Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. He graduated from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst with the Queen’s Medal and has worked in a series of high-profile positions at the UN, EU and UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
His work at the UN focused on ‘delivering stabilisation activities through the security sector and democratisation programs’, building a ‘framework for engagement in fragile states’. In 2008 he was appointed principal of Good Harbor Consulting, chaired by national security and counter terrorism ‘czar’ under Bush, Richard A Clarke, where he specialized in risk management, emergency planning, and critical infrastructure protection.
Mesurier left the military to focus on the humanitarian sector. He told Men’s Journal in 2014 that he wanted to use his military training to benefit civilians: “the idea of being a civilian carrying a weapon and guiding a convoy in a conflict zone — that leaves me cold,” he said.
In 2013, Mesurier founded the White Helmets out of Turkey and Jordan, ‘compelled’ by Syrians’ accounts of war, with $300,000 of seed-funding from Japan, the UK, and US, Qatar and the Syrian opposition party. The seed funding was used to vet and train more than 700 Syrians “to deal with the chaos erupting around them” with logistical support provided by Turkish natural disaster response team, AKUT.
In 2015, the UK government announced £15 million pounds of non-humanitarian aid for the organisation. The financing was announced as part of a larger funding package which included over £67m of ‘support’ to the ‘Syrian opposition’. In 2016, Boris Johnson announced a further £32 million. And USAID has provided the White Helmets with at least $20 million worth of funding since 2013.
The White Helmets have so far received $23 million from the US Government, £19.7 million from the UK Government, and €4 million from the Dutch. It also receives material support and training by a variety of other EU Nations.
A front for al-Qaeda
It is often presented by the western press as a humanitarian search-and-rescue NGO and occasional ‘freedom fighters’ against Assad, however, the White Helmets have ties to al-Qaeda, Nusra Front and other extremist groups that have occupied parts of Syria for going on seven years now. (Rebels which are, incidentally, also backed, funded and trained by western military and intelligence agencies).
We know for a fact that terrorist factions in Syria are in possession of chemical weapons, and that at least one journalist has died simply trying to report on this fact.
In 2014, Press TV reporter Serena Shim, a US citizen, was killed in mysterious circumstances in Turkey just days after reporting that World Food Program trucks and lorries were being used to transport terrorists and chemical weapons ingredients across the Turkish Syrian border near Kobani, into Syria.
Jaysh al-Islam, the terrorist group that occupied Douma, and many other parts of Syria, already admitted to using chemical weapons in 2016 against the Kurdish population in Aleppo.
“They already have a history of chemical weapons use that is well documented by Amnesty International,” says Vanessa Beeley, independent journalist, one of the few reporting from the ground in Syria. “They had a chemical weapon manufacturing facility in Douma. The majority of eastern Ghouta districts had manufacturing facilities that belonged to the terrorists, but were being supplied and equipped by the west.”
We also know, thanks to leaked conversations between documentary film-maker Matthew Van Dyke and British journalist and blogger, Eliot Higgins, (also known as ‘Brown Moses’), that the terrorist factions within Syria which the west wrongly calls the ‘moderate rebels’ were in possession of chemical weapons and that they were planning to use them.
“I have all those secret conversations archived,” says Beeley.
In 2012, the Al Nusra Front (al-Qaeda in Syria, a Salafist jihadist organisation fighting against Syrian government) took over Aleppo’s only chemical weapon factory and proceeded to use them against civilians and against the army in west Aleppo, which has been well documented.
In April 2017 the British press pilloried the US government after releasing a statement confirming that Assad should remain in power. Within 48 hours, there was a chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun, an area under the control of the British armed and trained White Helmets.
The samples from Khan Sheikhoun were not taken on site, but collected by the White Helmets and then transported to the OPCW.
“There has to be questions of the way those samples were handled,” says Beeley. “Even US Secretary of Defense General Mattis put out a statement saying that there was no actual really substantial evidence that President Assad has used chemical weapons.”
White Helmets the PR mouthpiece for Syria
The White Helmets are also the main source of the recent reports of chemical attacks in Douma, but the group has a very tainted reputation when it comes to the accuracy of its reporting.
Piers Robinson, propaganda researcher and chair of politics, society and political journalism at the University of Sheffield says that there are allegations that the White Helmets are working closely with militant groups in Syria.
“We know the White Helmets were setup by James Le Mesurier and are funded by the British and American government amongst others,” he says. “The question we need to ask now is: exactly what is their role?
“Has their role been to pass up information which is convenient to the agendas and narratives of Western governments?
“I think that question is reasonable now, at last, because no one disputes that the West and its allies have been supporting militant groups. So the question of the relationship between the White Helmets and these militant groups needs to be asked. I’m aware it is being promoted as this very positive humanitarian organisation but they do not appear to be independent in the way they are often understood to be. They are funded and supported by the West. There is a lot of awareness around this now.”
Co-option and coercion
Journalist Max Blumenthal recently uncovered an official email from The White Helmets trying to recruit musician Roger Waters with Saudi money and a ‘slick’ public relations firm.
Waters was invited by a PR firm representing the White Helmets to attend a lavish dinner organised by Saudi-British billionaire, Hani Farsi. He was told that by signing on to the organisation’s mission, he could help “elevate the voices of Syria’s peaceful heroes”. He was also lobbied by a French photojournalist affiliated with what he described as a “very powerful Syrian network” associated with the White Helmets and demanded to join Waters on stage in Barcelona to deliver a message for “the children of Syria”. Waters did not respond to either request.
Click here to read the emails in full.
Instead the Pink Floyd frontman used his Barcelona show to out the White Helmets as a propaganda organisation live on stage:
His concerns are shared by eminent author and filmmaker, John Pilger:
Professor Fadhel Kaboub, Associate Professor of economics and international studies at Denison University says there is a lot of evidence the White Helmets have staged and choreographed events that have been revealed and debunked by many experts including the UN.
“The sources of funding for the White Helmets group is also questionable to say the least,” he says.
“There are no independent experts on the ground who can confirm what was used and what the source of the poison gas was, or even if the event occurred at all. So there’s lots of reasons to suspect that there is some something fishy going on. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to confirm but it’s just very suspicious that these things are happening in this particular moment”.
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