Thread: Exclusive: Robert Fisk visits the Syria clinic at the centre of a global crisis

The search for truth in the rubble of Douma – and one doctor’s doubts over the chemical attack
Exclusive: Robert Fisk visits the Syria clinic at the centre of a global crisis

Robert Fisk Douma, Syria
Tuesday 17 April 2018 18:30 BST

The search for truth in the rubble of Douma - and one doctor’s doubts over the chemical attack

This is the story of a town called Douma, a ravaged, stinking place of smashed apartment blocks – and of an underground clinic whose images of suffering allowed three of the Western world’s most powerful nations to bomb Syria last week. There’s even a friendly doctor in a green coat who, when I track him down in the very same clinic, cheerfully tells me that the “gas” videotape which horrified the world – despite all the doubters – is perfectly genuine.

War stories, however, have a habit of growing darker. For the same 58-year old senior Syrian doctor then adds something profoundly uncomfortable: the patients, he says, were overcome not by gas but by oxygen starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.

As Dr Assim Rahaibani announces this extraordinary conclusion, it is worth observing that he is by his own admission not an eyewitness himself and, as he speaks good English, he refers twice to the jihadi gunmen of Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] in Douma as “terrorists” – the regime’s word for their enemies, and a term used by many people across Syria. Am I hearing this right? Which version of events are we to believe?

By bad luck, too, the doctors who were on duty that night on 7 April were all in Damascus giving evidence to a chemical weapons enquiry, which will be attempting to provide a definitive answer to that question in the coming weeks.

France, meanwhile, has said it has “proof” chemical weapons were used, and US media have quoted sources saying urine and blood tests showed this too. The WHO has said its partners on the ground treated 500 patients “exhibiting signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals”.

At the same time, inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) are currently blocked from coming here to the site of the alleged gas attack themselves, ostensibly because they lacked the correct UN permits.

Before we go any further, readers should be aware that this is not the only story in Douma. There are the many people I talked to amid the ruins of the town who said they had “never believed in” gas stories – which were usually put about, they claimed, by the armed Islamist groups. These particular jihadis survived under a blizzard of shellfire by living in other’s people’s homes and in vast, wide tunnels with underground roads carved through the living rock by prisoners with pick-axes on three levels beneath the town. I walked through three of them yesterday, vast corridors of living rock which still contained Russian – yes, Russian – rockets and burned-out cars.

So the story of Douma is thus not just a story of gas – or no gas, as the case may be. It’s about thousands of people who did not opt for evacuation from Douma on buses that left last week, alongside the gunmen with whom they had to live like troglodytes for months in order to survive. I walked across this town quite freely yesterday without soldier, policeman or minder to haunt my footsteps, just two Syrian friends, a camera and a notebook. I sometimes had to clamber across 20-foot-high ramparts, up and down almost sheer walls of earth. Happy to see foreigners among them, happier still that the siege is finally over, they are mostly smiling; those whose faces you can see, of course, because a surprising number of Douma’s women wear full-length black hijab.

I first drove into Douma as part of an escorted convoy of journalists. But once a boring general had announced outside a wrecked council house “I have no information” – that most helpful rubbish-dump of Arab officialdom – I just walked away. Several other reporters, mostly Syrian, did the same. Even a group of Russian journalists – all in military attire – drifted off.

It was a short walk to Dr Rahaibani. From the door of his subterranean clinic – “Point 200”, it is called, in the weird geology of this partly-underground city – is a corridor leading downhill where he showed me his lowly hospital and the few beds where a small girl was crying as nurses treated a cut above her eye.

“I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night – but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a “White Helmet”, shouted “Gas!”, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.”

Oddly, after chatting to more than 20 people, I couldn’t find one who showed the slightest interest in Douma’s role in bringing about the Western air attacks. Two actually told me they didn’t know about the connection.

But it was a strange world I walked into. Two men, Hussam and Nazir Abu Aishe, said they were unaware how many people had been killed in Douma, although the latter admitted he had a cousin “executed by Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] for allegedly being “close to the regime”. They shrugged when I asked about the 43 people said to have died in the infamous Douma attack.

The White Helmets – the medical first responders already legendary in the West but with some interesting corners to their own story – played a familiar role during the battles. They are partly funded by the Foreign Office and most of the local offices were staffed by Douma men. I found their wrecked offices not far from Dr Rahaibani’s clinic. A gas mask had been left outside a food container with one eye-piece pierced and a pile of dirty military camouflage uniforms lay inside one room. Planted, I asked myself? I doubt it. The place was heaped with capsules, broken medical equipment and files, bedding and mattresses.

Of course we must hear their side of the story, but it will not happen here: a woman told us that every member of the White Helmets in Douma abandoned their main headquarters and chose to take the government-organised and Russian-protected buses to the rebel province of Idlib with the armed groups when the final truce was agreed.

There were food stalls open and a patrol of Russian military policemen – a now optional extra for every Syrian ceasefire – and no-one had even bothered to storm into the forbidding Islamist prison near Martyr’s Square where victims were supposedly beheaded in the basements. The town’s complement of Syrian interior ministry civilian police – who eerily wear military clothes – are watched over by the Russians who may or may not be watched by the civilians. Again, my earnest questions about gas were met with what seemed genuine perplexity.

How could it be that Douma refugees who had reached camps in Turkey were already describing a gas attack which no-one in Douma today seemed to recall? It did occur to me, once I was walking for more than a mile through these wretched prisoner-groined tunnels, that the citizens of Douma lived so isolated from each other for so long that “news” in our sense of the word simply had no meaning to them. Syria doesn’t cut it as Jeffersonian democracy – as I cynically like to tell my Arab colleagues – and it is indeed a ruthless dictatorship, but that couldn’t cow these people, happy to see foreigners among them, from reacting with a few words of truth. So what were they telling me?

They talked about the Islamists under whom they had lived. They talked about how the armed groups had stolen civilian homes to avoid the Syrian government and Russian bombing. The Jaish el-Islam had burned their offices before they left, but the massive buildings inside the security zones they created had almost all been sandwiched to the ground by air strikes. A Syrian colonel I came across behind one of these buildings asked if I wanted to see how deep the tunnels were. I stopped after well over a mile when he cryptically observed that “this tunnel might reach as far as Britain”. Ah yes, Ms May, I remembered, whose air strikes had been so intimately connected to this place of tunnels and dust. And gas?

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices...-a8307726.html

You see the heavy dust in the videos. The White Helmets videos are fake, because the pictures do not show people suffering from gas poisoning, they do however show the dust that would cause respiratory problems, so their claim of gas poisoning was false. The White Helmets are the Islamic rebels, who tried to overthrow their government and were willing to murder or cause the deaths of 400,000 Syrians, the fleeing of 5 million refugees to other countries and the displacement of 6 million more who are still in Syria but without homes because they were destroyed int he war they caused.

Originally Posted by Judy

You see the heavy dust in the videos. The White Helmets videos are fake, because the pictures do not show people suffering from gas poisoning, they do however show the dust that would cause respiratory problems, so their claim of gas poisoning was false. The White Helmets are the Islamic rebels, who tried to overthrow their government and were willing to murder or cause the deaths of 400,000 Syrians, the fleeing of 5 million refugees to other countries and the displacement of 6 million more who are still in Syria but without homes because they were destroyed int he war they caused.

The following article does not back your claims that the White Helmets are Islamic rebels responsible for the things you claim.

Who Are the White Helmets?

The group has saved more than 60,000 people in Syria—a feat that has put them in contention for the Nobel Peace Prize.


The White Helmets in Aleppo, SyriaWhite Helmets

• YASMEEN SERHAN
• SEP 30, 2016

When airstrikes rain down on rebel-held parts of Syria, a group of 3,000 civilian volunteers are usually the first to respond.

The Syrian Civil Defense, known commonly as the White Helmets, is a volunteer corps of Syrians who act as first responders in the Syrian civil war, which is now in its sixth year. Established in 2013, the group’s charter is simple: to carry out search-and-rescue operations to save the maximum number of lives.

Inspired by a Quranic verse that says “to save a life is to save all of humanity,” the group has rescued more than 60,000 people—a feat that earned them the Right to Livelihood Award, commonly known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” in recognition for their “outstanding bravery, compassion and humanitarian engagement in rescuing civilians.” It has also put them in contention for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Although it has received support from many organizations and high-profile figures, it has been criticized by supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime—and by Assad himself—for its ties to Western governments, from which the group receives millions of dollars in funding.

At least 141 White Helmets have been killed during rescue missions and three of the organization’s four centers in Aleppo were bombed last week. As the Syrian government’s latest bombardment of Aleppo intensifies, the organization warns it may not be able to continue as it once has.
“We are abandoned,” Raed al-Saleh, the head of the organization, said Wednesday at UN headquarters in New York.

I spoke with Joanna Natasegara and Orlando von Einsiedel, the Academy Award–nominated filmmakers behind Netflix’s latest documentary, the White Helmets, which provides a firsthand look into the organization’s work from the perspective of three of its members. Our conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity.

---

Yasmeen Serhan: Who makes up this organization?

Joanna Natasegara: They come from everywhere and every walk of life. Some of them are students, some of them are professionals, and many, many of them are not. Lots of them are blue-collar workers doing very ordinary jobs who just want to be involved in something that’s positive. The three we focus on are—

Orlando von Einsiedel: A taylor, a blacksmith, and a builder.

Natasegara: It’s a sweet trio of jobs.

Serhan: With such an assortment of people coming together, one can imagine their individual backgrounds lend themselves useful in one way or another. But as the film shows, you have volunteers extinguishing fires and pulling people out of the rubble—not exactly your everyday skills. How are they trained?

Von Einsiedel: These guys all made this decision to not flee Syria, to not pick up a gun, and instead to every day risk their lives to save others. It’s quite an extraordinary decision they’ve all made. And the reason they do the training is because they don’t necessarily have those skills—they’re normal people just like me and you. There’s an organization called Akut, a Turkish organization which became well known during the earthquake in Turkey a couple of years ago, and they sort of specialize in that kind of rescue. And the reason it’s very applicable to what White Helmets are doing is because when those barrel bombs are chucked out the helicopters, the effect on cities like Aleppo is sort of like an earthquake—buildings collapse, people need to be pulled out of the rubble—so the skills are very transferable.

White Helmets undergoing training to evacuate people from the rubble.Serhan: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was asked in an interview last week about whether he thought the White Helmets deserve to win the Nobel Peace Prize, to which he responded asking, “What did they achieve in Syria?” How would you answer his question?

Natasegara: They have 120 centers in non-regime-controlled Syria, and that’s because they are not allowed to work in regime-controlled Syria, not because they don’t want to. They have saved 60,000 lives, and those are the ones that they can record, so the real number that they must have saved is actually bigger. And while so many people talk about the lives they save, they also deal with infrastructure and they bury the dead, which is not very well talked about—the amount of dignity that they give to those who lose their lives in Syria also has to be noted, I think. But for us, in terms of what they’ve done for Syria, I think that doesn’t come to question at all. They’re absolutely heroic and driven by this almost unbelievable integrity that everyone in war should be given as a sign of dignity.

Serhan: As filmmakers, what effect are you hoping this documentary has?

Von Einsiedel: Syria is such a hard issue for people to engage with because it’s gone on for so long, and it’s so upsetting, and it feels very hopeless, and that’s a problem. The White Helmets and what they do is a story of hope and these guys are, they are real heroes. And that’s not just hyperbole. We’ve been very fortunate in our work to be able to travel a lot and met lots of extraordinary people, but there’s not very many people on this Earth I’ve ever met who are as incredible as these men and women. And we think their story resonates—it cuts through everything else. It cuts through politics. It’s a pure human story.

Serhan: What do you think international audiences misunderstand the most about this conflict?

Von Einsiedel: Over the course of the last couple of years, the narrative coming out about Syria has very much been focused on ISIS, and terrorism, and the refugee crisis. Those are clearly important stories, but what’s happening to the millions of civilians left inside Syria, especially in non-regime controlled areas, and the daily bombings that they face—that narrative has shifted down the headlines. And the story of the White Helmets brings that very much back into focus.

Serhan: How did you first hear of the White Helmets?

Von Einsiedel: Some friends showed us the video of Mahmoud the “Miracle Baby” being rescued ... I think it even had more resonance when we realized who the actual rescuers were, this group of civilian volunteers. And from that point on, it just felt like a story that we really needed to tell.

A member of the White Helmets posing with Mahmoud the “Miracle Baby.”Serhan: What has the reception of the film been so far?

Natasegara: It’s been very encouraging. Particularly the response from young people is for me heartening. You can see that young people are very interested in issues, they are very interested in foreign affairs and what is happening around the world. They want to engage in a way where they don’t feel patronized or that the news doesn’t represent them or doesn’t speak to them, and I think documentaries really do that—they bridge that divide.

Von Einsiedel: There was a moment early last week where we listened to a podcast done by two young guys somewhere in the Midwest, and they couldn’t even pronounce Syria because they obviously knew very little about it. But how they responded to the documentary … talking about how they had all these stereotypes about what Muslim guys from the Middle East might be like and how the film had broken down a lot of those preconceptions, that was really, really fascinating and says a lot about what we hope this film might be able to do.

Serhan: The White Helmets have gotten considerable international attention for their work. When you spoke with the volunteers, did you get the sense as though they felt they were finally being heard?

Natasegara: If they felt they were being heard, they wouldn’t need to be rescuing as many people as they are. Certainly there is an onus on us all to witness that in a more significant way. It’s probably one of the worst wars of our lifetimes and what we see in this documentary is Syrians acting to save themselves—and not only trained Syrians, but ordinary everyday Syrians— acting to save themselves because there is nobody else. I think that says everything we need to know.

https://www.theatlantic.com/news/arc...elmets/502073/

Excerpt:

The White Helmets have been the subject of various accusations including links to terrorists by supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Iranian and Russia-sponsored media organisations such as Russia Today (RT) and Iranian news agency MNA, and other commentators. These claims are denied by other media.^{[5][6][7][8][9][10][11]}

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_...ian_Civil_War)

Now it all makes sense.

It's not a claim, it's a fact. They left with the rebels on the buses, they're no longer in Douma, they left with the rebels because they are rebels. They aren't a Red Cross or Red Crescent or aid type organization. They're part of the rebellion to overthrow the government. They did the same thing in Egypt and Libya. They aren't "volunteers", they're paid by the White Helmet organization that has an annual budget of $70 million, that's a lot of money for their primitive medical operations. That money went to the rebels to try to overthrow Assad, so it's a way to funnel money to murderers, Islamic extremists and Wack-O-Doodle dissidents.

How Syria's White Helmets became victims of an online propaganda machine

The Russia-backed campaign to link the volunteer rescuers with al-Qaida exposes how conspiracy theories take root: ‘It’s like a factory’

by Olivia Solon

Mon 18 Dec 2017 03.01 ESTLast modified on Sat 14 Apr 2018 13.53 EDT

• 
  

The Syrian volunteer rescue workers known as the White Helmets have become the target of an extraordinary disinformation campaign that positions them as an al-Qaida-linked terrorist organisation.

The Guardian has uncovered how this counter-narrative is propagated online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government (which provides military support to the Syrian regime).

The White Helmets, officially known as the Syria Civil Defence, is a humanitarian organisation made up of 3,400 volunteers – former teachers, engineers, tailors and firefighters – who rush to pull people from the rubble when bombs rain down on Syrian civilians. They’ve been credited with saving thousands of civilians during the country’s continuing civil war.



They have also exposed, through first-hand video footage, war crimes including a chemical attack in April. Their work was the subject of an Oscar-winning Netflix documentary and the recipient of two Nobel peace prize nominations.

Despite this positive international recognition, there’s a counter-narrative pushed by a vocal network of individuals who write for alternative news sites countering the “MSM agenda”. Their views align with the positions of Syria and Russia and attract an enormous online audience, amplified by high-profile alt-right personalities, appearances on Russian state TV and an army of Twitter bots.

The way the Russian propaganda machine has targeted the White Helmets is a neat case study in the prevailing information wars. It exposes just how rumours, conspiracy theories and half-truths bubble to the top of YouTube, Google and Twitter search algorithms.

“This is the heart of Russian propaganda. In the old days they would try and portray the Soviet Union as a model society. Now it’s about confusing every issue with so many narratives that people can’t recognise the truth when they see it,” said David Patrikarakos, author of War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the 21st Century.


The first page of results for ‘White Helmets’ on YouTube shows how the conspiracy theories bubble to the top of search engines. Photograph: YouTube Hybrid warfare

The campaign to discredit the White Helmets started at the same time as Russia staged a military intervention in Syria in September 2015, supporting President Bashar al-Assad’s army with airstrikes bombarding opposition-held areas. Almost immediately, Russian state media such as RT and Sputnik started falsely claiming that Isis was the only target and throwing doubt on the bombings of infrastructure and civilian sites.

The same propaganda machine scooped up fringe anti-American activists, bloggers and researchers who believe the White Helmets are terrorists, giving them a platform on state TV and amplifying their articles through social media.

There is no evidence to suggest that these activists and bloggers are knowingly spreading disinformation, although the stories are often thinly sourced.

Scott Lucas, professor of international politics at the University of Birmingham, describes the overall campaign as “agitation propaganda” but said that some of its participants don’t realise they are being used as pawns.

“The most effective propaganda is when you find someone who believes it then give them support – you don’t create them from scratch,” he added.

Why the White Helmets?

The White Helmets play two roles within Syria. The first is their rescue work: providing an ambulance service, fire service and search and rescue in conflict areas where infrastructure has been decimated. The second role is the documentation of what is taking place within the country via handheld and helmet cameras.

“This is the thing that has annoyed not just the Assad regime and Russian authorities but a lot of the propagandists who work in their orbit,” said Amnesty International’s Kristyan Benedict, a crisis response manager who specialises in Syria.

Their footage has helped organisations like Amnesty and the Syria Justice and Accountability Center corroborate testimony they receive from people in Syria via phone, Skype and WhatsApp. It allows them to check the aftermath of airstrikes to see whether civilians were targeted and whether there was any military presence or checkpoints.

“That’s really been damaging to the war narrative of Syria and Russia,” said Benedict.

It was the White Helmets’ footage that documented the chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun in April, which killed at least 83 people, a third of them children. UN war crimes investigators later concluded the attack was carried out by the Syrian regime against its own people. Russian state media and a network of supportive alternative news sites continue to cast doubt on investigators’ findings, describing it as “illogical” and “deliberately staged” by militants. The alt-right site Infowars repeated the conspiracy theory, describing the attack as staged by the White Helmets, who were described as an “al-Qaida affiliated group funded by George Soros”. The White Helmets have never received funding from George Soros or any of his foundations.

Some of the most vocal sceptics of the UN’s investigation include the blogger Vanessa Beeley, the daughter of a former British diplomat who visited Syria for the first time in July 2016; a University of Sydney senior lecturer, Timothy Anderson, who described the April chemical attack as a “hoax”; and Eva Bartlett, a Canadian writer and activist who said the White Helmets staged rescues using recycled victims – a claim that’s been debunked by Snopes and Channel 4 News.

“They are basically excusing the inexcusable,” said Lucas.

“They have a range of websites that will publish whatever nonsense and Russia Today will have them on TV,” he added.

The Russian strategy has been very successful at shaping the online conversation about the White Helmets. By gaming the social media algorithms with a flood of content, boosted by bots, sock puppet accounts and a network of agitators, propagandists are able to create a “manufactured consensus” that gives legitimacy to fringe views. Even Russia’s official channels, such as its UK embassy Twitter accounts, post memes discrediting the organisation.

View image on Twitter

Russian Embassy, UK
✔@RussianEmbassy


Russia welcomes #Oscars award for “White Helmets” film. Indeed, they are actors serving an agenda, not rescuers. #OscarMistake
7:40 AM - Feb 28, 2017

• 
  1,273
• 
  1,470 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

“If you scroll through tweets about the White Helmets, pretty much every other conversation is equating them with Isis, calling them terrorists. It looks like they are the bad guys,” said Sam Woolley, who studies computational propaganda at the University of Oxford.

“It’s all part of an effort to delegitimise western efforts to stabilise Syria,” he said.
His colleague Samantha Bradshaw adds: “The more confusion there is, the easier it is to manipulate people.”

The research that shows the link

The Guardian spoke to several researchers studying the spread of disinformation and propaganda online who have found evidence of a targeted Russian influence campaign against the White Helmets.

Fil Menczer, a computer science professor at Indiana University, has developed a tool called Hoaxy to chart the spread of misinformation online. Searching for “White Helmets” reveals a handful of sources generated hundreds of stories about the organisation. “It’s like a factory,” he said.

The same handful of people are quoted as “experts” in articles that are repackaged and interlinked to create a body of content whose conspiracy claims gain a semblance of legitimacy.

The analytics firm Graphika has spent years analysing a range of Russian disinformation campaigns including those around the Macron leaks and the Russian doping scandal. In research commissioned by the human rights group the Syria Campaign, it found that the patterns in the online network of the 14,000 Twitter users talking about the White Helmets looked “very similar” and included many known pro-Kremlin troll accounts, some of which were closed down as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the US election. Other accounts appeared to generate more than 150 tweets per day (more than 70 is seen by scholars studying bots as suspicious).


A Graphika map of the online conversation about the White Helmets. Photograph: GraphikaGraphika also found evidence of coordination of timing and messaging around significant events in the news cycle relating to the White Helmets.

Separately, both Graphika and Menczer’s Hoaxy tool identify Beeley, the British blogger, as among the most influential disseminators of content about the White Helmets.

Their findings also correlate with work done by Kate Starbird from the University of Washington in Seattle, who asserts that Beeley and the alternative news site 21st Century Wire have dominated the Twitter conversation about White Helmets over the last few months, along with Sputnik and RT.com.
View image on Twitter

Kate Starbird
✔@katestarbird





Created a domain network graph for “white helmets” tweets May-Aug 2017. These are websites connected by users (who tweet to both).
6:07 PM - Sep 21, 2017

• 
  158
• 
  156 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Beeley frequently criticises the White Helmets in her role as editor of the website 21st Century Wire, set up by Patrick Henningsen, who is also a former editor at Infowars.com.

In 2016, Beeley had a two-hour meeting with Assad in Damascus as part of a US Peace Council delegation,which she described on Facebook as her “proudest moment”. She was also invited to Moscow to report on the “dirty war in Syria”; there, she met senior Russian officials including the deputy foreign minister, Mikhail Bogdanov, and Maria Zakharova, director of information and press at Russia’s foreign ministry.

The mannequin challenge

To understand the propaganda machine in action, you only have to look at what happened when the White Helmets posted their version of the mannequin challenge, a viral internet video trend where people would film themselves frozen mid-action. The rescue group filmed themselves in a staged rescue and shared the video on social media with the hashtag #MannequinChallenge.

The video, posted in November 2016 by the Revolutionary Forces of Syria Media Office, was immediately stripped of its context and reshared as evidence that the organisation uses “crisis actors” in staged rescues designed to make the Russian and Syrian armies look bad.


YouTube ‎@YouTube

ms_knowital@ms_knowital





Here is the White Helmets caught faking a rescue after a fake attack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HCFol7g-FU …
11:06 PM - Apr 8, 2017

• 
  2
• 
  See ms_knowital's other Tweets

Twitter Ads info and privacy


One Twitter user, retweeted hundreds of times, stated: “Unbelievable! Must watch video showing White Helmets fakery.”

RT reported on the incident, including some of the tweets, and cited Beeley as an independent researcher asserting that the video fuelled suspicion around the “already questionable credibility” of the organisation. The following day Beeley wrote a story on 21st Century Wire in which she argued that the video caused “widespread doubt, even among diehard supporters, as to the veracity of their much edited slick video reports”.

The White Helmets later issued an apology, saying they had hoped the viral video would create a connection between the horror or Syria and the outside world, but acknowledged it was an “error of judgement”..

“It was a stupid thing to do,” said Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative reporting collective Bellingcat, “but it was then completely misused by people who have an agenda.”

A year on and the White Helmets’ mannequin challenge video is still widely circulated as evidence that they stage rescues.

There have, however, been isolated rogue actors within the White Helmets who are used to discredit the entire group. One former White Helmet was fired after he was filmed assisting armed militants in disposing of the mutilated corpses of pro-Assad fighters, and others have been photographed with guns despite marketing themselves as unarmed. There is also footage of White Helmets taking a body away from an execution carried out by rebel militants, which critics claim shows they are “assisting” executions.

“These are isolated incidents at the volunteer level – there has never been any kind of incident involving anyone in the leadership,” added Saleh, the White Helmets leader, looking down at his phone as he received a breaking news notification about a British politician resigning over sexual harassment allegations. “No one is saying that the government of the UK is a predatory organisation just because of this one incident.”

Meanwhile, Beeley’s influence continues. In April 2017, she gave a talk at a conference alongside ministers in Assad’s cabinet (who spoke via video conference) titled “White Helmets: Fact or Fantasy?” Her briefing paper and slides on the topic were then submitted to the UN security council and UN general assembly by the Russian government as “evidence” against the White Helmets.

“These leaked documents offer cast-iron proof that the Russian government is doing what it can to elevate Vanessa Beeley as a key player in its propaganda campaign,” said James Sadri, executive director of the Syria Campaign. “A blogger for a 9/11 truther website who only visited Syria for the first time last year should not be taken seriously as an impartial expert on the conflict.”
The Guardian contacted Beeley several times asking for comment and she declined to respond to specific queries, saying that the questions put to her were “a disgrace” containing “no relevant facts and are reminiscent of a McCarthyite interrogation”.

The Guardian also contacted Eva Bartlett, who said she had “no interest in participating in your quite evidently already-decided ‘story’ (an odd term for a journalist to use for an article)”.

Shortly after the requests for comment, Beeley appeared on a 40-minute-long YouTube programme in which she discussed the emailed requests for comment and criticised the Guardian’s coverage of Syria, alleging “faux reporting” based on footage provided by “al-Qaida affiliates” the White Helmets. Beeley said that the “majority consensus” was that the White Helmets were a fraudulent terrorist organisation.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/18/syria-white-helmets-conspiracy-theories

Originally Posted by Judy

It's not a claim, it's a fact. They left with the rebels on the buses, they're no longer in Douma, they left with the rebels because they are rebels. They aren't a Red Cross or Red Crescent or aid type organization. They're part of the rebellion to overthrow the government. They did the same thing in Egypt and Libya. They aren't "volunteers", they're paid by the White Helmet organization that has an annual budget of $70 million, that's a lot of money for their primitive medical operations. That money went to the rebels to try to overthrow Assad, so it's a way to funnel money to murderers, Islamic extremists and Wack-O-Doodle dissidents.

I think I've provided more than enough information to correct the false narrative your pushing. You have fallen for the Bashar Assad, Russia, Iran propaganda ....... hook, line & sinker. Don't feel bad, you're not alone.

No, sir, you have not. All you're doing is pushing false narratives to frame Assad as a Monster, justify the airstrikes, empower the rebels by victimizing them, to prolong the civil war in Syria and sustain US involvement in a war we should have never aided, assisted or been involved with in any manner whatsoever.

That is my opinion, it was my opinion last year, it's my opinion this year, and at this point will always be my opinion.

You of course are free to your opinion.

Okay, one more.


Who are Syria’s White Helmets, and why are they so controversial?

October 7, 2016 8.48am EDT

EPA/Zouhir al Shimale
Author

1. Scott LucasProfessor of International Politics, University of Birmingham

Disclosure statement

Scott Lucas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Partners

University of Birmingham provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK.
View all partners
Republish this articleRepublish our articles for free, online or in print, under Creative Commons license.



A young man, wearing a white helmet and a distinctive yellow-and-blue badge on his arm, digs for four hours in the rubble of a building destroyed by a Russian-regime airstrike in Idlib Province in northwest Syria.

Finally, he sees what he’s looking for: an infant, only weeks old. He gently lifts her, still breathing, from the wreckage and takes her to an ambulance. Crying uncontrollably, he cradles her as she is treated, wounded but alert. He says, “I feel like she is my own daughter.”

Warned that Russian warplanes are overhead, volunteers in a civil defence centre get out of their beds and dress, preparing to help victims at the next bombed site. As they arrive, the warplanes target them in a “double tap” attack, dropping one bomb and then another minutes later. One rescuer is seriously wounded. His colleagues wait anxiously, and suddenly he revives, insisting on lighting a cigarette. A sigh of relief as the pack is taken from him: “No smoking for you now.

These all-too-numerous episodes often don’t end so well. Generally it’s bodies rather than survivors that get pulled out of the rubble, and the volunteers are vulnerable: 141 have been killed and many more wounded.

As Syria’s nearly six-year conflict rumbles on with no end in sight, the country’s so-called "White Helmets” continue to offer a desperately needed humanitarian response. More than 62,000 people have been rescued since the volunteer humanitarian force was formed in 2013.

So who are the White Helmets, and how did they come into being?

Pick up a stretcher

By 2013, the Assad regime was well embarked on its strategy of targeting civilian sites with intense aerial bombardment. The city of Homs had been decimated by months of attacks in early 2012, ensuring that the overstretched Syrian Army could occupy almost all of the area, and the approach was being rolled out across the country.

Those who died in opposition areas often lay unburied, while the injured were left to perish. Ad hoc groups of residents tried to cope after the attacks, but they were usually untrained and not organised.

James Le Mesurier, a former British Army officer already working as an adviser on Syria civil defence at the UAE-based consultancy Analysis, Research, and Knowledge (ARK), decided to go further and seek the finance and infrastructure for a full-time service. With initial training and courses from ARK and the Turkish NGO AKUT, the first volunteers – starting with a team of 20 people – were soon in the field. Further support came from governments and NGOs in countries such as the US, Britain, and the Netherlands, and the White Helmets were formally organised as Syrian Civil Defense in October 2014.

The White Helmets’ origins were certainly international, but by membership, the group is very much Syrian. Its men and women are from Syrian communities: decorators, taxi drivers, bakers, tailors, engineers, pharmacists, shopkeepers, painters, carpenters, students, housewives. As Le Mesurier said in an August 2015 interview:

They are all a very diverse and disparate group of individuals, all of whom made individual choices … They all had the choice whether or not they want to pick up gun, to become a refugee – but they’ve all made a choice to instead pick up a stretcher.

First on the scene. EPA/Zouhir al ShimaleEven if they are unarmed, the volunteers are a threat to the Assad regime. Damascus’s strategy – now shared by Russia – is not to just to fight rebels on the battlefield, but also to destroy any semblance of organised services and infrastructure in opposition-controlled areas. If water, electricity, schools, and markets can be blown up and cut off, then civilians can be forced to surrender, or at least reduced to powerless, besieged bystanders.

The decimation of medical services is central to the strategy, holding a Damocles’ sword of no emergency treatment and everyday care over residents. In defiance of the Geneva conventions, hospitals, clinics, drug warehouses, and blood banks have been systematically targeted, with scores put out of service.

White Helmets centres have been regularly attacked over the past year. In April 2016, one set of missile strikes destroyed a centre west of Aleppo city, killing five volunteers and destroying equipment and vehicles. The “double tap” attacks, hoping to kill and maim the rescuers, are now routine.

Defying propaganda

The joint Russian-Assad regime campaign against the the White Helmets is not just fought with bombs and missiles. Russian and Syrian state outlets are circulating “information” meant to tarnish the volunteers as allies of terrorism, dedicated only to the assistance of jihadists. As President Assad told the Associated Press in September 2016: “They use different humanitarian masks and umbrellas just to implement certain agendas.”

The theme has been eagerly taken up by those who view the Syrian conflict as a conspiracy of American “imperialism”.

That the White Helmets receive assistance from the US government’s Agency for International Development – something they have not denied – apparently means they’re American puppets, even though they draw a range of support from around the world. The fundraising support they get from a <acronym title="Google Page Ranking"><acronym title="Google Page Ranking">PR</acronym></acronym> firm somehow proof that they are the vanguard of a proxy war fought by a US military-industrial complex.

Blogger Vanessa Beeley has switched her focus from Israel and Gaza to wage a vitriolic campaign against the White Helmets as “first responders for the US and NATO al-Nusra/al-Qaeda forces”. Never mind that the White Helmets explicitly stand against violence and extremism; ignore the absurdity of the idea that the US – which is bombing the jihadists of Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, and which has been in a misconceived “War on Terror” against al-Qaeda for a decade and a half – is suddenly allied with those groups. The sight of volunteers celebrating with rebels in the city of Idlib is apparently evidence that the White Helmets are “al-Qaeda”.

Max Blumenthal, another writer who has challenged Israeli policies in Palestine, frames the White Helmets as “driven by a pro-interventionist agenda conceived by the Western governments and public relations groups that back them”. Never mind that the White Helmets’ “crime” is to call for zones protecting civilians; ignore their firm declaration that they don’t affiliate with any government or NGO. To Blumenthal, they are a Trojan horse for “70,000 American servicemen” to invade Syria.

Having started the cycle of disinformation, Russian state outlets can complete it by citing “investigative journalists” such as Beeley and Blumenthal to deride the White Helmets as a “controversial quasi-humanitarian organisation” and – invoking the magnate George Soros as conspiracy master – a “Soros-sponsored” operation “cooking up lies”.
These claims are the product of disinformation and spurious inference – but all this politics and propaganda, however menacing, is irrelevant to the people on the ground, whose focus is on the next mission.

As one volunteer summarised it:

We have to have faith that this country is our country. We shouldn’t leave it. If I don’t stand by my country and by my people and those who are oppressed, who will?
If I leave and we all leave, there will be no one left.

Or as British MP Jo Cox wrote when she nominated the White Helmetsfor a Nobel Peace Prize, shortly before she was killed by an attacker in June 2016:

When the bombs rain down, the Syrian Civil Defense rush in. In the most dangerous place on earth these unarmed volunteers risk their lives to help anyone in need regardless of religion or politics.

They were ultimately overlooked for this year’s prize, and the propaganda against them keeps coming. But as the offensive in Aleppo ramps up, the White Helmets’ work goes on.

http://theconversation.com/who-are-s...oversial-66580

It doesn't matter how many you post, MW. The White Helmets are funded by the United States government through an aid program, the United Kingdom, France and the Soros Organization, all of whom have plenty of reporters and professors who will tell whatever story they want told for whatever purpose they seek. It's one ofo the ways they've funneled money to the rebels for years. Whether Trump knows this or not, I don't know, but when he finds out, donations from American taxpayers to these criminals will stop. Hopefully, very soon.