When a bomb comes crashing down on a building, leaving devastation in its wake, they rush towards the site instead of towards shelters. With their bare hands, they search for people in the rubble. They try to pull out survivors who are shocked and wounded, tormented by fear and, not least, the knowledge that civilians long ago stopped being collateral damage, and are precisely the target in this war. These rescuers are Syria’s White Helmets, a group of 3,000 local volunteers. Once tailors or carpenters or students or engineers, they are now dedicated to saving lives when fighter jets and helicopters drop barrel bombs, cluster explosives, phosphorus bombs and chlorine shells on neighbourhoods or hospitals. As the Nobel committee prepares to announce this year’s peace prize, the White Helmets deserve attention.
In Syria’s maelstrom of horrors, it is hard to find anything that points to respect for basic humanitarian principles or even human dignity. The Assad regime has unleashed untold levels of violence on the Syrian population and is being actively assisted by Russia’s military intervention as well as by Iranian-connected ground forces. Jihadi groups have grown, often filling voids left by less well-armed and well-resourced moderates. Civilians are trapped in the middle. In Aleppo, 300,000 people are exposed to a relentless barrage of airstrikes. The Syrian government and Russia now seem intent on crushing Aleppo, the opposition’s last stronghold, before a new American president takes office. Diplomacy has entirely collapsed, with acrimonious exchanges in the UN replacing attempts at a ceasefire.
This is the backdrop against which the White Helmets operate – a western-funded Syrian search-and-rescue organisation whose members put their lives at great risk to save civilians, receiving only a monthly stipend of $150. Danger is made worse by the fact those who bomb routinely resort to double-tap strikes, with fighter jets dropping ordnance and then returning to target rescue teams.
These volunteers know all too well that great power politics, alongside a tyrant’s brutal policies, have brought Syria to the abyss. They entertain no illusions that genuine measures will be taken swiftly to end massacres on a scale unprecedented in decades. The White Helmets do what they can, locally. It’s the very least the west can do to back them. No one should be surprised that Bashar al-Assad has compared these humanitarian activists to terrorists: that’s what he calls anyone who opposes him.
What the White Helmets accomplish may seem like a drop in the ocean, but what they represent is immense: resilience and bravery in the face of barbarism. They are a constant reminder that those targeted by Russia and the Assad regime’s massive bombing campaign in Aleppo are civilians, not terrorists. And they show that individual acts of courage can go a long way to fight indifference. They also embody a spirit of civic resistance – upholding some of the ideals of the peaceful, popular uprising of 2011 and exemplifying courage and solidarity in the face of state-sponsored terror. The international community has utterly failed Syrians, by failing to protect them from mass atrocities. No Nobel peace prize can erase that. But because symbols can be powerful, the White Helmets should be recognised with this award.
