Jul 15, 2017 5 min read

A verse from Islam’s holy book, the Quran, states: “Whoever saves one life, saves all of humanity.”

These are words to live by for Syria’s White Helmets, volunteers who spend their days, and sacrifice their lives, to save their fellow citizens from the brutality of President Bashar al-Assad’s military and that of his Russian and Iranian allies.

After six years of civil war, the Syrian landscape is a virtual wasteland. Whole cities have been reduced to rubble and a once vibrant and thriving society is no more. Syria’s history, and its ancient monuments, have been erased as Assad desperately clings to power. The senseless slaughter continues on a daily basis. The international community’s silence has given a green light to war crimes unparalleled since the killings of Muslims in Bosnia and the Tutsi minority in Rwanda in the 1990s. The Syrian nation will never be the same.

What was a steady flow of refugees trying to escape the hell that is their homeland has quickly become a torrent. For those who do make it out of Syria, life is difficult and uncertain, but for those who cannot elude this endless war, it is a veritable human catastrophe.

In the ever-shrinking areas of the country held by rebels, survival is a daily struggle. The population never knows when they will be subject to aerial attack or besieged by Syrian military ground forces. Air assaults are relentless, and come at times when civilians are most vulnerable. The Assad regime’s goal is to terrorize the resistance into surrender, and barring that, to eliminate it by mass murder. On the ground, defiant towns and villages are surrounded and denied food, water, and vital medical supplies. Forced starvation has become a common tactic used by Syrian and Russian military forces. War crimes of unspeakable horror are committed in the hope of finally subjugating a people who have grown weary of all the bloodshed and death.

The United States does not have clean hands when it comes to Syria. When Assad began his crackdown on peaceful pro-democracy protests that coincided with the 2011 Arab Spring, the Obama administration was hesitant to get involved. President Obama was in the midst of withdrawing all American troops from Iraq and reducing our fighting role in Afghanistan. At that point, possible U.S. entanglement in another war in the Middle East was clearly not in the cards. Short of allowing some symbolic aid in the form of weaponry to the rebel factions, Obama was not prepared to make a serious commitment to help bring down the Assad regime.

Enter the Russians, with a long history of supporting the Assad dynastic dictatorship, and a strong desire to maintain their warm-water naval base on the Mediterranean Sea. When it was discovered that Assad had a chemical weapons stockpile that he was prepared to use in his civil war, Obama drew his infamous red line, threatening Assad with U.S. military action. Assad crossed that line, gassing his civilian population in rebel territories. Obama choked, and Vladimir Putin smelled American timidity. There was no U.S. punishment consistent with the president’s warnings to Assad.

After a deafening silence on Syria from candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, President Trump, moved by videos of dying children who had been gassed in a February air attack, ordered an attack on the Syrian air base where the assault originated.

Apparently long on bravado but short on substantial policy, the Trump administration continues its quiet acquiescence to Putin’s bad behavior and Russian military intervention in Syria.

The White Helmets have come into this cauldron of murderous rage. They are also known as the Syrian Civil Defense. Prior to the start of hostilities, its members were doctors, lawyers, engineers, businessmen as well as electricians, carpenters, teachers and those in other occupations. They represent all levels of Syrian society. They are known as the White Helmets for the headgear that they wear when on rescue missions in the rebel-controlled regions of the country. When not using their bare hands to dig through the rubble of bombed-out buildings, their only weapons are the hand shovels they use and the lights on their helmets to search the darkened crevices of collapsed buildings for victims.

Numerous volunteers have been killed while trying to retrieve bombing victims trapped in the debris. It is dangerous work and they never know if they will die while attempting to save others. For this, they receive only a small monthly stipend to continue their work.

If you ask any of the White Helmets why they would be willing to make this daily descent into the hell of Assad’s Syria, they will tell you that every life is precious. Their victories are not won on the battlefields of a civil war that has cost nearly a half-million lives in six years. Success is measured in the children, elderly and injured they manage to find and pull out from the concrete and dust of decimated neighborhoods. Already, 159 White Helmets have died attempting to extricate the living from the jaws of death.

The selfless civilians of the Syrian Civil Defense hate war and long for the day when peace will finally come to the homeland they dearly love. They have chosen not to flee but to stay, and to make a positive difference in a war that knows no boundaries of human decency.

Haberl is a resident of South Strabane Township and a retired teacher.