No rol de guerra, a civil é a da pior espécie.
Não necessariamente devido à violência física - a ocupação da Palestina é prova disso.
É a pior de todas porque é autoridade pública contra seus próprios compatriotas; pai contra filho; irmão contra irmão; amigo contra amigo. Ou seja, é uma violência social que deixa cicatrizes doloridíssimas.
Na África do Sul, o arcebispo Desmond Tutu contribuiu para a amenização dos sofrimentos morais e sentimentais aplicando o programa Truth and Reconciliation criado por Nelson Mandela no fim do regime de apartheid. A reconciliação foi um processo de confissão de crimes e de perdão. Foi possível porque uns e outros eram cristãos e foram criados com nossos valores de confissão, arrependimento e absolução.
Além disso, a hasbara não perde oportunidade de definir os não israelitas como sub-raça, como prova o novo vídeo abaixo, divulgado pelo Ministério das Relações Exteriores de Israel, cujo ministro é o neo-fascista Avigdor Lieberman. Este mostra não apenas os árabes, mas também os gregos (!!), os romanos (!), os europeuus das Cruzadas, os ingleses, enfim, todos os não judeus, como trogloditas imbecis. Sem contar a afirmação revisionista que há milhares de anos que a Palestina lhes pertence. E não aos filistinos de Golias.
Para lugares como a Síria, que era e é, de fato, a razão deste artigo.
Voltemos ao drama das guerras civis abordando este país que virou palco de um conflito internacional.
Desde 1967 que quase todas as guerras civis devem-se aos mesmos motivos: pressão de Israel + miopia dos EUA e de seus cúmplices da OTAN + cobiça dos 1% de bilionários gringos.
Esses componentes, juntos ou individualemente, é que ditam o comportamento das grandes potências ocidentais. Estas intervêm (ou como na Palestina, lavam as mãos ou tomam partido pelo agressor) conforme seus próprios interesses imediatistas.
Ou melhor, conforme o interesse dos dois lobbies que dominam os Estados Unidos - o de armamento e o sionista.
A influência dessas duas hidras que devoram a paz no planeta Terra é tamanha, que intervêm até nas denominações de pessoas e eventos. (Como as învasões judias na Cisjordânia, que são, no mínimo, colônias, e que são vendidas como "assentamentos", palavra que insinua mais um direito do que a usurpação que de fato representa.)
A palavra é tudo. A escolha das palavras é um processo jornalístico de extrema importância. E é consciente. Pelo menos nos profissionais que conhecem seu peso e sua influência.
Alguns colegas repetem os comunicados de imprensa da IDF e do Pentágono e referem-se às atrocidades de Homs e Aleppo, na Síria, como "civil war".
Esse termo é premeditado e não é apropriado.
É usado para lembrar a opinião pública da Grã-Bretanha, dos EUA - Norte vs Sul, da Révolution française, e levar a pensar que como esses eventos, o que está acontecendo na Síria é passageiro e que culminará no renascimento da nação como aconteceu nos países ocidentais em que tais divergências ocorreram.Porém (ah! porém), quem realmente pensa, não pode deixar de perguntar-se se o que está acontecendo na Síria é um processo interno de renascimento ou um complô israelo-ocidental para aniquilar o país definitiva e irresponsavelmente.
A grande mídia fala em "carnificina", "massacre", e mostra dementes jogando barris de fogo do céu; um grupo de fanáticos escravizando mulheres e decapitando homens; e insinua a crença que os exércitos de Assad e de Putin, "desprovidos de moral", agem errado, bombardeando comboios humanitários a caminho de cidades sitiadas.
"Preto no branco", sem porquês e sem nuâncias.
Não se deixe enganar - as imagens captadas pelas câmeras são selecionadas, e muitas vezes, manipuladas.
As imagens no terreno são devastadoras. Mas são cinzentas.
Os EUA e suas subservientes França e Inglaterra, alimentaram os "rebeldes" e deixaram o circo pegar fogo até chegar a um ponto sem retorno. Aí, altaneiros e amorais, adotam atitudes moralizadoras.
Acontece que do alto de seus saltos altos e de seus drones que espionam de ainda mais alto, os seres humanos parecem formigas e não gente de carne, osso e sentimentos.
Os problemas no Oriente Médio - desde a guerra dos Sete Dias que inaugurou a limpeza étnica da Palestina; ao bombardeio do Afeganistão; à invasão do Iraque e execução de Saddam Hussein por razões vilmente monetárias; à execução de Muamar Gaddafi e entrega da Líbia ao caos, de mão beijada pela ogra Clinton; à lenha na fogueira da revolta síria - levam à constatação que os EUA, a Inglaterra, a França, são estados que só respeitam o "In God we Trust", do primeiro, o "Dieu et mon droit/God and my right" do segundo, e "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" do terceiro, como slogans, válidos apenas dentro de suas fronteiras. E olhe lá! Fora, a divisa é depredar, pilhar, conquistar e subjugar sempre que conseguirem. Só que durante seu mandato, a situação na região só piorou, até chegar a um impasse.
Na Síria, o impasse foi "solucionado" com a criação de supostos "salvadores da pátria". Fabricados, marketados com capacetes brancos e com um serviço de imprensa que os mediatiza ao máximo.
Mas quem são esses "White Helmets"? A que vem esta "Defesa civil"? O que fazem os Capacetes Brancos no terreno, de fato?
É verdade que a maioria absoluta é gente como a gente. Entre eles, há civis treinados militarmente e civis de boa vontade que ignoram que estão sendo manipulados para servir interesses dos lobbies citados acima, dos serviços de inteligência dos EUA, enfim, dos grandes capitalistas que só pensam na "reconstrução" pós-Assad, sobre os escombros de sítios arqueológicos cuja perda do dinheiro que o turista leva ao visitá-los.
Passo ao inglês para explicar a "Campanha Síria" e os "Capacetes Brancos". Assim meus leitores estrangeiros não se perderão na tradução google. Alerta artigo longo.
. The White Helmets have a vast network of connections in media and centers of political influence.. Their "Syria campaign" has played a crucial role in disseminating images and stories of the horrors shown this month on eastern Aleppo.
. They are able to operate within the halls of power in Washington and have the power to mobilize thousands of demonstrators into the streets. (Despite its outsized role in shaping how the West sees Syria’s civil war, which is now in its sixth year and entering one of its grisliest phases, this outfit remains virtually unknown to the general public.)
. They present themselves as an impartial, non-political voice for ordinary Syrian citizens that is dedicated to civilian protection, but they are not harmeless at all.
. They are capitalizing on the outrage inspired by the bombardment of rebel-held eastern Aleppo this year to intensify the drumbeat for greater U.S. military involvement.
. They have been careful to cloak interventionism in the liberal-friendly language of human rights, casting Western military action as “the best way to support Syrian refugees,” and packaging a no-fly zone — along with so-called safe zones and no bombing zones, which would also require Western military enforcement — as a “way to protect civilians and defeat ISIS.”
. They use their self-proclaimed "unarmed and impartialitly" presence to gather footage of themselves saving civilians trapped in the rubble of buildings bombed by the Syrian government and its Russian ally (those partial footages have become ubiquitous in western media coverage of the crisis).
. As they claim - without any material support - to have saved "tens of thousands of lives", the group has become the leading resource for journalists and human rights groups seeking information inside the war theater, from casualty figures to details on the kind of bombs that are falling.
Nevertheless, the Syria Campaign and the White Helmets are anything but impartial. They serve the interests of the people that fund them.
The group was founded in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Office of Transitional Initiatives, an explicitly political wing of the agency that has funded efforts at political subversion in Cuba and Venezuela. USAID * is the White Helmets’ principal funder, committing at least $23 million to the group since 2013.
This money was part of $339.6 million budgeted by USAID for “supporting activities that pursue a peaceful transition to a democratic and stable Syria" -- or establishing a parallel governing structure that could fill the power vacuum once Bashar Al-Assad was removed.
Thanks to an aggressive public relations pushed by The Syria Campaign, the White Helmets have been nominated for the Nobel Prize. They have already been awarded the “alternative Nobel” known as the Right Livelihood Award - previous winners include real good people such Amy Goodman, Edward Snowden, Leonardo Boff and Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu.
At the same time, the White Helmets are pushing for a NFZ in public appearances and on a website created by The Syria Campaign.
The Syria Campaign has garnered endorsements for the White Helmets from a host of Hollywood celebrities including Ben Affleck, Alicia Keyes and Justin Timberlake - all of them, with good intentions, but completely unaware of what is going on on the field.
And with fundraising and “outreach” performed by The Syria Campaign, the White Helmets have become the stars of a slickly produced Netflix documentary vehicle that has received hype from media outlets across the West.
But making the White Helmets into an international sensation is just one of a series of successes The Syria Campaign has achieved in its drive to oust Syria's government.
When an aid convoy organized by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) and United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs came under attack on its way to the rebel-held countryside of West Aleppo in Syria this September 18, the White Helmets pinned blame squarely on the Syrian and Russian governments - with no proof whatsoever.
In fact, a White Helmets member was among the first civilians to appear on camera at the scene of the attack, declaring in English that “the regime helicopters targeted this place with four barrel [bombs].”
The White Helmets also produced one of the major pieces of evidence Western journalists have relied on to implicate Russia and the Syrian government in the attack: a photograph supposedly depicting the tail fragment of a Russian-made OFAB 250-270 fragmentation bomb. (This account remains unconfirmed by both the UN and SARC, and no evidence of barrel bombs has been produced).
As the United Nations workers know what is really going on, they could not be fooled by White Helmetss propaganda. So they became a nuisance to the White Helmets, as they could set the records straight to the press. So what dit the White Helmets do to make sure their only point the view would reach the media? They had to commit an unforgiven crime. White Helmets figured prominently in The Syria Campaign’s push to undermine the UN’s humanitarian work inside Syria.
For months, The Syria Campaign has painted the UN as a stooge of Bashar Al-Assad for coordinating its aid deliveries with the Syrian government, as it has done with governments in conflict zones around the world. White Helmets' influence is such, that even The Guardian's Kareem Shaheen praised a 50-page report by them attacking the UN’s work in Syria as "damning." A subsequent Guardian' article cited the report as part of the inspiration for its own “exclusive” investigation slamming the UN’s coordination with the Syrian government.
At a website created by The Syria Campaign to host the report, visitors are greeted by this UN logo drenched in blood.
The Syria Campaign has even taken credit for forcing former UN Resident Coordinator Yacoub El-Hillo out of his job in Damascus, a false claim it was later forced to retract, but the public damage was done.
Among the opposition groups that promoted The Syria Campaign’s anti-UN report was Ahrar Al-Sham, a jihadist rebel faction that has allied with Al Qaeda in a mission to establish an exclusively Islamic state across Syria.
A Westerner who operates a politically neutral humanitarian NGO in Damascus offered, off the record, a withering assessment: "The Syria Campaign aim do divide and polarize the humanitarian community along political lines while forcing humanitarian entities to make decisions based on potential media repercussions instead of focusing on actual needs on the ground.” The NGO executive accused the Syrian Campaign and its partners in the opposition of “progressively identifying the humanitarian workers operating from Damascus with one party to the conflict,” limiting their ability to negotiate access to rebel-held territory. “As a humanitarian worker myself, I know that this puts me and my teams in great danger since it legitimizes warring factions treating you as an extension of one party in the conflict. The thousands of Syrians that signed up with the UN or humanitarian organizations are civilians. They not only joined to get a salary but in hopes of doing something good for other Syrians. This campaign [by The Syria Campaign] is humiliating all of them, labelling them as supporters of one side and making them lose hope in becoming agents of positive change in their own society.”
This September, days before the aid convoy attack prompted the UN to suspend much of its work inside Syria, The Syria Campaign spurred 73 aid organizations operating in rebel-held territory, including the White Helmets, to suspend their cooperation with the UN aid program. Which is dreadful because it means, in practice, the UN will lose sight of what is happening throughout the north of Syria and in opposition-held areas of the country, where the NGOs do most of their work. And the public won't acces to impartial information.
Despite The Syria Campaign’s influence on the international media stage - even on Netflix, details on the outfit’s inner workings are difficult to come by. The Syria Campaign is registered in England as a private company called the Voices Project at an address shared by 91 other companies. Aside from Asfari, most of The Syria Campaign’s donors are anonymous.
Looming over this opaque operation are questions about its connections to Avaaz, a global public relations outfit that played an instrumental role in generating support for a no-fly zone in Libya, and The Syria Campaign’s founding by Purpose, another PR firm spun out of Avaaz. James Sadri bristled when I asked about the issue, dismissing it as a “crank conspiracy” ginned up by Russian state media and hardcore Assadist elements.
To make a long story short, a careful look at the origins and operation of The Syria Campaign raises doubts about the outfit’s image as an authentic voice for Syrian civilians, and should invite serious questions about the agenda of its partner organizations as well.
By the way, the Syria Campaign shows some understandable defensiveness about its ties to Avaaz.
This is because back in 2011, it was Avaaz that introduced a public campaign for a no-fly zone in Libya and delivered a petition with 1,202,940 signatures to the UN supporting Western intervention. John Hilary, the executive director of War On Want, the U.K.’s leading anti-poverty and anti-war charity, warned at the time, "Little do most of these generally well-meaning activists know, they are strengthening the hands of those western governments desperate to reassert their interests in north Africa… Clearly a no-fly zone makes foreign intervention sound rather humanitarian—putting the emphasis on stopping bombing, even though it could well lead to an escalation of violence.”
John Hilary’s dire warning was fulfilled after the NATO-enforced no-fly zone prompted the ouster of former President Moamar Qaddafi. Months later, Qaddafi was sexually assaulted and beaten to death in the road by a mob of fanatics. The Islamic State and an assortment of militias filled the void left in the Jamahiriya government’s wake. The political catastrophe should have been serious enough to call future interventions of this nature into question. Yet Libya’s legacy failed to deter Avaaz from introducing a new campaign for another no-fly zone; this time in Syria.
On another hand, there is the old petroleum mogul. It provided the funding that launched the Syria Project, the means of military intervention justified an end in which he could return to the country of his birth and participate in its economic life on his own terms.
Though The Syria Campaign claims to “refuse funding from any party to the conflict in Syria,” it was founded and is sustained with generous financial assistance from one of the most influential exile figures of the opposition, Ayman Asfari, the U.K.-based CEO of the British oil and gas supply company Petrofac Limited. Asfari is worth $1.2 billion and owns about one-fifth of the shares of his company, which boasts 18,000 employees and close to $7 billion in annual revenues.
Through his Asfari Foundation, he has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to The Syria Campaign and has secured a seat for his wife, Sawsan, on its board of directors. He has also been a top financial and political supporter of the Syrian National Coalition, the largest government-in-exile group set up after the Syrian revolt began. The group is dead-set on removing Assad and replacing him with one of its own. Asfari’s support for opposition forces was so pronounced the Syrian government filed a warrant for his arrest, accusing him of supporting “terrorism.”
In London, Asfari has been a major donor to former British Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative Party. This May, Cameron keynoted a fundraiser for the Hands Up for Syria Appeal, a charity heavily supported by Asfari that sponsors education for Syrian children living in refugee camps. The Prime Minister might have seemed like an unusual choice for the event given his staunch resistance to accepting unaccompanied Syrian children who have fled to Europe. However, Asfari has generally supported Cameron’s exclusionary policy.
Grilled about his position during an episode of BBC’s Hardtalk, Asfari explained, “I do not want the country to be emptied. I still have a dream that those guys [refugees] will be able to go back to their homes and they will be able to play a constructive role in putting Syria back together.”
In Washington, Asfari is regarded as an important liaison to the Syrian opposition. He has visited the White House eight times since 2014... He is welcome there because, as described by The Independent, Asfari is onfe of the few "super rich" exiles poised to rebuild a post-Assad Syria — and to reap handsome contracts in the process. To reach his goal of returning to Syria in triumph after the downfall of Assad’s government, Asfari not only provided the seed money for The Syria Campaign, he has helped sustain the group with hefty donations.
Just this year, the Asfari Foundation donated $180,000 to the outfit, according to The Syria Campaign’s media lead Laila Kiki. Asfari is not The Syria Campaign’s only donor, however. According to Kiki, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund also contributed $120,000 to the outfit’s $800,000 budget this year. “The rest of the funds come from donors who wish to remain anonymous,” she explained.
What are The Syria Campaign’s main priorities?
. It has been pushing for a no-fly zone in Syria that would require at least “70,000 American servicemen” to enforce, according to a Pentagon assessment, along with the destruction of government infrastructure and military installations. There is no record of a no-fly zone being imposed without regime change following —which seems to be exactly what The Syria Campaign and its partners want. This would mean, de fato, OTAN going to war against Syria, Russia, and China, if not all the BRICS together. Third World War, actually).
. To move Western media in a more interventionist direction, and to demonize Bashar el Assad and Russia.
When The Syria Campaign placed an ad on its website seeking a senior press officer upon its launch in 2014, it emphasized its need for “someone who can land pieces in the U.S., U.K. and European [media] markets in the same week.” The company’s ideal candidate would be able to “maintain strong relationships with print, broadcast, online journalists, editors in order to encourage them to see TSC as a leading voice on Syria.” Prioritizing PR experience over political familiarity, The Syria Campaign reassured applicants, “You don’t need to be an expert on Syria or speak Arabic.” After all, the person would be working in close coordination with an unnamed “Syrian communications officer who will support on story gathering and relationships inside Syria.”
Sadri acknowledged that The Syria Campaign has been involved in shopping editorials to major publications. “There have been op-eds in the past that we’ve helped get published, written by people on the ground. There’s a lot of op-eds going out from people inside Syria,” he told me. But he would not say which ones, who the authors were, or if his company played any role in their authorship.
One recent incident highlighted The Syria Campaign’s skillful handling of press relationships from Aleppo to media markets across the West. It was August 17, and a Syrian or Russian warplane had just hit an apartment building in rebel-held eastern Aleppo. A video then emerged of five-year-old boy, Omran Daqneesh, as he sat blinking in the back of White Helmets' ambulance. An Australian journalist who received the video from the Syria Campaign tweetted it without explaining who provided her with the video, saying only“Watch this video from Aleppo tonight. And watch it again. And remind yourself that with #Syria #wecantsaywedidntknow.” Her post was retweeted over 17,000 times and the hashtag she originated, which implied international inaction against the Syrian government made such horrors possible, became a viral sensation as well. (the journalist in question did not respond to questions sent to her publicly listed email.)
Hours later, the image of Omran appeared on the front page of dozens of international newspapers, from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal to the Times of London. CNN’s Kate Bolduan, who had suggested during Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip in 2014 that civilian casualties were, in fact, human shields, broke down in tears during an extended segment detailing the rescue of Omran.
Abu Sulaiman Al-Muhajir, the Australian citizen serving as a top leader and spokesman for Al Qaeda’s Syrian offshoot, Jabhat Fateh Al-Sham, took a special interest in the boy. "I cannot get conditioned to seeing injured/murdered children," Al-Muhajir wrote on Facebook. "Their innocent faces should serve as a reminder of our responsibility."
Seizing on the opportunity, The Syria Campaign gathered quotes from the photographer who captured the iconic image, Mahmoud Raslan, and furnished them to an array of media organizations. While many outlets published Raslan’s statements, Public Radio International was among the few that noted The Syria Campaign’s role in serving them up, referring to the outfit as “a pro-opposition advocacy group with a network of contacts in Syria.”
On August 20, McNeill took to Facebook with a call to action: “Were you horrified by the footage of little Omran?” she asked her readers. “Can't stop thinking about him? Well don't just retweet, be outraged for 24 hours and move on. Hear what two great humanitarians for Syria, Zaher Sahloul & James Sadri, want you to do now.”
Sadri happened to be the director of The Syria Campaign and Sahloul was the Syrian American Medical Society director who partnered with The Syria Campaign and this September, joined up with the Jewish United Federation of Chicago, a leading opponent of Palestine solidarity organizing, to promote his efforts.)
Behind the scene of the snapshot that made Westerners cry their heart out, there was another image that did not made the headlines, despite showing the real reality on the ground: Culled from the Facebook page of Mahmoud Raslan, the "activist" from the American-operated Aleppo Media Center who took the initial video of the little boy Omran, there was Raslan posing for a triumphant selfie with a group of "rebel" fighters. The armed men hailed from the Nour Al-Din Al-Zenki faction - close to ISIS. At least two of the commanders who appeared in the photo with Raslan had recently beheaded a boy they captured, referring to him in video footage as “child” while they taunted and abused him. The boy has been reported to be a 12-year-old named Abdullah Issa.
Despite its unsavory tendencies and extremist ideological leanings, Al-Zenki was until 2015 a recipient of extensive American funding, with at least 1000 of its fighters on the CIA payroll.
This September 24, Al-Zenki formally joined forces with the jihadist Army of Conquest led by Al Qaeda-established jihadist group, Jabhat Fateh Al-Sham. For its part, The Syria Campaign coordinated the release of a statement with Raslan explaining away his obvious affinity with Al-Zenki. Sophie McNeill, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reporter who was among the first to publish the famous Omran photo, dutifully published Raslan’s statement on Twitter, acknowledging The Syria Campaign as its source.
Curiously describing the beheading victim as a 19-year-old and not the “child” his beheaders claimed he was, Raslan pleaded ignorance about the Al-Zenki fighters’ backgrounds: “It was a busy day with lots of different people and groups on the streets. As a war photographer I take lots of photos with civilians and fighters.”
Mahmoud Raslan may not have been the most effective local partner, but The Syria Campaign could still count on the White Helmets.
. They have been careful to cloak interventionism in the liberal-friendly language of human rights, casting Western military action as “the best way to support Syrian refugees,” and packaging a no-fly zone — along with so-called safe zones and no bombing zones, which would also require Western military enforcement — as a “way to protect civilians and defeat ISIS.”
. They use their self-proclaimed "unarmed and impartialitly" presence to gather footage of themselves saving civilians trapped in the rubble of buildings bombed by the Syrian government and its Russian ally (those partial footages have become ubiquitous in western media coverage of the crisis).
. As they claim - without any material support - to have saved "tens of thousands of lives", the group has become the leading resource for journalists and human rights groups seeking information inside the war theater, from casualty figures to details on the kind of bombs that are falling.
Nevertheless, the Syria Campaign and the White Helmets are anything but impartial. They serve the interests of the people that fund them.
The group was founded in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Office of Transitional Initiatives, an explicitly political wing of the agency that has funded efforts at political subversion in Cuba and Venezuela. USAID * is the White Helmets’ principal funder, committing at least $23 million to the group since 2013.
This money was part of $339.6 million budgeted by USAID for “supporting activities that pursue a peaceful transition to a democratic and stable Syria" -- or establishing a parallel governing structure that could fill the power vacuum once Bashar Al-Assad was removed.
Thanks to an aggressive public relations pushed by The Syria Campaign, the White Helmets have been nominated for the Nobel Prize. They have already been awarded the “alternative Nobel” known as the Right Livelihood Award - previous winners include real good people such Amy Goodman, Edward Snowden, Leonardo Boff and Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu.
At the same time, the White Helmets are pushing for a NFZ in public appearances and on a website created by The Syria Campaign.
The Syria Campaign has garnered endorsements for the White Helmets from a host of Hollywood celebrities including Ben Affleck, Alicia Keyes and Justin Timberlake - all of them, with good intentions, but completely unaware of what is going on on the field.
And with fundraising and “outreach” performed by The Syria Campaign, the White Helmets have become the stars of a slickly produced Netflix documentary vehicle that has received hype from media outlets across the West.
When an aid convoy organized by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) and United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs came under attack on its way to the rebel-held countryside of West Aleppo in Syria this September 18, the White Helmets pinned blame squarely on the Syrian and Russian governments - with no proof whatsoever.
In fact, a White Helmets member was among the first civilians to appear on camera at the scene of the attack, declaring in English that “the regime helicopters targeted this place with four barrel [bombs].”
The White Helmets also produced one of the major pieces of evidence Western journalists have relied on to implicate Russia and the Syrian government in the attack: a photograph supposedly depicting the tail fragment of a Russian-made OFAB 250-270 fragmentation bomb. (This account remains unconfirmed by both the UN and SARC, and no evidence of barrel bombs has been produced).
As the United Nations workers know what is really going on, they could not be fooled by White Helmetss propaganda. So they became a nuisance to the White Helmets, as they could set the records straight to the press. So what dit the White Helmets do to make sure their only point the view would reach the media? They had to commit an unforgiven crime. White Helmets figured prominently in The Syria Campaign’s push to undermine the UN’s humanitarian work inside Syria.
For months, The Syria Campaign has painted the UN as a stooge of Bashar Al-Assad for coordinating its aid deliveries with the Syrian government, as it has done with governments in conflict zones around the world. White Helmets' influence is such, that even The Guardian's Kareem Shaheen praised a 50-page report by them attacking the UN’s work in Syria as "damning." A subsequent Guardian' article cited the report as part of the inspiration for its own “exclusive” investigation slamming the UN’s coordination with the Syrian government.
The Syria Campaign has even taken credit for forcing former UN Resident Coordinator Yacoub El-Hillo out of his job in Damascus, a false claim it was later forced to retract, but the public damage was done.
Among the opposition groups that promoted The Syria Campaign’s anti-UN report was Ahrar Al-Sham, a jihadist rebel faction that has allied with Al Qaeda in a mission to establish an exclusively Islamic state across Syria.
A Westerner who operates a politically neutral humanitarian NGO in Damascus offered, off the record, a withering assessment: "The Syria Campaign aim do divide and polarize the humanitarian community along political lines while forcing humanitarian entities to make decisions based on potential media repercussions instead of focusing on actual needs on the ground.” The NGO executive accused the Syrian Campaign and its partners in the opposition of “progressively identifying the humanitarian workers operating from Damascus with one party to the conflict,” limiting their ability to negotiate access to rebel-held territory. “As a humanitarian worker myself, I know that this puts me and my teams in great danger since it legitimizes warring factions treating you as an extension of one party in the conflict. The thousands of Syrians that signed up with the UN or humanitarian organizations are civilians. They not only joined to get a salary but in hopes of doing something good for other Syrians. This campaign [by The Syria Campaign] is humiliating all of them, labelling them as supporters of one side and making them lose hope in becoming agents of positive change in their own society.”
This September, days before the aid convoy attack prompted the UN to suspend much of its work inside Syria, The Syria Campaign spurred 73 aid organizations operating in rebel-held territory, including the White Helmets, to suspend their cooperation with the UN aid program. Which is dreadful because it means, in practice, the UN will lose sight of what is happening throughout the north of Syria and in opposition-held areas of the country, where the NGOs do most of their work. And the public won't acces to impartial information.
Despite The Syria Campaign’s influence on the international media stage - even on Netflix, details on the outfit’s inner workings are difficult to come by. The Syria Campaign is registered in England as a private company called the Voices Project at an address shared by 91 other companies. Aside from Asfari, most of The Syria Campaign’s donors are anonymous.
Looming over this opaque operation are questions about its connections to Avaaz, a global public relations outfit that played an instrumental role in generating support for a no-fly zone in Libya, and The Syria Campaign’s founding by Purpose, another PR firm spun out of Avaaz. James Sadri bristled when I asked about the issue, dismissing it as a “crank conspiracy” ginned up by Russian state media and hardcore Assadist elements.
By the way, the Syria Campaign shows some understandable defensiveness about its ties to Avaaz.
This is because back in 2011, it was Avaaz that introduced a public campaign for a no-fly zone in Libya and delivered a petition with 1,202,940 signatures to the UN supporting Western intervention. John Hilary, the executive director of War On Want, the U.K.’s leading anti-poverty and anti-war charity, warned at the time, "Little do most of these generally well-meaning activists know, they are strengthening the hands of those western governments desperate to reassert their interests in north Africa… Clearly a no-fly zone makes foreign intervention sound rather humanitarian—putting the emphasis on stopping bombing, even though it could well lead to an escalation of violence.”
John Hilary’s dire warning was fulfilled after the NATO-enforced no-fly zone prompted the ouster of former President Moamar Qaddafi. Months later, Qaddafi was sexually assaulted and beaten to death in the road by a mob of fanatics. The Islamic State and an assortment of militias filled the void left in the Jamahiriya government’s wake. The political catastrophe should have been serious enough to call future interventions of this nature into question. Yet Libya’s legacy failed to deter Avaaz from introducing a new campaign for another no-fly zone; this time in Syria.
Though The Syria Campaign claims to “refuse funding from any party to the conflict in Syria,” it was founded and is sustained with generous financial assistance from one of the most influential exile figures of the opposition, Ayman Asfari, the U.K.-based CEO of the British oil and gas supply company Petrofac Limited. Asfari is worth $1.2 billion and owns about one-fifth of the shares of his company, which boasts 18,000 employees and close to $7 billion in annual revenues.
Through his Asfari Foundation, he has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to The Syria Campaign and has secured a seat for his wife, Sawsan, on its board of directors. He has also been a top financial and political supporter of the Syrian National Coalition, the largest government-in-exile group set up after the Syrian revolt began. The group is dead-set on removing Assad and replacing him with one of its own. Asfari’s support for opposition forces was so pronounced the Syrian government filed a warrant for his arrest, accusing him of supporting “terrorism.”
In London, Asfari has been a major donor to former British Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative Party. This May, Cameron keynoted a fundraiser for the Hands Up for Syria Appeal, a charity heavily supported by Asfari that sponsors education for Syrian children living in refugee camps. The Prime Minister might have seemed like an unusual choice for the event given his staunch resistance to accepting unaccompanied Syrian children who have fled to Europe. However, Asfari has generally supported Cameron’s exclusionary policy.
Grilled about his position during an episode of BBC’s Hardtalk, Asfari explained, “I do not want the country to be emptied. I still have a dream that those guys [refugees] will be able to go back to their homes and they will be able to play a constructive role in putting Syria back together.”
In Washington, Asfari is regarded as an important liaison to the Syrian opposition. He has visited the White House eight times since 2014... He is welcome there because, as described by The Independent, Asfari is onfe of the few "super rich" exiles poised to rebuild a post-Assad Syria — and to reap handsome contracts in the process. To reach his goal of returning to Syria in triumph after the downfall of Assad’s government, Asfari not only provided the seed money for The Syria Campaign, he has helped sustain the group with hefty donations.
Just this year, the Asfari Foundation donated $180,000 to the outfit, according to The Syria Campaign’s media lead Laila Kiki. Asfari is not The Syria Campaign’s only donor, however. According to Kiki, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund also contributed $120,000 to the outfit’s $800,000 budget this year. “The rest of the funds come from donors who wish to remain anonymous,” she explained.
. It has been pushing for a no-fly zone in Syria that would require at least “70,000 American servicemen” to enforce, according to a Pentagon assessment, along with the destruction of government infrastructure and military installations. There is no record of a no-fly zone being imposed without regime change following —which seems to be exactly what The Syria Campaign and its partners want. This would mean, de fato, OTAN going to war against Syria, Russia, and China, if not all the BRICS together. Third World War, actually).
. To move Western media in a more interventionist direction, and to demonize Bashar el Assad and Russia.
When The Syria Campaign placed an ad on its website seeking a senior press officer upon its launch in 2014, it emphasized its need for “someone who can land pieces in the U.S., U.K. and European [media] markets in the same week.” The company’s ideal candidate would be able to “maintain strong relationships with print, broadcast, online journalists, editors in order to encourage them to see TSC as a leading voice on Syria.” Prioritizing PR experience over political familiarity, The Syria Campaign reassured applicants, “You don’t need to be an expert on Syria or speak Arabic.” After all, the person would be working in close coordination with an unnamed “Syrian communications officer who will support on story gathering and relationships inside Syria.”
Sadri acknowledged that The Syria Campaign has been involved in shopping editorials to major publications. “There have been op-eds in the past that we’ve helped get published, written by people on the ground. There’s a lot of op-eds going out from people inside Syria,” he told me. But he would not say which ones, who the authors were, or if his company played any role in their authorship.One recent incident highlighted The Syria Campaign’s skillful handling of press relationships from Aleppo to media markets across the West. It was August 17, and a Syrian or Russian warplane had just hit an apartment building in rebel-held eastern Aleppo. A video then emerged of five-year-old boy, Omran Daqneesh, as he sat blinking in the back of White Helmets' ambulance. An Australian journalist who received the video from the Syria Campaign tweetted it without explaining who provided her with the video, saying only“Watch this video from Aleppo tonight. And watch it again. And remind yourself that with #Syria #wecantsaywedidntknow.” Her post was retweeted over 17,000 times and the hashtag she originated, which implied international inaction against the Syrian government made such horrors possible, became a viral sensation as well. (the journalist in question did not respond to questions sent to her publicly listed email.)
Hours later, the image of Omran appeared on the front page of dozens of international newspapers, from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal to the Times of London. CNN’s Kate Bolduan, who had suggested during Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip in 2014 that civilian casualties were, in fact, human shields, broke down in tears during an extended segment detailing the rescue of Omran.
Abu Sulaiman Al-Muhajir, the Australian citizen serving as a top leader and spokesman for Al Qaeda’s Syrian offshoot, Jabhat Fateh Al-Sham, took a special interest in the boy. "I cannot get conditioned to seeing injured/murdered children," Al-Muhajir wrote on Facebook. "Their innocent faces should serve as a reminder of our responsibility."
On August 20, McNeill took to Facebook with a call to action: “Were you horrified by the footage of little Omran?” she asked her readers. “Can't stop thinking about him? Well don't just retweet, be outraged for 24 hours and move on. Hear what two great humanitarians for Syria, Zaher Sahloul & James Sadri, want you to do now.”
Sadri happened to be the director of The Syria Campaign and Sahloul was the Syrian American Medical Society director who partnered with The Syria Campaign and this September, joined up with the Jewish United Federation of Chicago, a leading opponent of Palestine solidarity organizing, to promote his efforts.)
Behind the scene of the snapshot that made Westerners cry their heart out, there was another image that did not made the headlines, despite showing the real reality on the ground: Culled from the Facebook page of Mahmoud Raslan, the "activist" from the American-operated Aleppo Media Center who took the initial video of the little boy Omran, there was Raslan posing for a triumphant selfie with a group of "rebel" fighters. The armed men hailed from the Nour Al-Din Al-Zenki faction - close to ISIS. At least two of the commanders who appeared in the photo with Raslan had recently beheaded a boy they captured, referring to him in video footage as “child” while they taunted and abused him. The boy has been reported to be a 12-year-old named Abdullah Issa.
Despite its unsavory tendencies and extremist ideological leanings, Al-Zenki was until 2015 a recipient of extensive American funding, with at least 1000 of its fighters on the CIA payroll.
This September 24, Al-Zenki formally joined forces with the jihadist Army of Conquest led by Al Qaeda-established jihadist group, Jabhat Fateh Al-Sham. For its part, The Syria Campaign coordinated the release of a statement with Raslan explaining away his obvious affinity with Al-Zenki. Sophie McNeill, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reporter who was among the first to publish the famous Omran photo, dutifully published Raslan’s statement on Twitter, acknowledging The Syria Campaign as its source.
Curiously describing the beheading victim as a 19-year-old and not the “child” his beheaders claimed he was, Raslan pleaded ignorance about the Al-Zenki fighters’ backgrounds: “It was a busy day with lots of different people and groups on the streets. As a war photographer I take lots of photos with civilians and fighters.”
Mahmoud Raslan may not have been the most effective local partner, but The Syria Campaign could still count on the White Helmets.
*To make a long story longer, away from the battlefield, the White Helmets have proven one of the most effective tools in the Syria Campaign’s public relations arsenal. Apart from the group’s own calls for a no-fly zone, the White Helmets have been at the center of the Syria Campaign’s ongoing attack on the United Nations, which it accuses of illicit collusion with Assad. This month, the White Helmets joined 74 other groups operating in rebel-held territory announced their refusal this month to cooperate with the U.N. as long as it recognizes the Syrian government. In a separate move, the Syria Campaign launched a petition to demand that the United States National Security Council share confidential radar information with White Helmets teams operating on the ground, apparently including in areas controlled by extremist rebel factions.
The White Helmets’ Netflix documentary studiously avoids any discussion of the group’s interventionist, hyper-partisan agenda and omits any mention of its actual origins among Western governments, leaving the impression that the White Helmets are an organically developed band of politically impartial volunteers reflecting the Syrian consensus.
Furthermore, together with the $1 billion the CIA has spent on arming and training the rebels, a close look at the hundreds of millions of dollars the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent in Syria on projects including the White Helmets tells a different story.
Back in July 2012, a year after the Syrian conflict began, USAID began to lay the groundwork for its Syrian Regional Option. With American analysts excitedly proclaiming the imminent downfall of Bashar Al-Assad and his government, USAID rushed to “provide support to emerging civil authorities to build the foundation for a peaceful and democratic Syria,” according to a USAlD executive report from that year.
The grants were authorized by USAID’s Office of Transitional Initiatives (OTI), spearheading efforts to encourage what proponents like to call “democracy promotion” in countries like Cuba and Venezuela, but which amount to failed attempts at regime change. In Cuba, USAID’s OTI caused an embarrassing diplomatic incident in 2014 when it was exposed for funding a program aimed at spawning instability and undermining the government through a Twitter-like social network called Zunzuneo.
Following a series of pilot programs carried out by a for-profit, Washington DC-based contractor called Development Alternatives International (DAI) at a cost of $290,756 to U.S. taxpayers, the OTI began setting up local councils in rebel-held territory in Syria. The idea was to establish a parallel governing structure in insurgent-held areas that could one day supplant the current government in Damascus. According to its 2012 USAID executive summary on the Syria Regional Option (PDF), “foreign extremist entities” already held sway across the country.
In March 2013, a former British infantry officer named James Le Mesurier turned up on the Turkish border of Syria. Le Mesurier was a veteran of NATO interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo who moved into the lucrative private mercenary industry after his army days ended. But running security for the UAE’s oil and gas fields left him feeling unfulfilled with his career as a hired gun. He wanted to be a part of something more meaningful. So he became a lead participant in USAID’s Syria Regional Option.
Le Mesurier’s job was to organize a unique band of people who rush into freshly bombed buildings to extract survivors—while filming themselves—in rebel-held areas facing routine bombing by Syrian army aircraft. In 2014, he established Mayday Rescue, a non-profit based in Turkey that grew out of the Dubai-based "research, conflict transformation, and consultancy" firm known as Analysis, Research, and Knowledge, or ARK. That group, which employed Le Mesurier while overseeing the White Helmets' training, has been sustained through grants from Western governments and the British Ministry of Defense. Mayday Rescue, for its part, received around $300,000 in initial funding from the U.S. Department of State to assist in training the first responders. Though they were known as Syrian Civil Defense, graduates of Le Mesurier’s course became popularly identified by the signature headgear they wore in the field: White Helmets.
Since being founded under the watch of Mayday Rescue, the White Helmets have received grants worth millions of dollars from the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Japan and USAID. To date, USAID has donated $23 million to the White Helmets, a substantial sum for a civil defense project in a war zone.
Mark Ward, director of the Syria Transition Assistance and Response Team at the State Department, highlighted the political dimension of the White Helmets’ funding in an interview with Men’s Journal: “[Funding the White Helmets is] one of the most important things we can do to increase the effectiveness and legitimacy of civil authorities in liberated areas of Syria.” (In the Netflix documentary The White Helmets, Mayday Rescue is never identified as the administrator of the group, nor does Le Mesurier ever appear on screen. USAID and Chemonics, the for-profit contractor that supplies the group, are also curiously omitted from the film.)
USAID relies on Chemonics to deliver resources to the White Helmets. The company’s contract with the group is part of the $339.6 million committed by USAID for “supporting activities that pursue a peaceful transition to a democratic and stable Syria.” This whopping sum of money supplements the reported $1 billion the CIA spent in the past year supplying and training the rebel forces attempting to overthrow the Syrian government, fueling a grinding civil war that necessitates the presence of thousands of first responders.
(By the way, in reports by the U.S. Government Accountability Office and USAID Inspector General, Chemonics was slammed for its incompetent performance and poor evaluation procedures, and was accused of wasting tens of millions of dollars in Afghanistan.)
For many languishing in rebel-held territory in Syria, however, USAID and its contractors are among the only sources of sustenance.
Far from the gaze of most Western media consumers, videos and photographs have surfaced on news sites and social media showing White Helmet members boasting about discarding the body parts of Syrian troops in dumpsters, posing triumphantly on the corpses of Syrian soldiers, joining fighters accosting an alleged political opponent, waving the flag of Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra alongside jihadist fighters, and carrying weapons.
In May 2015, it was a White Helmet member named Muawiya Hassan Agha who provided an extensive eyewitness account to the Violations Documentation Center in Syria on the alleged deployment of chemical weapons by Syrian government warplanes in Idlib. (The report described him as a “media activist.”)
A year later, Agha was exposed for filming a grotesque video depicting extremist Syrian rebels torturing two captured soldiers they later executed.
A year later, Agha was exposed for filming a grotesque video depicting extremist Syrian rebels torturing two captured soldiers they later executed.
Asked about the allegations of involvement by White Helmet members in human rights violations, the US State Department’s replied, “Syria Civil Defense are emergency response workers who risk their lives to save others—men, women and children trapped by the ravages of war. USAID has no credible information to believe the organization is engaged in anything other than this core mission.”
Chemonics refused to offer a comment on its monitoring and evaluation of the White Helmets or other clients in Syria.
In brief, in 2014, the year after USAID disbursed its seed money for the White Helmets, the outfit called the Syria Campaign suddenly materialized to mobilize even greater support for Western intervention through online “clicktivism.” Among the group’s primary functions has been marketing the White Helmets to Western media consumers as non-political heroes saving lives in a sea of sectarian villains.
It is true that there are many good and brave Syrians helping one another, mostly, without any helmet or international help.
But White Helmets' selflessness and impartiality are too good to be true simply because it is not true at all.
It is true that there are many good and brave Syrians helping one another, mostly, without any helmet or international help.
But White Helmets' selflessness and impartiality are too good to be true simply because it is not true at all.
Cross Talk: White Helmets, Really?
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