Kolkata: In opposition-held northwest Syria, ravaged by 12 years of a conflict which has by now settled at the background of global events, a macabre tussle is playing out over humanitarian aid in the aftermath of the earthquake of February 6, which killed 40,642 in Turkey and 5,800 in Syria.
Since the earthquake, two million people are living in displacement camps in northwest Syria, MSF notes.
At the centre of this tussle is the very group which has been a key player in rescue efforts in the region for the last decade, the Syria Civil Defence, or ‘White Helmets’.
Its 3,000 civilian volunteers serve a population of 4 million people, who have no formal government structure to look after them and who, trapped in a war between opposition forces and the Syrian government, have faced a decade of almost daily airstrikes by the latter, with help from Russia and Iran.
Now, facing destruction equal to a thousand airstrikes, the White Helmets have said that key decisions taken in the crucial days just after the earthquake have proved costly to the region in a way that defies limits of human cruelty. The volunteers have also expressed their deep disappointment at the UN’s inadequacy and its apparent ability to do nothing in the face of Syrian president Bashr Al Assad’s initial and astounding stipulation that no aid should reach opposition-held areas.
Since the day of the earthquake, Ismail Alabdullah has been a familiar face on international news.
In every broadcast – across MSNBC, CNN, CBS, BBC, Channel 4 and others – Alabdullah has insisted that he and his colleagues are stretched beyond capacity. He has asked for heavy equipment to remove rubble and clear roadways, stressing that this is exactly the kind of work that needs international support.
Ismail in a video dispatch from Idlib just after the earthquakes. Photo: Video screengrab from Twitter/@SyriaCivilDef
Many reports have introduced Alabdullah by noting that the White Helmets “have experience” in exactly this kind of work. But when he speaks to The Wire, Alabdullah says that this is not at all true.
“The work we have done is very different from rescuing people after an earthquake. In an airstrike, one, two or three buildings are bombed. Here, all buildings are gone,” he says on the evening of February 17, from Idlib.
Idlib is 184 km from Sehitkamil in Turkey’s Gaziantep, the epicentre of the first earthquake on February 6. “From here to reach the interiors [earthquake affected rural areas of northwest Syria] will take weeks. It will take even longer to clear the roads,” he says.
All White Helmets volunteers are rescuers, working from morning till night in removing rubble, building fresh infrastructure from the ground up, clearing roads and making hospitals.
But most importantly, says Alabdullah, they “are also victims”. Already, four White Helmet volunteers have died in the earthquake. One has lost an eye but is continuing with rescue work nonetheless. Others have suffered injuries ranging in seriousness. Many are engaged in rescue efforts not just of their fellow countryfolk but also their own families, says Alabdullah.
“We are constantly receiving calls from people who need help,” he says.
In the background of Alabdullah’s voice, the sound of loud and hurried exchanges I can hear reflect the chaos of the situation.
An image, by now shared across channels, showing the White Helmets celebrating the rescue of a child after the earthquakes in northwest Syria. Photo: Twitter/@SyriaCivilDef
With entry points to opposition-held areas largely closed to journalists (and until recently to aid too), Alabdullah, who is one of the few White Helmets at the scene who speaks English, has to field questions from reporters worldwide – some of which are more sensitive than others.
On February 13, eight days after the earthquake, an anchor of America’s CBS News asked Alabdullah: “If you could wave a magic wand, what do you need to help you work?”
The anchor is not being unjustly facetious. What the rest of the world can take for granted, northwest Syrians may perhaps need a magic wand to help materialise.
Also read: Media Coverage After a Disaster: Lessons from Turkey
But this is exactly the kind of thought Alabdullah has no luxury to ponder over at the moment. He told the anchor that from the very beginning they have been asking for assistance to save people under the rubble. The necessity of heavy machinery to help remove chunks is enormous.
So did the heavy equipment come?
“It did not come when it was supposed to. Had it come, it would have made a huge difference. In various places, we are still digging and removing rubble with our bare hands,” Alabdullah tells The Wire.
Oubadah Alwan, a White Helmets spokesperson stationed at Turkey’s Istanbul, says to The Wire that Alabdullah hardly ever sleeps. “I am talking to him 24×7.”
Had machinery arrived in the days immediately following the earthquake, more people may have been saved. Now, they will be used to remove dead bodies from rubbles. Alwan says that the bulk of aid received in the immediate aftermath has been food and other emergency supplies, which, while helpful, did not assist rescuers in the one avenue they needed help in.
Disasters such as earthquakes are difficult to deal with even for the most efficient of governments, but in northwest Syria, tremors of geopolitics have ended up consigning the whole area to the White Helmets, who consider within their ambit the wellbeing and future of the people they are rescuing too.
“We want to rebuild schools so that kids can go back,” says Alabdullah.
Children gather around a White Helmets volunteer in northwest Syria, during rescue operations after the earthquake. Photo: Twitter/@SyriaCivilDef
As the Arab Spring – the protests against Assad’s rule in 2011 – gave way to a decades-long winter defined by war, deaths and displacements, Syria split up into bits controlled by opposing forces, each with its own set of backers. As some of the world’s oldest cities were reduced to ruin in an unending war, international aid emerged as a key lifeline especially for those who fled Assad’s rule and ended up being trapped in northwest Syria, with an international border to their west and north and unfriendly Syrian government-held areas to the east and south.
The UN has overseen aid delivery to these parts since 2014 through the border with Turkey.
However, since the earthquake, only a single border point between Turkey and Syria at Bab al-Hawa (red pin in the map below) has been open to humanitarian aid givers.
Assad has always opposed humanitarian operations that have delivered aid into opposition-ruled Syria from Turkey, saying assistance should be delivered via Damascus, a Reuters report noted.
On February 10, four days since the earthquake, Raed Al Saleh who heads the White Helmets, said in a press conference from Sarmada in northwestern Syria that no UN help had arrived till then. A UN official told him that “bureaucratic reasons were to blame.” Al Saleh claimed that UN aid had reached regime-controlled areas and did not reach northern Syria.
This blockage on aid reaching Idlib and other rebel-held areas, said the Wall Street Journal, was little more than an attempt to “starve them into submission”.
“We have so far failed the people in north-west Syria. They rightly feel abandoned. Looking for international help that hasn’t arrived,” UN humanitarian chief, Martin Griffiths, tweeted from the Turkey-Syria border on February 12.
On Monday, February 13, a whole week after the earthquake, President Assad gave his nod to open two more crossing points – Bab Al-Salam and Al Ra’ee – from Turkey to the opposition-held northwest Syria. While UN secretary-general, António Guterres welcomed this decision, White Helmets’ Alwan pointed out that it was too little and too late. He also said that the clause that the border points can remain open for only ‘three months’ is almost laughable.
By the time the White Helmets spoke to The Wire on February 17, UN convoys had arrived but with no heavy machinery. Aid has now also arrived from the UK, the US and other countries. US secretary of state Anthony Blinken has also met with volunteers in Turkey.
Alwan says that Assad has always politicised aid in Syria, apportioning it as he likes and to whom he likes, with little humanitarian concern. Reuters notes in an analysis that this earthquake, in fact, presents, and is being treated by Assad, as a unique opportunity to mend ties with the Arab world. Opening the border points does not cost Assad anything. So why he could not have done it at a time when rescue efforts could have got a boost is a question the White Helmets are familiar asking.
Asma and Bashar al Assad visit earthquake relief centres. Photo: Official Instagram.
“Often, White Helmets volunteers are also under attack,” says Alwan. Kremlin has earlier called the group a “cover for anti-Assad terrorists”. In 2018, fearing for their lives, the US, Germany Canada and Britain led an operation to evacuate 422 White Helmets rescuers and their families as the Quneitra province fell to the government. Governments of Assad and Putin both criticised this.
The Human Rights Watch, in its severe note on the deadly impact of aid delays in northwest Syria, has noted that in addition to Assad’s government, other local forces at play have also had a role.
“The Syrian government, Hay’et Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an anti-government armed group that controls a portion of northwest Syria, and the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), which controls some territory across northern Syria, have all hampered humanitarian assistance from reaching heavily impacted areas of northwest Syria,” it said.
Criticism against the delay in the lifting of US sanctions – rife in US media – are relevant to only parts of Syria that are under Assad. “Northwest Syria was not under the sanctions to begin with,” Alwan says.
Therefore, caught in a land whose politics is so complicated that not even injustice can be ascribed to a single source, the White Helmets have tried to focus on diligent reports and accounts – taking charge of the truth of the people they are custodians of.
“Our official toll is thus different from others accounts because we only consider bodies we have seen ourselves,” says Alwan.
In 2016, a UK short documentary on The White Helmets, won the Oscar in the category. Organisation head Raed al Saleh had greeted the news but said two lines that are heavy with meaning now.
“But we are not happy to do what we do. We abhor the reality we live in.”