James
Le Mesurier, a British ex-mercenary, founded the White Helmets in
2013. The group has been lauded for its “humanitarian” efforts in
Syria, but they have actually functioned more as a logistics and
propaganda arm of Syria’s al-Qaeda branch, complete with training
from Le Mesurier.
By
Whitney Webb
Part
3 - White Helmets founded through Western funding
When
it came to time to found the White Helmets in March 2013, Le Mesurier
seemed to have simply been in the right place at the right time.
According to his own account, he founded the group in Turkey after
being “compelled” by Syrians’ wartime stories.
Despite
founding the White Helmets in Turkey, he raised $300,000 in seed
funding provided by the UK, the U.S. and Japan, which Le Mesurier
apparently had no trouble scrounging up. The $123 million dollars
that was funneled soon after to the organization by the U.S. and UK
governments, along with Western NGOs and Qatar, dispels all notion of
the organization’s alleged “impartiality” and “non-partisan”
stance on the Syrian conflict stated on their website.
He
then used it to train 25 “vetted” Syrians “to deal with the
chaos erupting around them.” By September of that year, more than
700 “vetted” individuals were believed to have undergone training
under Le Mesurier’s supervision.
However,
Le Mesurier’s ties to British military intelligence, mercenary
groups and involvement in “stabilization activities” and
“democratization programs” suggest that his convenient appearance
in Istanbul, Turkey is perhaps not too coincidental. As Beeley noted
in an interview with MintPress: “there are very few coincidences
in the multi-spectrum, hybrid war that has been waged against Syria
by the U.S. coalition since 2011.”
Indeed,
the White Helmets were founded when the West was losing on both the
propaganda and military front regarding the push for regime change
and foreign intervention in Syria. More specifically, as Beeley told
MintPress, the group’s founding took place just after “the
Syrian government had raised concerns about a terrorist chemical
weapon attack in Khan Al Asal against the SAA [Syrian Arab Army].”
It
should come as no surprise then that, since their founding, the White
Helmets have been instrumental in blaming the Syrian government for
any and all subsequent chemical weapons attacks in Syria, acting as
both witnesses and responders to events that were later proven to be
the work of the armed opposition in Syria or staged. As a result,
Beeley argued that it’s well within reason to speculate that the
White Helmets were explicitly founded with this purpose in mind.
However,
it is Le Mesurier himself who shed light on why the White Helmets
were formed at such a crucial point for the foreign-funded
opposition. As Le Mesurier noted in a speech delivered on June 2015,
in “fragile” (i.e. destabilized) states, security actors – such
as mercenaries or foreign armies – have the lowest level of public
trust. However, Le Mesurier states that in contrast, those
professions with the highest level of public trust in such situations
are firefighters, paramedics, rescue workers and other similar types
of first responders.
Le
Mesurier, however, is not the only figure linked to the British
military to take such a perspective. UK Admiral Sir Philip Jones,
Chief of Naval Staff, stated last year that “the hard punch of
military power is often delivered inside the kid glove of
humanitarian relief.” It is for this reason that military
actions sponsored by the United States and its allies for the past
few decades have often been framed as “humanitarian interventions.”
Thus,
the White Helmets were seen as a chance to reclaim the trust that the
Syrian opposition fighters had lost, as news of their affiliation
with terrorist groups began to spread.
In
reclaiming that trust in Western audiences, the White Helmets have
done nothing to ease the burden of war in Syria, but have fomented it
by underpinning the very propaganda that has kept the conflict raging
on for over six years, as well as undermined the ability of the
Syrian and Russian governments to secure diplomatic alternatives to
continued fighting.
Indeed,
despite their claim of “impartiality,” the White Helmets were
instrumental in Western attempts to bolster international support for
Western intervention and a “no-fly zone” in Syria. However, such
intervention will bring much more devastation to Syria, something the
White Helmets profess to want to end.
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