The Purpose Of The White Helmets Is To Covertly Destabilize Syria

Why do Western pundits still defend the White Helmets? After jihadist leaders have repeatedly praised the White Helmets as allies, several White Helmets members have been caught assisting in al-Qaeda atrocities and sympathizing with jihadists, the Dutch government has stopped funding the White Helmets amid concerns that the money is going to terrorist groups, and the White Helmets have been shown to inflate their rescue numbers while only selectively saving war victims, shouldn't the group have universally lost mainstream support by now?

The fact that governments and media outlets still typically treat the White Helmets as allies shows how important they are for the U.S.-NATO effort to destabilize Syria.

“The White Helmets are the flagship of the Western-manufactured ‘human rights’ industry working to destabilize Syria and to criminalize the Syrian government and its allies,” recently wrote the investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley. As Beeley further explained in her op-ed about how the White Helmets operate:

The human rights industry that has been created to manage the Syrian narratives manipulates events to amplify those that serve the NATO-member-state agenda in Syria, effectively the furtherment of US Coalition resource-plundering and the reduction of Syria to a rudderless state and a terrorist vacuum, where sectarian lawlessness and conflict will thrive.

Simultaneously, the crimes and massacres committed by the Western-sponsored armed gangs and terrorist groups in Syria will be normalized and “disappeared” by this highly partisan network of public opinion influencers.

The White Helmets epitomize this doctrine. As their role has developed since their British intelligence-led incubation in Turkey, they have become pivotal to the US Coalition military adventurism in Syria. They are essential to legitimize ongoing proxy and direct intervention in Syria by the regime-change global alliance.

In other words, without the White Helmets, the U.S./NATO effort to destroy Syria for profit would be revealed for the Iraq-level imperialist crime that it is. After Americans saw the body bags of Iraq War soldiers and photos of blood-covered Iraqi children who’d been attacked by American forces, direct military invasions became less appealing to the public. This is why in recent years, the orchestrators of Western-led regime change missions have instead taken the approach of supporting anti-government militia groups while creating “humanitarian” fronts that aid the destabilization efforts.

So while U.S.-backed terrorist groups have been tearing Syria apart for the last eight years, the corporate media has been able to absurdly blame Assad and Putin for the conflict while using unsupported “gas attack” charges to call for overthrowing Assad. And the White Helmets have worked as a central part of this operation.

For example, in January 2016, the White Helmets were photographed marching through the Syrian town of Madaya with banners which called for the “burning and destruction” of the towns of Kafarya and Foua. This open expression of support for the jihadist campaign against Assad’s government was no isolated incident. As the journalist Brandon Turbeville wrote earlier this year about
just how close the White Helmets are integrated with Syria’s terrorist factions:

In 2017, I had a chance to travel to Syria to see the situation for myself. After the liberation of Aleppo, I was able to enter East Aleppo and travel to the Sakhour White Helmets center where I personally saw evidence that the White Helmets
complex was exactly the same as the Nusra Front complex. Both buildings were located in the same compound. Indeed, I saw Western-purchased medical supplies and plenty of munitions left over from the “unarmed” White Helmets. The [al-Qaeda] flag, which is clearly visible in the clip above, was still hanging on the wall of the Sakhour center when I arrived.

If this isn’t damning enough, in 2015 the correspondent John Cantlie referred to the White Helmets as the “Islamic State fire brigade.” And in addition to the many other times where White Helmets members have been caught assisting groups like al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, and ISIS, last year the leader of al-Qaeda in Syria Abu Jaber praised the White Helmets as the “hidden soldiers of the revolution.”
From this, we can conclude that the White Helmets are acting as assistants to the U.S./Israeli backed network of jihadists in Syria. And their media-manufactured reputation as a “neutral” humanitarian group has allowed them to shape public opinion in favor of this terrorist network’s interests.

This is shown in the deliberately inaccurate reports about Syria that the White Helmets have repeatedly given to the Western media, which have served to justify war escalations. In September 2016, when a Syrian Red Crescent truck convoy was attacked, the Obama administration and most of the media immediately blamed it on Russian or Syrian aircraft. Their source for this claim was White Helmets leader Ammar Al-Selmo-whose story was filled with inconsistencies.

For another notable example of the blatant lies that have come from the White Helmets, this April the organization misrepresented the nature of an incident in Douma. According to a report from the famed journalist Robert Fisk, when a dust storm happened in Douma, one of the White Helmets caused panic by shouting “Gas!” in a triage center. There’s no evidence that the incident involved gas, and witnesses to the event have since testified in the Hague that it was not a chemical attack. Yet this wild misperception was repeated by the White Helmets’ leaders, and was then reported to the world so that several NATO countries could justify attacking Syria.

It’s no surprise that interviewed war victims have described the White Helmets as “camera posers, thieves, and raiders.” The purpose of the organization is to destabilize Syria for the benefit of the Western plutocracy, and its public image can only be maintained through a vast propaganda campaign.

And despite the widespread exposure of all of these facts, the White Helmets are continuing their propaganda effort. According to a new report from the Russian Defense Ministry, several dozen White Helmets have arrived in Aleppo to film a staged chemical weapons attack. If there isn’t a massive effort from the alternative media to expose this hoax, the United States will soon try to use it to further escalate with Syria and Russia.

It feels exhausting to pore over these endless deceptions and manipulations from the people in power. But as John Adams said, “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Painting and Poetry.”