Should You Donate To Syria’s White Helmets To Help Aleppo?

Hundreds of thousands have donated to the White Helmets in Syria as the horrors of Aleppo have filled the globe’s browsers and television screens this week.

After all, no other Syrian aid group has quite reached the celebrity status of the White Helmets, who count a documentary screened internationally on Netflix as their greatest promotional tool. In the lead-up to the Nobel Peace Prize announcement in October, several publications argued that the honor should go to the force of around 3,000 working tirelessly to help Syrians escape the bombing campaign attempting to crush the insurgency. The Guardian called their actions one of the few elements of the Syrian War still showing a respect for basic human dignity.

“What the White Helmets accomplish may seem like a drop in the ocean, but what they represent is immense: resilience and bravery in the face of barbarism. They are a constant reminder that those targeted by Russia and the Assad regime’s massive bombing campaign in Aleppo are civilians, not terrorists. And they show that individual acts of courage can go a long way to fight indifference.”

Some in the alternative media, given voice by Russian state TV networks Russia Today and Sputnik, argue that the White Helmets are not quite the saintly figures being presented in Western media. At least partially, this distrust is due to criticisms often levied at so-called NGOs: too much money is spent on the entity itself instead of the cause, and that money often comes from countries or individuals with a vested interest in the conflict, namely the U.K., the U.S., and France.

Apart from those common gripes, many of these White Helmets-opposing journalists claim the problem is centered around an approved media narrative that has emerged about Syria — one that they argue is deceptive at best and blatantly false at worst. British investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley recently returned from Aleppo and claimed that the United Nations is ignoring the terrorist threat in the area in favor of deposing Assad at all costs. On an RT debate, she argued that groups like the White Helmets have benefitted from scant on-the-ground coverage that does not expose how Syrians have suffered under the terrorist groups affiliated with the rebel forces — groups she claims are also interlinked with the humanitarian organization.

Few networks are giving airtime to these criticisms, and those that are generally have a strongly pro-Russian slant. Even the possibility that Assad is not the only evil in the conflict has been somewhat deflected by mainstream commentators, but it seems odd to shift this blame on to groups like the White Helmets, who can hardly control which terrorist organizations — be it ISIS or the Al-Nusra Front — have used the chaos to further their own interests. Even within such questionable groups, some horrific actions — such as the beheading of an 11-year-old boy by members of the Islamic Nureddin al-Zenki — are condemned by the loose collectives themselves, reported Lebanese paper the Daily Star.

On the other hand, Beeley and other journalists critical of the White Helmets do present an important consideration: How can you trust an NGO that is clearly thriving off of government sponsorship, especially when those governments are an integral part of the conflict? Yet Beeley does not provide us with conclusive evidence of her thesis, instead asking us to have the same blind faith in her reporting that she criticizes.

Pointing to footage of a small gathering of citizens in Aleppo supposedly celebrating the victory of government forces in Aleppo, she claims that these people are the true voice of the city’s people — as if any one group can represent the nuanced opinions of a besieged city. Anything falling outside of her views is propaganda, while even a photo of a Syrian in a white helmet with a terrorist sympathizer is definitive proof that the group is a pawn of ISIS and Western governments. This hard truth — that there are no “good guys” in war — would be much easier to swallow if it wasn’t presented in the context of slandering a charity organization in favor of a brutal regime.

When Max Blumenthal published a similar criticism of the White Helmets earlier this year, many Syrians living in Aleppo took to social media to condemn his conclusions, accusing him of ignoring the voices of those living the war. Marcell Shehwaro, an activist who runs a series of underground schools in Aleppo, gave one of several responses to the article collected by Hummus for Thought.

“I will not even bother to comment on the White Helmets accusation. They have enough of the hallelujah of Syrian women every time they reach an airstrike site rushing to save people. In addition to cheers from children that they have saved and those are even more honoring than Nobel peace prizes even if I really hope they get it. We are just happy and proud as the White Helmets are from us.”

In the end, to donate to the White Helmets is to suffer the doubt that anyone who clicks a few dollars of support into any group’s coffers has to deal with. In reality, we don’t know where that money goes for years — like the poorly administered Red Cross donations in Haiti — if ever. Charity is, in itself, an act of blind faith, but one that runs a greater risk of extending hope than terror in the case of the White Helmets, despite how loaded supporting either side in the Syrian War may be.

[Image by Syrian Civil Defense – White Helmets/AP]