Aleppo, Syria: noble work
29 November 2016 – A number of years ago during a trip to the Middle East I had the good fortune to meet several staffers with Médecins Sans Frontières. MSF doctors show the most incredible bravery and dedication in the midst of the world’s most violent wars. My involvement intensified (raising funds, using my job lists for staffing positions, etc.) after the October 2015 U.S. airstrike which killed 42 people and destroyed the MSF trauma hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. It was only due to excellent investigative reporting by the New York Times and others that we learned the U.S. military had been set up by its Afghan “allies” due to Afghan mistrust for the medical group. You can read more here, here, here and here.
But during my most recent trip to the Middle East a MSF doctor told me “we are really nothing. Those civil-defense units in Aleppo. Wow”.
He is referring to teams of volunteers who are the first to respond when bombs flatten buildings, rushing into the thick clouds of fine white dust to dig through the rubble for survivors. They started as small, ragtag bands of untrained volunteers but turned into a formidable search-and-rescue force by Raed al-Saleh. According to a contact I have in Turkey, the group has probably rescued more than 60,000 people since 2014, when it began to keep count. They became known as the “White Helmets” for the color of the hard hats they wear. They were nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, though they did not win.
I have seen dead bodies pulled from rubble but not in Aleppo. The twisted metal and concrete slabs of buildings destroyed by air strikes is like nothing I have ever seen before. In a UN report on Aleppo it was noted that rescuers “no longer bother to identify the dead bodies they pull from the rubble. There are simply too many. The dead are given numbers rather than names, and buried in trenches in the city’s parks; often ten to a grave”.
The work is lethal. Roughly one in six volunteers has been killed or badly wounded, many by “double-tap” Russian and Syrian strikes on the same site as they search for bodies. They are carpenters, electricians and plumbers .. or at least were before the war broke out … and consider themselves “ordinary men” pulled onto the front lines of a savage conflict by a desire to save lives.
They are trained in Turkey by an international contracting firm that set up a training center modeled on parts of downtown Aleppo. What I found interesting was the fact they work off manuals written in 1947 that describe how to save Londoners from air raids. The training is focused on basic search-and-rescue techniques. In the beginning they had no equipment but then the U.S. and the UK provided some basic, simple equipment — battery-powered hand tools and hand-cranked air-raid sirens — and then eventually seismic listening devices, ambulances, fire engines and hydraulic tools.
Needless to say, they have drawn the fury of the Syrian regime. Quoting a piece in the Guardian which picked up some local social media reporting:
Just days after the collapse of a short-lived ceasefire last month [September], Syrian and Russian air strikes destroyed three of the group’s four centres in eastern Aleppo in a single day. Many see in the White Helmets a long-term solution to the country’s destruction; a highly motivated and well-trained civilian force that can be expanded to rebuild the country once the war ends. Such thoughts are far from the minds of exhausted rescue workers pulling out the bodies the bombing leaves behind.
You can follow the White Helmets on Twitter (click here).
And after awhile these people just learn stuff. Raed al-Saleh (who organized the White Helmets as I noted above) was recently quoted:
I don’t need to see a warplane to know what kind of bombs it drops. I just need to hear it. It’s very depressing. Based on its sound, we can predict the kind of airplane, and then anticipate the scale of the destruction”.
He has reached the stage where he hopes for the rumble of a Mig-29, rather than a Su-24. It’s the Su-24s that carry the cluster bombs.
In the world in which many of us normally live … a world seemingly corralled by algorithms … we must bring to our soul an element of chaos to another world, another culture that continually plays its deadly, dystopic sameness.