White Helmets chief reflects on Syria’s lessons for Ukraine
Raed al-Saleh, who leads the volunteer rescue group in Syria, offered advice to Ukrainians seeking to document Russia's potential war crimes in real time.
For Raed al-Saleh, the chief of the White Helmets rescue organization in Syria, the images of buildings reduced to rubble in Ukraine look depressingly familiar. Russian warplanes have bombed opposition-held parts of his country since 2015, turning the tide of the decadelong battle in President Bashar al-Assad’s favor through an unrelenting air campaign that's destroyed schools, hospitals and other civilian infrastructure in the name of attacking terrorists.
“For seven years, we have been suffering from what the search-and-rescue teams are suffering from in Ukraine today,” Saleh told Al-Monitor by phone on Monday.
When Russian and government planes hit densely populated areas, the White Helmet rescuers, a Syrian volunteer force, were often the first on the scene to pull bodies from beneath the smoldering ruins.
As first-hand witnesses to the horrors of Syria’s war, the White Helmets have provided testimony and photographic evidence of potential war crimes, including an April 2017 chemical weapons attack in the town of Khan Sheikhoun that UN investigators attributed to Syrian government forces.
