NATO White Helmets follow al-Qaeda to Ukraine

Vanessa Beeley

Four-hundred and fifty extremists from Idlib, north-west Syria have arrived in Ukraine according to Al Mayadeen.

Hailing from Idlib – the “largest Al Qaeda haven since 9/11”-  these fanatics from various countries have been despatched to Ukraine to fight against the Russian forces that alongside the Syrian Arab Amy signified the end of their Caliphatist dreams in Syria. 

These extremists passed through Turkey, a NATO member state, to arrive at their destination in western Ukraine. According to Al Mayadeen:

senior fighters from the terrorist group Hayat Tahrir-Al-Sham (rebranded version of Jabhat Al Nusra aka Al Qaeda) have held a number of meetings with senior leaders in the Turkistan Islamic Party group and Ansar Al Tawhid and Hurras Al Din groups, and agreed on allowing a number of their fighters to enter Ukraine through Turkey”.

According to the Counter Extremist Project: 

Hurras al-Din and its leaders are U.S. Specially Designated Global Terrorists. The U.S. presently offers a $5 million reward for information on three of its leaders” 

Yet here they are fighting for NATO member states, led by the US, in Ukraine, alongside the NATO fascist and Neo-Nazi contras.

Sources in Idlib added that these foreign fighters are veterans of the war against Syria led by the US and UK, bankrolled by Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

The fighters had been causing issues in Idlib and “were given this opportunity to fight against Russia as a compromise by which they would receive a new start and with an acceptable income”.

Does that mean they were receiving a more-than-acceptable income in Syria? It is well known that Al Qaeda and affiliates are benefiting financially from the dirty war against Syria. 

The fighters were apparently given assurances that their families would be allowed to follow on and settle in Ukraine. It must be noted that the Zionist influence in western Ukraine and particularly Kiev consists of a vast web of military, intelligence and ideological projects.

The inclusion of these Islamist extremist mercenaries in the war against Russia in Ukraine demonstrates the collusion between Israel and these terrorist gangs, already documented multiple times in Syria. 

Around 300 of the terrorists are Syrian nationals from Idlib and Aleppo countryside, 150 are Belgian, French, Chinese (Uighurs), Moroccan, Tunisian, Chechen and British nationals.

The Syrian nationals will receive around $1200 – $1500 but there is no figure given for the foreign nationals. Bear in mind an average Syrian Arab Army soldier receives 70,000 Syrian Pounds per month, around $ 20. 

Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky has claimed that 16000 foreign mercenaries will fight for Ukraine.

So, NATO member states are yet again turning a sovereign nation into a battlefield  using mercenaries and fanatics to defend their agenda – to blockade and besiege Russia on the western flank and to ensure NATO expansion east despite the Minsk agreements. 

Russian President, Vladimir Putin had warned German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz of the growing number of foreign mercenaries operating in Ukraine during a telephone conversation on the 4th March. 

This is not the first evidence of Syrian extremist armed groups heading to Ukraine. Militant Wire Telegram channel had previously reported that a Syrian businessman, Tariq Al Jasem from the southern Aleppo countryside had formed a faction to fight against Russia in Ukraine.

Al Jasem’s links to extremists in Syria was later confirmed by Syrian researcher, Ibrahim Mohammed Wahdi.

One thing is for sure, confronting Russian forces on the ground in Ukraine will be a very different experience for these Islamist terrorists who benefitted from extensive rat runs in the areas they occupied in Syria, spending most of their time underground while Syrian civilians were used as human shields above ground.

There are no tunnels for them to escape to in Ukraine, they will be exposed to the full force of a Russian military already experienced in dealing with these terrorist groups after six years battling them successfully  in Syria. 

The White Helmet tag team 

The pseudo humanitarian organisation embedded with Al Qaeda and affiliates in Syria, the White Helmets, are now offering to “help Ukrainians organise their first responders” according to an opinion piece by Josh Rogin for Washington Post. 

On March 16 the leader of HTS (Al-Qaeda in #Syria) Abu Jaber thanked the #WhiteHelmets & called them the "hidden soldiers of the revolution" pic.twitter.com/1ac8M8xb5d

— Ibn Walid (@walid970721) March 20, 2017

Rogin doubles down on the US/UK legacy media narratives on Russian involvement in the Syrian war against terrorist forces sponsored, promoted and armed by the Western US-led coalition.

The whole Russia “is bombing hospitals, schools, civilian infrastructure” canard is rolled out, as always lacking the important context that Al Qaeda inc. occupy schools and hospitals. These buildings are converted into military headquarters, ammunition factories and storage, Sharia courts, prisons, torture chambers and detention centers as I have personally witnessed in Aleppo, Eastern Ghouta, southern Idlib – please subscribe to my YouTube channel or Odysee for multiple recorded civilian testimonies.

I interviewed Ahmad Aldayh in May 2017, in his shop in East Aleppo. He had been held prisoner by Jabhat al Shamiya brigade [affiliated with Nusra Front aka Al Qaeda] in the Eye Hospital in East Aleppo for 7 weeks just prior to its liberation by the SAA on 4/12/2016 when the wardens fled the advancing Syrian Army.

Here is his testimony: 

According to Rogin, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has said it would “immediately proceed” with an investigation into the alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine. 

Has the ICC started proceedings against the UK/US allied destruction of Syrian civilian infrastructure and US occupation of Syrian oil fields or the torching of Syrian wheat and barley fields, the deprivation of water from millions of civilians in the north west of Syria, the crippling unilateral economic sanctions?

Has the ICC started proceedings against the far right Ukrainian brigades that have massacred 14,000 Russian speaking Ukrainians in the Donbass region for the last 8 years? 

On the contrary, Ukraine is being supported by NATO member states  to take Russia to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for “having launched an invasion on the pretext of false claims of genocide perpetrated against the country’s Russian speakers” according to a report in The Guardian. 

Unsurprisingly the NATO-linked “evidence” provider, Bellingcat, is involved in “preserving” evidence against Russia that is admissible in court. 

Karim Khan who was elected as ICC prosecutor in 2021 is a British barrister and Queen’s Counsel. According to the Guardian, Khan’s “predecessor as ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced in 2020 that there was enough evidence from the conflict in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea to launch an investigation but the ICC judges did not give their approval”. Khan reviewed the case and concluded that: 

I am satisfied that there is a reasonable basis to believe that both alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed in Ukraine.”

Effectively Khan imposed false equivalence onto what has clearly been the attempted ethnic cleansing of the opposition to the NATO influence in Ukraine and the NATO support for far right, Neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian security forces and political institutions. 

The very real genocide that has been ongoing for eight years in Donbass was “disappeared” just as the agencies of Western hegemony and aligned media have disappeared the atrocities committed against the Syrian people by the terrorist groups in Syria and the ethnic cleansing pogroms carried out by these so called “moderate rebels”. 

Enter the White Helmets 

Rogin repeats the taglines that have been the mainstay of PR for the UK-incubated White Helmet organisation – “giving emergency care to civilians since 2014”.

The “all volunteer force” where each “volunteer” is paid $150 per month for the most junior members (remember the salary of a Syrian Arab Army soldier is $20) claims to have saved more than 100,000 civilians, a claim rendered ridiculous by their own lack of supporting documentation. Interesting that Rogin uses the term “force” which more accurately represents the armed members of White Helmet groups with  close links to Al Qaeda.

James Le Mesurier might also have been worried that despite the White Helmets' headline claim of over 115,000 lives saved they had documented only 625 to end Oct '19, of which only 88 are supported by plausible video evidence, of which only 9 are named of which 3 have surnames.

— Mike Ralph King (@MikeKingWriter) November 18, 2019

Raed Saleh, now known as the “Chairman” of the White Helmets and with terrorist ties himself made the following statement in an interview with Rogin: 

We are here to help our Ukrainian brothers and sisters in any way we can,” Raed Al Saleh, the leader of the White Helmets, told me in an interview. Putin’s goal is to break the will of the civilian population, he said, and there are no limits to the savagery of his troops. “The Russian military has no principles. They respect no human rights. They have no standards or ethics,” Saleh said. “The Ukrainians are facing the most ferocious, unethical, criminal killing machine that exists in the world today, which we have been facing for the last seven years.”

“There are no limits to the savagery of [Russian] troops” Saleh tells Rogin. For a more reserved and accurate account of the Russian military campaign in Syria, I recommend ‘Operation Aleppo’ by Sunday Times contributor and defence journalist Tim Ripley. 

Despite allegedly being tasked with the documentation of war crimes in Syria, the White Helmets have not one record of atrocities and crimes committed by the terrorist armed groups, including ISIS and Nusra Front (Al Qaeda). They are embedded with these terrorist groups yet have not witnessed a single war crime? 

Those atrocities include the regular targeting of children, schools, hospitals and civilian infrastructure in the Syrian Christian town of Al Sqeilbiyyeh, northern Hama.

During these attacks, the White Helmets shared underground headquarters with Al Qaeda in Qalaat Al Madiq less than one kilometer away from the Christian town that was threatened with extinction for seven years prior to liberation of the surrounding areas by the Syrian Arab Army and Russian forces in early 2019.

The White Helmets are allegedly preparing a series of videos to instruct Ukrainian civilians in the handling of unexploded rockets, how to evacuate a building under attack.

I guess it will be a slick compilation of their finest operations, perhaps taken from the Oscar winning promo that was produced in Turkey, not Syria? The White Helmets are even “ready to send in staff”.

Perhaps they would base themselves in the Zionist funded field hospitals that are springing up in Ukraine. 

Odd how this announcement follows on from the arrival of Idlibistan terrorists in Urkaine? Not really, the White Helmets go where the terrorists go. 

In Syria the White Helmets did not stay behind to help the civilians. Once an area was liberated from the terrorist groups by the Syrian Arab Army and allies,  they departed on the green buses that evacuated extremist fighters to Idlib. 

In July 2018 they were evacuated from southern Syria via Israel to Jordan in a special operation masterminded by Israel and Canada, a very Zionist intervention to rescue the US Coalition funded, terrorist-linked organisation.  

Saleh mentions the use of walkie-talkies and the deployment of teams to monitor skies for planes as a more effective early warning system. Rogin fails to mention that the White Helmets in Syria have been supplied with the US State Department developed Hala System that enables the “grotesque militarisation of humanitarianism in Syria”. 

Saleh regurgitates the Russian “double tap” claims – “Russian planes attack civilians, wait for first responders to arrive and then attack the first responders”. 

Saleh never refers to the evidenced double tap strikes carried out by the terrorist groups embedded in urban areas in Aleppo and in all the cities they occupied – targeting civilians, waiting for the REAL Syria Civil Defence (RSCD established in Syria 1953) to arrive before targeting them as they attempted to rescue Syrian civilans. 

I interviewed the Commander of the RSCD (not the White Helmet imposters) in Aleppo in March 2018. He told me: 

They (terrorists) targeted us deliberately in order to destroy our equipment & structures. They wanted to prevent us being able to work for our people. They would target our crew with sniper fire and explosive bullets. Their main mission was to kill the crew and destroy our base so we couldn’t care for the people of Aleppo”

According to the Commanding Officer of this RSCD centre, the main terrorist objective was to paralyse the essential infrastructure for the 1.5 million Syrian civilians sheltering in the Syrian Government controlled West Aleppo. This included the destruction of water trucks, water pipes, electricity stations and the RSCD crews, vehicles and equipment.

I was told that the terrorist groups systematically carried out double-tap attacks on the RSCD crew. Nusra Front or one of their affiliates would fire mortars into a densely populated civilian area of West Aleppo. 

For example in June 2016, terrorist groups intensified their attacks on West Aleppo.

The district of Midan was pounded by mortar fire and during one attack, a huge number of civilians were injured and trapped in destroyed buildings. The RSCD sent teams to evacuate the wounded and to dig out those trapped inside the buildings.

The terrorists waited for us to arrive and begin work, before they targeted the same area again – with mortars and hell cannon missiles” 
CO, RSCD

Predictably, Rogin reinforces the concept that the White Helmets are a “victim” of a “Russian disinformation campaign” ignoring the fact that the majority of accusations against the White Helmets come from the Syrian civilians who survived occupation by the armed groups and the White Helmets. 

Accusations of organ trafficking, child abduction and trafficking, staging of “chemical weapon” events, murder, theft, corruption and being weapon-carrying members of extremist armed groups – a claim even made by former White Helmets and an operational White Helmet leader I interviewed in Daraa in July 2018. 

Of course Rogin sweeps all the considerable prima facie evidence against the White Helmets to one side, that is his job.

The fact remains, there are many questions hanging over the credibility of the White Helmets that are yet unanswered by an independent public enquiry into the war crimes they are accused of committing by the Syrian people disenfranchised by mainstream media and UN agencies.

Saleh claims “there is no greater honour than doing this work”. One must ask what kind of honour is gained by supporting violent ideologues and fanatics globally. When Saleh suggests it is a “duty and privilege” to “save people who represent the future of their country”, is he referring to the NATO-backed far right, Neo-Nazi brigades who would take absolute power in Ukraine? 

It would make sense that an organisation tasked with being an auxiliary to some of the most brutal and sectarian armed militant gangs in Syria would now be providing PR for their fascist equivalent in Ukraine. As Syrian President, Bashar Al Assad stated shortly after the Russian military campaign began: 

The enemy facing the Syrian and Russian armies is one. In Syria, it is (Islamist) extremism and in Ukraine it is Nazism. The Russian Federation will give a lesson to the world that great countries are not only great with their military strength, but also their respect for the law, high morals and humanitarian principles”
Translated from Arabic by Syriana Analysis/a>

In 2018 during an interview with the Corbett Report I alluded to the potential for a  White Helmet global franchise. It appears that my prediction is coming true in Ukraine.

Effectively, the war against the Syrian alliance has been switched to Ukraine and Ukraine and its people are being weaponised by NATO member states to carry out their dirty work against Russia.

Ukrainians must resist the call to arms, secure negotiation with Russia and maintain neutrality before their country becomes a battleground strewn with the corpses of another US UK EU allied proxy war against the most powerful enemy they have confronted so far.

Vanessa Beeley is an independent journalist and photographer who has worked extensively in the Middle East – on the ground in Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Palestine, while also covering the conflict in Yemen since 2015. Follow her on Twitter @VanessaBeeley, or read her blog at The Wall Will Fall.