The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime on Dec. 8 brought at least a temporary end to Syria’s long and devastating civil war.
But the relative peace has put the spotlight on the amount of damage done over more than 13 years of fighting – as well as the exorbitant number of unexploded bombs, rockets, artillery shells, mines and other dangerous detritus left behind.
For the White Helmets – a rescue organization that emerged as one of the few heroes of the war as they raced to dig out people trapped in the rubble of regime bombings, recording their work with cameras attached to their headgear – the end of the fighting brought only fleeting relief.
In the aftermath, the group faces a staggering workload. While some teams focus on UXOs, other squads work to clear away the buildings – and sometimes entire city blocks – that have been reduced to rubble so that this battered country can start to rebuild. All the while, the White Helmets are careful to preserve any evidence they find of mass graves, chemical weapons attacks and other apparent war crimes.
If that wasn’t enough, the volunteer organization has also taken over as de facto first responders for the entire country, as the interim government of president Ahmed al-Sharaa has pushed out suspected Assad sympathizers from the civil service, leaving the White Helmets operating the main fire station in the Syrian capital of Damascus.
“We’re struggling with so many competing priorities,” Farouq Habib, deputy general manager of the White Helmets, said in an interview in the group’s office in Damascus. But, he added, it was a victory for the group to finally be able to operate across Syria again, after many years when it felt as if the revolution against Mr. al-Assad was on the verge of defeat.
From Damascus, deputy general manager Farouq Habib has seen the White Helmets take on increasing workload.
Mr. Habib, who was already outside Syria at the time, played a co-ordination role in the 2018 rescue operation that saw 98 White Helmets members and their families, 422 people in all, evacuated to Jordan from southern Syria, with the majority eventually being resettled to Canada. At the time, the White Helmets – who played a key role in revealing potential war crimes committed by the regime and its allies to the world – were being specifically targeted by Mr. al-Assad’s forces.
After that evacuation, the group’s work was largely limited to the northwestern province of Idlib, which was under the control of the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militia headed by Mr. al-Sharaa. That earned the White Helmets the trust of what is now the national government, which asked them to perform the same tasks across the whole of Syria after the sudden fall of the regime in December.
That co-operation has the White Helmets – who are funded by foreign governments, including Canada – awkwardly straddling the line between being a civil society organization and part of a government seen as playing a role in the new sectarian violence that has erupted.
“At the moment, we’re an NGO delivering a wide range of services, including some which should be delivered by the government. But currently the government does not have a structure or the forces to do that,” Mr. Habib said. “We will split at some point. One will form a ministry in the new government, and one will stay an NGO.”
Parts of Aleppo’s old market are still damaged from conflicts between government and rebel fighters. Rebuilding is a tall order for the new government, given the scale of destruction across Syria.
The UXO-clearing work is funded almost entirely by Canada, which donated $7.2-million to the White Helmets over a 15-month period that ended Jan. 31. That money funded six teams, including the one sweeping the olive grove near Aleppo on Sunday.
But the funding was meant only to help the White Helmets clear UXOs from the 6,000 square kilometres of Idlib governorate. Suddenly, the same six teams are working to clear all 185,000 square kilometres of Syria. Mr. Habib, whose family has settled in Montreal as refugees, said he was optimistic Canada would provide an injection of additional funding that would allow the organization to at least double the number of UXO teams in the field.
On Wednesday, the Canadian government announced that it was temporarily lifting some sanctions imposed on Syria since 2011, specifically for transactions “aimed at the democratization and stabilization of Syria or the delivery of humanitarian assistance.” Ottawa also announced that it was providing $84-million in new humanitarian aid to Syria, while nominating Canada’s ambassador to Lebanon, Stefanie McCollum, to concurrently serve as the country’s first ambassador to Syria since 2012.
That’s all high politics to the thinly stretched White Helmets members working on the ground. Their dangerous tasks are further complicated these days as many members are fasting for Ramadan.
Tariq Ibrahim, a 35-year-old who heads the UXO-clearing effort around Aleppo, said he gives his team extra breaks during the Muslim holy month to help them maintain their focus. “Because your first mistake is your last mistake,” he said.
Mara Hajj Ahmed, 25, one of the two women on the squad working in Kafr Hamra, said she had joined the White Helmets in 2023 out of a desire to do something to help her country. “My family was completely against it because of how dangerous it was.” But, she insisted, her job is only risky if she doesn’t follow her training. (Mr. Ibrahim said the six UXO teams haven’t suffered any casualties so far.)
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Faded portraits of Bashar al-Assad and his father and presidential predecessor, Hafez al-Assad, are still visible around Aleppo.
Locals told The Globe and Mail that both the mortar and the cluster bomblet found in the olive orchard were likely fired by forces loyal to Mr. al-Assad during the devastating 2012 to 2016 siege of Aleppo, when Kafr Hamra was under the control of the rebel Free Syrian Army and other anti-Assad factions.
The surprise was that only one bomblet was found in the field. Usually when there’s one cluster munition, there are hundreds.
As the White Helmets were filling sandbags to carry out the controlled detonation on Sunday, the owner of the olive grove, 40-year-old Khalid Khattab, sheepishly acknowledged that there had originally been more than 20 of the tiny silver balls.
He said he and his brother had been detonating the munitions themselves by shooting them with a Kalashnikov rifle – until his brother was hit in the stomach by flying shrapnel and taken to hospital. After that, he decided to call in the White Helmets.
Mr. Ibrahim said a lack of education about the danger of UXOs is one of the biggest dangers Syria now faces, recounting a story about how a 10-year-old boy had taken a mortar shell home, killing his whole family when he accidentally set it off. “Some people collect the UXOs hoping to sell them for metal,” he said. “They do it out of poverty.”
Mr. Habib said more than 120 people had been killed by UXOs in the three months since the fall of the regime.
This abandoned artillery cache on the outskirts of Aleppo is another challenge for the White Helmets, who must find a way to neutralize them safely.
After the olive grove was cleared, the White Helmets drove a few kilometres to another town on the shattered northern edges of Aleppo. The second part of their mission was to check on an abandoned cache of artillery shells they had discovered in January, but which they hadn’t yet had time to properly dispose of.
They arrived at the two-room house in Haiyan to discover someone had removed the red warning tape and the “Danger: Mines” signs they had placed in front of the building. Fortunately, the dozens of Russian-made shells – which have had their firing pins removed – were still inside.
“Nothing ever stays in these places,” 27-year-old Yahia Hamoud muttered as he replaced the red tape and planted new warning signs.
Mr. Hamoud and his family fled Aleppo at the start of the war. He hadn’t seen his hometown – where entire neighbourhoods have been all but flattened, and even the historic 4,000-year-old citadel is badly damaged – since 2011. He said it was bittersweet being back and helping to remove the dangers left behind by the war.
“It’s a miracle to be standing here. We had given up on ever returning,” he said. “But seeing all the destruction, it aches my heart.”