Israel Aids Evacuation From Syria of Hundreds of ‘White Helmets’ and Families
By Ben Hubbard July 22, 2018
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Israel has facilitated the evacuation of hundreds of rescue workers, known as the White Helmets, and their families from an embattled pocket of southern Syria, helping them to travel through Israeli-held territory to reach Jordan, Israeli and Jordanian officials said on Sunday.
The move in a part of Syria where pro-government forces are advancing followed a push by Western countries including the United States to protect members of the White Helmets, volunteer emergency workers who rush to the scene of airstrikes in civilian areas.
The Israeli Army said in a statement on Sunday that the United States and European countries had asked for help with the evacuation of the civilians “due to an immediate threat to their lives.”
A Foreign Ministry spokesman in Jordan, Mohammad al-Kayed, said that his country had authorized the United Nations to facilitate the entry of hundreds of Syrians to Jordan after Britain, Germany and Canada had made a “legally binding undertaking to resettle them within a specified period of time due to a risk to their lives.”
Ayman Safadi, Jordan’s foreign minister, said on Twitter on Sunday that the original request had been for 800 Syrians, but that the final number who made the trip was 422.
The evacuation came as Syrian government forces, which are supported by Russia and Iran, have been sweeping through a swath of territory along Syria’s southern border with Jordan, seizing areas that have long been held by Western-backed rebels seeking to oust President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
As the lines dividing those zones have solidified, large numbers of people living in them have been moved, further exacerbating the crisis that has displaced more than half of Syria’s population.
In addition to the evacuation of the White Helmets, hundreds of rebels and their families were bused from southern Syria to the rebel-held north because they did not want to live under Syrian government control. And last week, thousands of members of Syria’s Shiite minority were removed from two besieged villages in the country’s north, emptying them out.
The evacuation of the White Helmets came near the end of the Syrian government’s sweep through southern Syria. As towns have fallen, hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes, and many, including members of the White Helmets, ended up in the shrinking pocket of rebel-held territory along the Israeli-held Golan Heights.
Officially known as the Syria Civil Defense, the White Helmets, so called for their signature hard hats, have been lauded in the West for their work digging people out of the rubble after government airstrikes. The United States and other Western governments have funded their work, and a Netflix film, “The White Helmets,” won an Academy Award last year for best short documentary.
A second film about the group, “Last Men in Aleppo,” was nominated for an Oscar this year.
The Syrian government accuses the group of cavorting with terrorists and of staging footage of their operations to garner sympathy and demonize the government.
The Israeli Army called the move “an exceptional humanitarian gesture,” apparently to make it clear that further evacuations were not to be expected.
Tzachi Hanegbi, Israel’s minister of regional cooperation, said in a radio interview on Sunday that foreign powers worried that Mr. Assad’s government would target the White Helmets if they were in territory his forces seized.
“Now that it appears that the Assad regime is going to regain its hold over all of Syria, the international community wanted to extricate them so that they wouldn’t have to pay the price of the enormous hatred that the Syrian regime has for them,” he said.
The Syrians will remain in a restricted area in Jordan until their resettlement within three months, the spokesman or the Jordanian Foreign Ministry said.
On Sunday, Jeremy Hunt, Britain’s new foreign secretary, who recently replaced Boris Johnson, took to Twitter to trumpet the evacuation: “Fantastic news that we — UK and friends — have secured evacuation of White Helmets and their families — thank you Israel and Jordan for acting so quickly on our request.”
Jeremy Hunt
?@Jeremy_Hunt
Fantastic news that we – UK and friends – have secured evacuation of White Helmets and their families – thank you Israel and Jordan for acting so quickly on our request. The WH are the bravest of the brave and in a desperate situation this is at least one ray of hope
This was the second major evacuation in Syria this past week.
On Thursday, buses removed more than 6,000 people from two Shiite villages in Idlib Province in the north who had been besieged by Sunni rebels for years.
Idlib now holds the largest patch of rebel-held territory in Syria, and officials in the region assume that once Mr. Assad has retaken the south, he will turn his guns to Idlib.
More than two million people are there, many displaced from elsewhere in Syria, and aid organizations worry that any military operation would be catastrophic because civilians will have nowhere to flee. The province borders Turkey, which has kept its border closed.
The two Shiite villages, which contained civilians and fighters loyal to the Syrian government, had been under siege by rebel forces for years. Last week, a deal was reached for them to be emptied out and their residents bused to government-held areas farther south in exchange for the release of about 1,500 detainees held by the government.
The departure was bitter for those who left, not knowing if they would ever return.
“We were hoping for a military campaign to reach us here, but unfortunately nothing happened and we’re leaving,” Hussein Halaq, a Shiite villager, said via a messaging app as he prepared to leave. “Many lost their houses and their future.”
But some who remained in Idlib worried that the departure of the Shiites was the government’s way of paving the way for a harsh military attack, since it no longer had to worry about collateral damage to its loyalists.
“They were like a card for us, pressing the regime warplanes not to bomb civilians,” said Mohammed Saeed, an antigovernment activist in Idlib.
Source: The New York Times