Inside Homs with Syria's White Helmets
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ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. I'm Eden Scherer. And I'm Brock Charlelli. We played best friends on The Middle. And became best friends in real life. We're here to re-watch The Middle with all of you. Each week, we'll recap an episode with behind-the-scenes stories, guest interviews, and what we think now, many years later. There's a lot to dive into, so let's get to middling. ♪

Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com I am personally, I am prepared to forgive those who tortured me when I was detained. But they have to admit their mistake and they have to make a lesson to others that this would never happen again. They said he will start a war. I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars. I recognize the challenges from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan and beyond. War.

Hunger. Terrorism. I just find bombs and I find dead people. But it's a really scary thing. I'm Venetia Roney and this is Battle Lines. It's Friday, December 13th, 2024.

On today's episode, we speak to a White Helmets volunteer who has just returned to his home city of Homs for the first time in over a decade. He tells us about the devastation Bashar al-Assad has wreaked on Syria and how the country can heal now that the regime has fallen. Plus, our senior foreign correspondent, Sofia Yan, has been on the Turkish-Syrian border. She's been speaking to refugees ecstatic to be able to go back, but also Turkish Alawites who continue to have an affinity for Assad.

We start in Homs, where some shell-shocked residents have been able to return for the first time in years to their homes, only to discover them uninhabitable. The city was subjected to a particularly brutal crackdown by the Assad regime as punishment for its key part in the 2011 pro-democracy uprising.

From 2014 onwards, civilian volunteers came together to create the White Helmets, a makeshift emergency search and rescue service working across Syria. They dodged incessant bombs to help people trapped or injured and became famous for showing the world the reality of the civil war.

Farouk Habib is the deputy general manager for the White Helmets. Originally from Homs, I spoke to him after he had just returned home for the first time in over a decade. I couldn't wait. Once Homs was liberated, I packed my bags and arranged to go there.

We've been dreaming of this moment for years and everybody is so excited. Of course, people are worried a bit. It's a big change and it happened so fast, but people are hopeful. They are free to dream again because our first dream to get rid of the dictatorial regime costed us a lot. It came at a very heavy price.

But yeah, we turned that dark page in our history and now people are preparing to open a new page and build a new future for Syria. It must be such an amazing feeling. I mean, this war has been going on for so long and as you say, the cost has been so high. When were you last living in Homs?

Well, I left Homs in 2013 and I couldn't return back until now. So you've been living in Turkey since then? Well, I was living all over the place in Turkey, in Europe, in Canada, in Jordan, but I couldn't find home and I'm keen to return home. But I cannot permanently return now because my home is damaged, it's destroyed and there are no services available.

My children need attention. So you've just returned back on your own for now to see what it's like? Yes, I came on my own to see how does it look like. Are we able to live there or not yet? And yeah, most of the city is destroyed. We as White Helmets, we are opening the roads, trying to remove rubble from the essential roads so we ensure access.

We are also working to clear the unexploded ordinance. There are a lot of landmines and cluster munition. This is a really sad story and painful. Some civilians who returned from camps in Idlib, they died when they arrived home by explosives. Oh, wow. I've been informed of four cases so far. Imagine someone who lived in a tent for five years, dreaming of this moment, dreaming of the day when they would return home and when they returned home.

they lost their life so we have a lot of responsibility a lot work to be done also we need to restore services it's a faint state all government services collapsed already and it's corrupted as as the regime allocated most of the national income of the cn states to the military

Most of the Syrian revenues were spent on the military and the intelligence services. So the civilian services are in very, very poor conditions. And we need to ensure health services to people. We need to ensure emergency medical services, search and rescue, firefighting. And as I said, the early recovery is very important, the rehabilitation of the infrastructure.

It's a crucial requirement to enable IDPs and refugees to return home. Have you met a lot of people then going back to Homs for the first time who are finding their homes also uninhabitable? Yeah, look, there are two kinds of challenges here for the people to return. Some people, they left homes because they are wanted by the regime. They saved and they escaped. And their homes were not destroyed.

So they allowed relatives or friends to live in their homes, people who belong to neighborhoods which were destroyed by the war. And now the owners of these homes want to return. They have to ask their friends who live in their homes to leave and empty their apartments. But those people have no place to go because their neighborhoods are destroyed.

And there were other IDPs and refugees who escaped from the destroyed neighbourhoods, and those cannot return until we, as I said, rebuild these neighbourhoods. And has there been much rebuilding since the beginning of the civil war? Has the Syrian government done anything? No, no, no, it did nothing. It was a collective punishment because these communities historically have been against the regime. So the regime was very happy to forcibly displace those people

and definitely has no interest at all to let them return. And that was the reason why Bashar al-Assad was reluctant to collaborate with any initiative to allow the return of the refugees. Can you just to explain a bit to our listeners how things became so bad there? Obviously, Homs was the site of really heavy fighting back at the beginning of the civil war. What were things like when you left? Well, Homs was the capital of the Syrian revolution. It hosted the biggest demonstrations in Syria.

and a lot of people were killed, detained or displaced. The regime conquered Homs militarily by support from Hezbollah.

back in 2018. And that came after the regime destroyed almost half of the city. A lot of people were displaced and left to the north, to Italy. Can you tell me a bit more about the White Helmets? The White Helmets was composed by people from different backgrounds, because they were former firefighters, paramedics, doctors, and there are others from different backgrounds. And we joined our efforts together to respond to the crisis and try to save lives.

And we've been growing since then, responding to the crisis, developing our techniques and expanding the scope of our activities. So it's not only search and rescue, we also provide first aid, we run the biggest network of women's centers to take care of women and children. We also have community resilience activities, including rehabilitation and early recovery, localization projects and community engagement.

And of course we've been working on justice and accountability because the first responders are the first witnesses to the atrocities and crimes.

So we collect evidence, we archive it, we investigate and share with the international investigation mechanisms. I'm sure a lot of our listeners will remember the absolutely extraordinary and heartbreaking footage that was often broadcast by you guys because sometimes some White Helmets volunteers would wear GoPros on their helmets to try and share with the world the awful terror that you were working through on the ground in places like Homs.

That didn't stop the war. Do you feel let down by the international community? Look, in the beginning of the revolution, we thought that the main challenge is to let the international community know what's happened.

Because at that time, the regime called the internet service, did not allow foreign media to enter Syria. Those who call for democracy, they are terrorists or they are MI6 or CIA or whatever, or that footages which come from Syria are fabricated, all kinds of disinformation. And we thought that we just need to let the people in the UK and in the US and Europe know what's happening. And we thought that

that definitely those countries will stand with us because we share the same values and we're calling for peace and freedom. But we were failed. The international community definitely failed us. It let us die for 14 years. Millions of people were displaced and lost their homes. The international community recently looked at the Syrian crisis only as if it's just a humanitarian crisis from a natural disaster. While it's not.

It's not. It's a political and human rights crisis in its origin. And without addressing the root causes of the problem, we will continue forever trying to address the symptoms, but that doesn't work. And while we received support and sympathy from ordinary citizens, from the people in the UK, people in the United States, people everywhere around the world, but the politicians did not do their homework. And that led to what we see in Ukraine.

The lack of accountability against what the Russians did in Syria emboldened Putin and encouraged him to invade Ukraine. And if the international community does not stop this aggression in Ukraine, it will move elsewhere to another country. There should be consequences. If perpetrators have impunity and feel that they can get away with their crimes, they will do it again and again. And there will be other criminals who think that they can do it.

What does justice look like for you now in Syria going forward? It's obviously a slightly fluid situation with Hayat Tareel al-Sham, essentially the sort of kingmaker in all of this, Abu Muhammad al-Jalani, the sort of de facto leader at the moment, I suppose, but none of that is really settled. Do you feel confident that they'll be able to

bring about the justice and accountability that you'd like to see? We feel confident that there is nothing worse than the regime. And as we have dealt with the regime, we can deal with any other challenge. The Syrian people will not accept to live under dictatorship again, for whatever reason.

We believe we will be able to rebuild our country as I said and deal with the challenges. So far HDS have shown high discipline. They gave assurances to everybody including minorities, the Syrian people that they will not interfere in the civilian life.

These positive messages are received well by our people in Syria and I believe by the international community as well. And we are looking forward for more actions to transform these assurances to a real political process. We don't want more guns. We don't want to be ruled by a military

regime anymore in the future. And as I said, with the internal dialogue among the different Syrian groups and support from the international community, we are hopeful that we can overcome these challenges and build a new Syria.

Has White Helmets as an organisation been in contact with Hayat al-Hasham to sort of negotiate what kind of role they'll play on the ground in the future? The White Helmets existed long time before all the armed groups in Syria. So we have our legitimacy and support from the communities themselves who protect us. And everybody who recognise the efficiency and the impartiality of the services delivered by the White Helmets.

So we coexisted together for years. We are independent. They don't interfere in our work. We negotiate access like all humanitarian organizations, because definitely you have to deal with the de facto authorities. But we remain independent. And so far, they did not hinder our work or interfere in our work.

In our vision since the establishment back in 2014 when for the first time leaders of the White Helmets from different areas of Syria met together and signed the Charter of Principles, we pledged that when Syria gets freedom and we have a new legitimate government elected by the people, we will put all our resources and assets under the authority of that government.

Until that day, we remain an independent organization. But if the transitional phase goes well, and we have free elections and a new legitimate government accepted by the people and recognized internationally,

We will be happy to collaborate and work more closely with that government. You mentioned a bit about the work that White Helmets has been doing on the ground since the fall of Assad, expanding to other cities, mine clearance, dealing with rubble. Have you guys also been going into the prisons that have now been liberated? I know you were on the ground in Sednaya, right? Yes. We sent five rescue teams from the White Helmets, including a K9 team,

And we searched there, we looked for two days, we got the map of the prison. We also had contact with former officers from the regime military who were in charge of the prison. And we confirmed by now that there are no other hidden cells and there are no detainees left in Sayyidina Naya. But we lost a very precious time because the time which five of our team spent for almost two days in Sayyidina Naya

was at the expense of searching in other prisons across Syria. And there are reports of many secret prisons and buildings related to the Assad family or Al-Bas party or their affiliated militias. So we announced a financial reward for anyone who give us legitimate information to guide us to those secret prisons.

We also liaised with the human rights organizations who have information from previous investigations. We also liaised with our international partners and sent a request to the UN to speak to the Russians who accepted Bashar al-Assad and granted him asylum. So we asked the Russians through the UN to put pressure on Bashar al-Assad to reveal the places of the secret prisons.

Sadly speaking, regrettably, we don't expect collaboration from them. But I'm telling you, we're fighting on all fronts and every minute counts in this work. So your worry is that there are people in underground rooms and now that the guards and staff have deserted, these people are just stuck there. Yeah, they need food, they need water, some of them need medication and we don't know where they are.

Because the number of people who are detained by the regime, according to the reports by the Human Rights Organization, is much bigger than the number of people who were found and released from the known prisons. The difference, maybe most of them, maybe all of them were executed and buried in mass graves.

Or maybe there are some of them in hidden secret prisons and we are searching for them. How does Syria heal from this? How can it start to move forward from all of the awful things that have happened under the Assad regime and become one country again? We need tolerance. We need to overcome our sorrows and pain. We need to forgive each other's.

But also, as I said, we need to protect the future of Syria by holding the main war criminals accountable. Transitional justice is important in this period. Also, the identification and documentation of mass graves is important. Knowing the truth about the missing persons is important.

and telling the truth about what happened. So we learn from these lessons and also the world learn from them so they don't happen again. And does transitional justice, is that people having a trial in court potentially facing the death penalty? Is that what that looks like to you? Not necessarily. Not necessarily. Personally, I don't support the community.

But it's not up to me or others. There should be new constitution and new laws as the people in the country choose. But what I'm telling you, first of all, telling the truth is important. In many cases, just letting the victims safely speaking out, telling what happened to them. And those who are involved in a way or another, admitting their sins.

speaking what happened, clearing that disinformation. That may help. I am personally, I'm prepared to forgive those who tortured me when I was detained. But they have to admit their mistake and they have to make a lesson to others that this would never happen again. Gosh, so you were tortured and detained. Were you detained for being part of the White Helmets?

No, that was before the formal establishment of the White Helmets. That was back in 2012. I was detained because I brought foreign journalists to Homs to film what was happening. At that time, the regime claimed that there was nothing happening in Homs or other cities in Syria. There was no revolution and all media reports are fabricated because simply there were no independent journalists in Syria.

So I used to bring journalists from Lebanon to Homs from different channels, Channel 4, BBC, France 2 and others. And here finally a regime informat, they arrested me at the checkpoint. Gosh, so you were tortured and detained and then managed to escape or were you let go? What happened? If you don't mind me asking. Finally, I was released against big price. My friends and colleagues

Yeah, they were able finally to reach some officials in the regime and pay them money and also give jewelry to the wife of the head of the military security branch where I was kidnapped. Well, now I'm alive and talking to you, but there are others, tens of thousands of others who lost their lives and now we don't know about them because maybe they did not have the money to pay or they did not have the right contacts.

Is there anything else that you want to add or say? I want to say that we are grateful for every human who stood with us over the past 14 years, even with a word, with a post on social media, or with a donation, or with a phone call to their representatives at the parliament to call for action on Syria. We survived because

We have friends and allies who supported us, but we need to continue together to build a safe world, enjoy hopefully peaceful life for us and for the next generation. So we need your support more than ever. Political support first will help during the transitional phase in Syria, so we'll be able to

bring all parties to the table and have free elections and elect our representatives. And we need financial support indeed. For the white helmets and for the civil society in general, we need to fill the vacuum and ensure service delivery to the people. And as I said, help the refugees to return home. Thank you so much for joining us. That's Farouk Khabib, Group Deputy General Manager of the Syrian White Helmets from Homs. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Coming up after the break, we take a trip to the Turkish-Syrian border with Safiya Yan. Welcome back. The Syrian civil war caused the largest refugee crisis since the Second World War. Over 7 million people were displaced internally and a further 6 million fled abroad, mostly to neighbouring countries as well as Europe.

The majority ended up in Turkey, and now some of those people are making their way back to their homes in Syria. Senior foreign correspondent Sophia Yan has been down to the Turkish-Syrian border to speak to them.

Welcome to Batline, Safiya. What kind of things were they telling you? Hundreds of Syrian migrants have been gathering at the border between Turkey and Syria. They're going home. A lot of them have not been home in 10, 11, 12 years or so. And they're excited for this chance to return. It's bittersweet. Syria, for many of them, is a place of both really wonderful but also terrible memories. They fled because of

of the civil war that rocked Syria. And again, war is still ongoing at the moment, but the fall of the Assad regime has meant that a lot of these people feel that it is time for them to return. And so I met families

children, some babies. These were children born in exile, Syrian children born in exile, going to their country for the first time, possibly meeting relatives. Some of them were looking for their grandparents, were planning to do that. And again, these are family members that they'll see for the very first time because they've been outside of the country for so many years. I met this one family. They said, it's over. We will never come back to Turkey. This woman named Zelija Sadik.

That's what she told me. And she was with her three children and her husband. They had a bakery in Idlib and they planned to reopen it. And they were so happy to have the chance to return. It's really poignant to see this. You know, there's a lot of nervousness and anticipation in a way. They don't really know what's on the other side. Yes, it's a homecoming that's been so long awaited. But the situation is very fluid. It's been less than a week.

where after the regime fell, and even though this transitional government has now been set up, it's happened very quickly. We're talking about changes every minute, every hour, every day. And so what happens next in Syria really is still an unknown. But for now, a lot of people who've been stranded and fled to Turkey for refuge have

these last years are looking for a chance to get back across. Can you tell me a bit more about the story of Muhammad Deir al-Ahmad? He named his new daughter Damascus, and I just thought that story was really moving. Can you tell us a bit more about his backstory?

You know, Mohamed was the first man I spoke to at the border crossing at Cebelgazou. It's on the southern Turkey side, but it's really just about 30 miles to Aleppo. And Mohamed was there in the early hours of the morning unloading a car,

He was very interesting to speak to. He worked as a medic in Syria. He was at one of the last remaining field hospitals that eventually got bombed. And in Syria, he lost his wife, he lost his daughter. And finally, when the hospital he was working in was hit, was completely destroyed, turned to rubble, he decided finally, after all these years as a medic saving lives, he was going to try to save himself. And so he fled to Turkey.

He set up a new life. He was providing medical services to the Syrian migrant community and met a new woman, got married again, and had a daughter and named her Damascus because that's where he's from. It was a way for him to remember Damascus.

his homeland to try to keep this hope alive really of possibly one day returning home even though it seemed like this war would perhaps never end and that the Assad regime would never fall. And of course in these last few days all of a sudden things changed so quickly. His parents called him immediately. They said, you know, come home, come home if you can. And that's what he did. He and a neighboring family in total, a group of 12,

went to the border this week, and they plan to cross over. It's really, again, these stories are so moving because these are people who've been uprooted now so many times, fleeing war, fleeing some of the worst bloodshed you can imagine.

You mentioned that these refugees returning home after so many years, they don't know what kind of Syria they're stepping back into. As you say, there's all this political uncertainty. But one thing that is certain is that the cities, the towns, sometimes the villages that they're going back to have overwhelmingly, if they're in areas that were rebel held at some point during the civil war, have overwhelmingly been destroyed. We heard earlier in this episode from

A White Helmets volunteer has returned to Homs to find scenes of just devastation. You know, services haven't been provided there for years. What did people say about that? Did people know what sort of state the homes that they were hoping to return to would be in? A lot of people told me that their homes had been completely flattened by the war. They aren't going home to very much in terms of physical infrastructure in the cities. Houses are gone. Hospitals are gone.

Aleppo flattened. I mean, these are cities that were historic. They had beautiful, beautiful sites, historic sites. They had so many buildings. They had so many facilities. A lot of that is gone. But what people are really excited about is the chance to find their family members again, to see them again. Some people are looking for

brothers and uncles and mothers even who had been squirreled away in Assad's prisons. They're looking for news of whether their loved ones are still alive. And so it's this hope of a family reunion that's driving a lot of them to go to Syria, to return to Syria at this point, even though, again, the situation is so fluid and there are so many unknowns. There's still violence. There's still clashes ongoing. There's a lot of stuff going on. I mean, Syria is a pretty vast territory.

So there is also a certain safety concern. But again, it's this hope to see their relatives and their friends, to try to find them and to see how everybody is faring. This is what's so important to them. And so a lot of them are taking what they can carry. Bags full of blankets and rugs. I saw a children's bicycle. That was Mohammed's daughter, actually, her bicycle.

but he was taking back electric stoves. I mean, they're taking what they can carry because again, they're setting up life again in a place that is both home, but also completely, uh, destroyed, uh,

And so they're taking with them whatever they can from Turkey. And were they glad to be leaving Turkey? Syrian refugees have had a sort of uneasy accommodation in Turkey. The country has obviously taken in the most Syrian refugees out of any country in the world, 3.2 million according to the UNHCR. But they haven't always been welcomed, right? It was a really mixed bag sentiment. Some people were glad that they left.

could seek refuge all these years in Turkey. But for the majority of them, they were just so happy to be able to go back to their own country. It has been really tough for the Syrians. The migrants were at first very much welcomed by the Turks. They did the humanitarian thing when war began. But we're talking about a war that lasted 13 years and in many ways is still ongoing.

It has become a domestic political issue in many countries, including the UK, the US and Europe. Also in Turkey, there is growing anti-refugee sentiment. There's a sense that these migrants are taking away jobs from the locals. You know, this is something that applies both in Turkey and other countries. And so some of them...

haven't felt so welcome in Turkey more recently, and they're glad to be going. When they now leave Turkey, they have to first pay off any debts, any driving fines, any owed taxes, this sort of thing. Then the Turkish government is canceling their status here. That means once they cross over that border, they cannot return. And so this is a very big step because, again, I can't underscore enough how

quickly things are changing on the ground now in Syria. If they change their mind because something has happened, it will be very hard for them, it seems, to return to Turkey. I want to ask you about another reporting trip that you've made over the last few days, and that's to the coast on the Turkish-Syrian border where you met Turkish Alawites. Tell me a bit about their quite different views on the fall of Assad. So the Alawites are a very interesting group to which the Assad family also belongs. And they settled...

in what is now southern Turkey, northern Syria. And this coastal town that I went to, Samandağ, it's about 18 miles away from Assad's ancestral village, Kardağa.

There are even distant relatives of Assad that live in this coastal town that I visited. And here, there's an affinity for Assad. There's a bit of pride in him. And while so many people in the world, so many Syrians around the world are celebrating the fall of Assad, who ruled between his father and with Bashar al-Assad for so many decades, ruled with an iron fist. You know, this was a lot of brutality, a lot of bloodshed, a lot of violence.

While many people have been celebrating his demise, in this town, it's been kind of a complicated situation. A lot of them liked Assad. A lot of them supported him. They come, again, from the same group, the Alawites.

A lot of Alawites largely supported Assad's campaign to crush the Sunni-led rebel challenge against his rule. And some of them are now worried that without Assad in power, they're worried about what this means for them. You know, Assad in the Syrian government had stacked all the senior positions around him in government and military with other Alawite loyalists, some of the most brutal, torturous

enforcement of his crackdown came through these militias who were Alawites, drawn from the Alawite community. And so now on even the Turkish side, there's a worry about what kind of pressures might come to them. On the whole, how this goes, whether or not the Alawites are able to

live and to coexist in harmony with everybody else in this new Sunni-led government. This is sort of a litmus test about the takeover by the Syrian rebels, whether there will be more violence to come, if there's going to be some sort of revenge seeking. Again, we'll have to see what happens. But again, for this community, it's been a really challenging time. It's been a bit confusing for them because Assad for them was someone that they in a way looked up to.

Yeah, and I think that's a really good point. The Telegraph ran a first person piece by someone called Abdullah Rahman Badawi. He's a refugee here in the UK and he's saying it's too soon to return to Syria. Its new rulers were Al-Qaeda members just a few years ago. And I think that speaks to some of the fears amongst, as you say, Syria's minorities or people who might have collaborated with the regime, Assad's regime for one reason or another. But also, I guess, the international community who are

You know, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the group that has been at the helm of this coalition of rebel groups that's ousted Assad, are prescribed as a terror organization in the UK and the US. And there's some uncertainty about how to deal with them and how much of this moderate language is a front and how much of it's real. Did you meet any refugees, Syrian refugees, who were reflecting these fears in Turkey as well? Absolutely. Everybody knows that this is a very fluid and fast-moving situation. And...

To a certain extent, it seems that people want to believe that finally we've turned the page, that there's a bit of a reprieve, that the world can move on. You know, war, so many people said to me, you know, war is not something that we want. Nobody wants this. It's been nearly 15 years. This is what one man said to me. He said, enough, enough, enough, enough.

And I think in just those few words, that tells you a lot about how people who have lived so close to all this conflict really feel. On these border towns, there were some bombings, there were attacks on the Turkish side for, again, residents living in this frontier area.

combat aircraft in the sky, sounds of explosions, and you could see it. You could see it from the Turkish side. So even though there is a border, a modern-day border between Turkey and Syria, this is not at all, conflict is not at all something that is confined just because there is a line drawn between two countries. And so for these communities that live near Syria, they also hope that this is going to move in a more positive direction going forward.

in a way, the world is holding their breath to see what happens next with Syria. Will they make good, as you say, HTS? Will they make good on these promises, these overtures, these noises that they're making to try to be more international and to work with the global community? Sophia Yan, our senior foreign correspondent. Thanks very much for joining us. That's all for this week. Join us again on Battlelines on Monday. Goodbye. Battlelines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles. The producer is Yolaine Goffin.

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I'm Eden Scherer. And I'm Brock Charlele. We played best friends on The Middle. And became best friends in real life. We're here to re-watch The Middle with all of you. Each week, we'll recap an episode with behind-the-scenes stories, guest interviews, and what we think now, many years later. There's a lot to dive into, so let's get to middling. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.