White Helmets is a glamorous terror group: “An Oscar for a Propaganda Flick,” Consortium News, 3/3/2017
“Tweet. Cave. Repeat. Equals 2020 Defeat,” Ryan Detert
..............
"Aid" to White Helmets and other terrorist groups in Syria is distributed in cash, there are no paper receipts, per August 2018 report by Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, page 31
...........
10/28/19, “Trump gives $4.5 million to Syria’s White Helmets, which partnered with jihadists and joined Turkey’s ethnic cleansing,” Gray Zone, Ben Norton
“While touting his efforts to end US involvement in Syria, Trump approved $4.5 million more for the White Helmets [sometimes known as Syria Civil Defense]. This group has been at the heart of the regime-change war on the country, partnering with jihadists and joining Turkey’s brutal invasion….
With close to $100 million in funds from the US and UK governments, as well as donations from Qatar, support from Turkey, and backing from wealthy private donors, this outfit has acted as a public relations vehicle for the Syrian armed [terrorist] opposition.
White Helmets links to extremist Salafi-jihadist groups, including ISIS and al-Qaeda, have been thoroughly documented. What’s more, the group has participated in recent Turkish onslaughts in northern Syria where Kurds and other minority groups faced ethnic cleansing.
The continued US funding is a sign that Washington’s regime-change war against Syria continues, even while Trump has [supposedly] partially withdrawn American troops from the country.
The White House announced the funding in a press release on October 22.
.......
....
The Trump White House called on “allies and partners to join us in our support for the SCD (White Helmets),” claiming the group has saved “many ethnic and religious minorities.”
But in fact the White Helmets have directly helped extremist Islamist militants and Turkish invaders who have ethnically cleansed and massacred ethnic and religious minorities.
The White Helmets – the ‘Islamic State’s fire brigade’
The White Helmets only operate in [terrorist] opposition-controlled areas in Syria, most of which have been dominated by far-right Islamist insurgents. Members of the organization have been filmed and photographed carrying guns and waving Salafi-jihadist flags, and have even participated in numerous public executions of citizens in this [terrorist] occupied territory.
The group has also assisted NATO member Turkey in its invasion and ethnic cleansing of northern Syria, collaborating with Ankara after it illegally militarily occupied the city of Afrin and kicked out its majority-Kurdish population.
John Cantlie, a British journalist kidnapped by ISIS and forced to make propaganda for the genocidal militia, referred to a White Helmets team in one such hostage video as “the Islamic State’s fire brigade.” Similarly, the Saudi Islamic fundamentalist warlord Abdullah al-Muhaysini, who is closely linked to Syrian al-Qaeda, praised the White Helmets as allied “mujahideen.”
None of these inconvenient facts stopped the organization from winning an Academy Award, getting nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, or being portrayed by the international corporate media as benevolent humanitarian angels.
Oceans of funding from Western governments
The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal published a detailed exposé on the White Helmets, highlighting the group’s creation by an elite London public relations firm called the Syria Campaignand a British military officer named James Le Mesurier, himself a veteran of the NATO regime-change war in Yugoslavia.
Syria Civil Defense [White Helmets] was formed in alliance with the regime-change arm of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Office of Transitional Initiatives.
The White Helmets have enjoyed a flood of funding from Western governments, who have used the group as a PR weapon to turn up the heat against the Syrian government and its allies Iran and Russia.
Between 2013 and 2016, USAID donated at least $23 million [US tax dollars] to the group. The governments of Britain, France, Canada, the Netherlands, and Japan added tens of millions more to this substantial “humanitarian” regime-change slush fund.
In June 2018, the US State Department announced that Trump had approved another $6.6 million [tax dollars] in USAID funding for the White Helmets.
......
A month after this new round of funding, more than 400 members of the White Helmets and their families were evacuated from Salafi-jihadist-occupied territory in southwest Syria in an operation overseen by Israel.
The US State Department published a statement announcing, “We deeply appreciate Israel’s role in facilitating the transit of the White Helmets” into Jordan….
While they have been aggressively marketed in corporate media as a supposed humanitarian and peace group, the White Helmets and their parent organization the Syrian Campaign have in fact openly lobbied for US [taxpayer funded] military intervention and sanctions on Syria.
When neoconservative Senator John McCain died in 2018, the White Helmets honored the infamous war hawk as “an extraordinary man and politician, and a staunch supporter of peace.”
[Terror sponsor Trump] Continuing the regime-change war on Syria while denouncing it
In a White House press briefing on October 23, President Donald Trump issued a shockingly honest denunciation of the US regime-change war on Syria and the violence and destruction it has wrought:
“Eight long years after President Obama’s ill-fated push at regime change, U.S. troops are still on the ground in Syria. More than half a million people are dead, hundreds of thousands are terribly injured, and millions more Syrians are displaced. It really is a nightmare of misery.
Across the Middle East, we have seen anguish on a colossal scale. We have spent $8 trillion on wars in the Middle East, never really wanting to win those wars. But after all that money was spent and all of those lives lost, the young men and women gravely wounded so many--the Middle East is less safe, less stable, and less secure than before these conflicts began.”
Yet just the day before making this speech, the Trump White House had announced $4.5 million in additional funding for a group that has been at the center of that regime-change war on Syria.
Trump’s declaration also came in the same speech in which he announced that hundreds of American soldiers would remain in Syria to occupy the country’s oil and gas reserves, blocking the Syrian government from revenue needed to rebuild.
[Image: Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, US ally and leader of Islamic Salafist Jihadist terror group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Syria that controls Idlib province.] In May [2019], the Trump administration also approved a Turkish shipment of US-made anti-tank missiles to Salafi-jihadist rebels fighting in Syria’s al-Qaeda-occupied Idlib province.
So while Trump publicly condemns regime change as a policy, the campaign to destabilize Syria continues directly under his watch.”
……………………………
Added:
Terrorists only accept cash: Millions of US taxpayer dollars Trump funnels to White Helmets are delivered in cash, there are no paper receipts, per August 2018 report by Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, page 31. Added, from page 24: “The large majority of the [White Helmets] volunteers is not actually vetted.”…The entire US political class agrees with Trump that Islamic terrorists are great partners of the US.
President Trump in March 2019 praised Islamic terror group White Helmets in a State Dept. proclamation: “These heroic first responders have the most dangerous job in the world.” Trump further rewarded his terror group “heroes” with $5 million more US taxpayer dollars, saying, “The United States Government strongly supports the work of the White Helmets.”
3/16/19, “US to provide $5 million to White Helmets to continue services: State Dept.,” almasdarnews.com, Beirut, Lebanon
…………………………………
……………………
Islamic terrorist leader praises White Helmets as “hidden soldiers:”
“This March [2017], a leader of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the powerful newly rebranded al-Qaeda-led rebel coalition in Syria, hailed the White Helmets in a special video message as the “hidden soldiers of the revolution.”…
"Abu Jaber praises [terrorist] humanitarian workers, such as the White Helmets.” 3/19/17.…..
White Helmets acts of terror across Syria:
9/6/2017, ”Investigation: White Helmets Committing Acts Of Terror Across Syria,” Mint Press News
…………………………………..
Added: Netherlands stops funding White Helmets:
9/17/2018, “Netherlands Cuts Funding to White Helmets Over Likely Links to Terrorism,” Mint Press News, Whitney Webb
“A report by the Netherlands’ Foreign Affairs Ministry found Dutch funding given to the group had fallen into the hands of extremist groups and had been used in illegal black market transactions.”
.........................