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How a Syrian White Helmets Leader Played Western Media
Reporters who rely on the White Helmets' leader in
Aleppo ignore his record of deception and risk
manipulation.
By Gareth Porter
November 29, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Alternet"
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The White Helmets,
founded to rescue victims trapped under the rubble of
buildings destroyed by Syrian and Russian bombing, have
become a favorite source for Western news media covering
a story on Russian-Syrian bombing. Portrayed as
humanitarian heroes for over the past year and even
nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize last summer, the White
Helmets have been accorded unquestioned credibility by
journalists covering the Syrian crisis.
Yet
the White Helmets are hardly a non-political
organization.
Funded heavily by the U.S. State Department and the
British Foreign Office, the group operates only in areas
in northern Syria controlled by an al Qaeda affiliate
and their extremist allies—areas to which Western
journalists have not had access. Given that the White
Helmets work under the authority of those who hold the
real power in east Aleppo and other
opposition-controlled zones, the Western media’s
reliance on this organization for information comes with
serious risks of being manipulated.
The
highly political role played by the White Helmets in
relation to foreign press coverage was dramatically
demonstrated after the attack on a Syrian Red Crescent
truck convoy in the rebel held area of Urum al-Kubra,
just west of Aleppo on September 19. The assault took
place immediately after a ceasefire agreed to by Russia,
the U.S. and the Syrian government was shattered by a
deadly U.S. air attack on Syrian army forces battling
ISIS around the city of Deir Ezzor on September 17.
The
Obama administration assumed the attack was an airstrike
and immediately blamed it on Russian or Syrian aircraft.
An unidentified U.S. official
told the New York Times that there was “a very high
probability” that a Russian plane was near the area just
before the attack, but the administration did not make
public any evidence in support of that claim. In the
days following the attack, news media coverage relied
heavily on accounts provided by the White Helmets. The
head of the organization in Aleppo, Ammar Al-Selmo, was
offering them a personal on-the-scene account.
Selmo’s version of the story turned out to be riddled
with falsehoods; however, many journalists approached it
without an ounce of skepticism, and have continued to
rely on him for information on the ongoing battles in
and around Aleppo.
Changing stories
while the press plays along
The
first detail on which Selmo’s testimony revealed itself
as dishonest is his claim about where he was located at
the moment the attack began. Selmo told
Time Magazine the day after the attack that he was a
kilometer or more away from the warehouse where the aid
convoy trucks were parked at that point—presumably at
the local White Helmet center in Urm al-Kubra. But Selmo
changed his story in an interview with
the Washington Post published September 24, stating he
was “making tea in a building across the street” at that
moment.
Even
more dramatically, Selmo claimed at first that he saw
the beginning of the attack. According to the story
published by Time on September 21, Selmo said he was
drinking tea on the balcony when the bombing began, and
“he could see the first barrel bombs falling from what
he identified as a Syrian regime helicopter.”
But
Selmo could not have seen a barrel bomb falling from a
helicopter or anything else at that moment. In a video
shot early the next morning, Selmo declared that the
bombing had started at about 7:30pm. In later
statements, the White Helmets put the time at 7:12pm.
But sunset on September 19 was at 6:31pm, and by roughly
7pm, Aleppo was shrouded in complete darkness.
Someone evidently called Selmo’s attention to that
problem after the Time story was published, because by
the time he gave his account to the Washington Post, he
had changed that part of the story as well. The Post reported his
amended account as follows: “Stepping onto a balcony
just after 7pm, when it was already past dusk, he said
he listened to a helicopter swoop in and drop two barrel
bombs on the convoy.”
In
videos the White Helmets made the night of the attack,
Selmo went even further, asserting on one segment of the
video that four
barrel bombs had been dropped and in another, that eight
barrel bombs had been dropped. The idea that barrel
bombs were used in the attack was immediately picked up
by self-styled “media activists” on behalf of the
opposition authorities in Aleppo the following morning,
as the BBC
reported. That theme was in line with an effort by
opposition sources going back to 2012 to identify
“barrel bombs” as uniquely destructive weapons, more
reprehensible than conventional missiles.
Questionable
evidence from partisan sources
In
a video the White Helmets produced the night of the
attack, Selmo addresses viewers by pointing at the
indentation of the supposed bomb blast. “You see the box
of the barrel bomb?” he asks. But what is shown in the
video is a rectangular indentation in the gravel or
rubble that appears to be about a foot deep two feet
wide and a little more than three feet long. He reaches
under the surface and pulls out what look like a damaged
shovel blade, based on its shape.
That
scene clearly proves Selmo’s claim to have been
completely false. Barrel bombs make very large round craters
at least 25 feet wide and more than 10 feet deep, so the
box-like indentation in the video bore no resemblance
whatever to a barrel bomb crater.
Hussein Badawi, who is the local White Helmets director
of Urum al-Kubra, is clearly lower than Selmo in the
organization’s hierarchy. Badawi appeared briefly next
to Selmo in one segment of the video made that night but
remains silent, then disappeared. Nevertheless, Badawi directly
contradicted Selmo’s claim that the first explosions
that night were from barrel bombs. In a White Helmets
video that was translated from Arabic into English,
Badawi described those first explosions not as
airstrikes but as “four consecutive rockets” near the
center of the Red Crescent compound at Urum al-Kubra.
No
other visual evidence of a crater such as would have
been created by a barrel bomb has come to light. In
support of Selmo’s assertion, The Russian-based Conflict
Intelligence Team, which is dedicated to refuting
Russian government claims, could
only cite the video frame of Selmo holding up that
single piece of metal.
The
Bellingcat website, whose founder Eliot Higgins is a
non-resident fellow of the militantly anti-Russian,
State Department-funded Atlantic Council, and has no
technical expertise on munitions, pointed to
the same frame. Higgins claimed that the piece of metal
came from a “crater.” He also cited a second photograph
that he said showed a “repaired crater” in the road next
to a burnt-out truck. But the area in the photograph
that appeared to be covered with fresh dirt is clearly
no more than three feet long and a bit more two feet
wide—again far too small to be evidence of a barrel bomb
explosion.
Selmo’s White Helmet team also distributed to Bellingcat
and media outlets what appeared at first glance to be
visual evidence of Syrian and Russian air attacks: the
crumpled tailfin of a Russian OFAB-250
bomb, which can be seen under the boxes in a photograph
taken inside a warehouse at the site. Bellingcat cited
those photographs
as clinching evidence of Russian use of that bomb in the
attack on the aid convoy.
But
that photographs of the OFAB tailfin is extremely
problematic as evidence of an airstrike. If an OFAB-250
bomb had actually exploded at that point it would have
left a crater that was much larger than the one shown is
that photograph. The standard
rule
of thumb is that an OFAB-250, like other any other
conventional bomb weighing 250kg would make a crater 24
to 36 feet wide and 10 or 12 feet deep. The magnitude of
its crater is shown in a video of a Russian journalist standing
in one after the battle for the Syrian city of
Palmyra, which had been held by ISIS.
Furthermore,
the wall in the photograph only a few feet from the
supposed point of impact was clearly not affected by the
bomb. That indicates that either no OFAB-250 was dropped
in that spot or it was a dud. But the picture of the
boxes surrounding the OFAB tailfin also reveals other
evidence that there was an explosion. As one observer discovered
from a close examination, the boxes display evidence of shrapnel
tears. A closeup of
one package shows a pattern of fine shrapnel holes.
Only
something much less powerful than an OFAB-250 bomb or a
barrel bomb would account for those observable facts.
One weapon whose shrapnel could cause the pattern seen
in the photograph is the Russian S-5 rocket, two
variants of which throw out either 220 or 360 small
shrapnel fragments.
In the video he
made the night of the attack, Selmo had already claimed
that Russian aircraft fired S-5s at
the site, although he mistakenly called them “C-5s.”
And a photograph of two S-5 missiles was also
distributed to Bellingcat and to news organizations,
including the Washington Post. Selmo insisted
to Time magazine that the airstrikes were divided
between barrel bombs and missiles fired by Russian jets.
But
again Badawi, the White Helmets chief for Urum al Kubra,
contradicted Selmo in a
separate video, stating that the initial barrage of
missiles were launched from the ground. Badawi’s
admission was very significant, because the Syrian
opposition forces have had supplies of Russian
S-5s ever since the weapons were smuggled out of
Libya to the rebels in large numbers in 2012. They have
been using S-5s as ground-launched rockets like the
Libyan rebels did, and have designed their own
improvised launchers for them.
Badawi claimed the initial four missiles had been fired
by Syrian government forces from the defense factories
in southern Aleppo governorate. But the government
defense plants in southern Aleppo governorate are in al-Safira—more
than 25 kilometers away, whereas the S-5s have a range
of only 3 to 4 kilometers.
Even more
telling is that fact that, despite Selmo’s insistence
that airstrikes continued for hours and included as many
as 20 to 25 distinct attacks, none of the members of the
White Helmet team captured a single airstrike in a
video, which would have provided clear audio-visual
evidence of his claim.
The
Atlantic Council’s Bellingcat site pointed to a
video posted online by opposition sources in Aleppo
as providing such audio evidence of jet planes just
before the nighttime explosions. But despite a voice on
the video declaring that it was a Russian airstrike, the
sound stops immediately after the fiery explosion,
indicating that it was caused by a ground launched
missile, not a missile fired from a jet plane. Thus the
confirming evidence of an airstrike claimed by
Bellingcat did not actually confirm it at all.
Despite a record
of distortions, Selmo remains the go-to source
Whoever was
responsible for the attack on the Syrian Red Crescent
aid convoy, it is clear that Ammar al-Selmo, the top
White Helmet official in Aleppo, lied about where he was
when the attack on the aid convoy began and, at least
initially, misled his audience when he said he witnessed
the first stages of the attack with his own eyes. What’s
more, he made claims of Syrian barrel bombs and Russian
OFAB-250 bombs dropped on the convoy that are not
supported by any credible evidence.
In
light of Selmo’s readiness to embellish his account and
to support the narrative of a Russian-Syrian attack,
Western media should have been far more careful about
relying on it as confirming the U.S. charge about the
aid convoy attack. But during the weeks of heavy Russian
and Syrian bombing in eastern Aleppo that followed the
breakdown of the ceasefire, Selmo was frequently quoted
by the news media as a source on the bombing campaign.
And Selmo exploited the new situation to push the
rebels’ political agenda.
On
September 23, the White Helmets told the news media that
three of their four operating centers in east Aleppo had
been hit and two of them were out of commission.
National Public Radio
quoted Selmo as saying he believed the group had
been deliberately targeted, because he had “intercepted
pilots’ communications and heard them getting orders to
bomb his colleagues.” Curiously, NPR failed to identify
Selmo as the head of the White Helmets in east Aleppo,
identifying him only as a “White Helmets member.”
Five
days later the Washington Post reported a
similar claim by Ismail Abdullah, another White
Helmets official working directly under Selmo.
“Sometimes we hear the pilot tell his base, ‘We see a
market for the terrorists, there is a bakery for the
terrorists,’” said Abdullah. “Is it okay to hit them?
They say, ‘Okay, hit them.’” He further claimed that on
September 21, the White Helmets had heard an enemy pilot
refer to the “terrorist” civil defense centers. The
organization sent a message to U.S. officials in New
York for the U.N. General Assembly that they were being
targeted, Abdullah added. These dramatic stories helped
propel the White Helmets’ campaign for the Nobel Peace
Prize, which was announced days later but which they
ultimately did not win.
The
claim that the White Helmets had overheard pilots asking
for and receiving permission to hit targets while in the
air is a fabrication, according to Pierre Sprey, a
former Pentagon analyst on combat aircraft who played a
central role in designing the F-16. “It’s inconceivable
that this could have been an authentic communication
between an attack pilot and a controller,” Sprey told
AlterNet, referring to Selmo’s accounts. “The only time
a pilot might initiate a request to hit a target is if
he sees gunfire from it. Otherwise it makes no sense.”
The
day after the Russian and Syrian bombing campaign on
rebel-held eastern Aleppo began on September 22, Reuters
turned to Selmo for an overall assessment of the
bombing’s impact on Aleppo. Selmo bluntly
declared, “What’s happening now is annihilation.”
Following this dramatic statement, Western media
continued to cite Selmo as though he were a neutral
source. On September 26, Reuters went back to the White
Helmets working under him again,
citing an estimate by unnamed “civil defense
workers” in Aleppo -- which could only mean members of
the White Helmets -- that 400 people had already been
killed in less than five days of bombing in and around
Aleppo. But after three full weeks of bombing the United
Nations and other agencies
estimated that 360 people had been killed in the
bombing, suggesting that the White Helmets figure had
been was several times higher than could be documented
by non-partisan sources.
It is
obviously difficult for the news media to cover events
such as the attack on the Syrian Red Crescent aid convoy
and the bombing in Aleppo from Istanbul or Beirut. But
the hunger for information from the ground should not
outweigh the obligation to vet sources. Selmo and his
White Helmets should have been recognized for what they
are: a partisan source with an agenda reflecting the
power to which the organization is accountable: the
armed extremists who have controlled east Aleppo, Idlib,
and other areas of northern Syria.
The uncritical
reliance on claims by the White Helmets without any
effort to investigate their credibility is yet another
telling example of journalistic malpractice by media
outlets with a long record of skewing coverage of
conflicts toward an interventionist narrative.
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