My name is Gardenia.
Six years ago, I was a student in Damascus.
Today, I am a member of Syria civil defense
also known as the White Helmets.
The White Helmets is a volunteer organization
made up of community first responders
who have pledged to serve their community
inside Syria with neutrality, impartiality, and humanity.
Gardenia is not my real name,
and I’m sorry I can’t show you my face today.
White Helmets, their friends and families
are being targeted daily inside Syria by the Syrian regime,
so I wear this helmet for their protection.
The story of the White Helmets begins in March 2013,
two years into the Syrian uprising.
By that time, the Syrian regime
was conducting around 50 airstrikes a day against civilians, targets in Aleppo –
with heavy artillery and aerial attacks –
and in Daraa, Damascus, Damascus countryside,
Hama, Homs, and Idlib.
They were using barrel bombs to destroy marketplaces,
small businesses, hospitals, schools, and residential neighborhoods.
This is an example
of the kind of damage that a barrel bomb can cause.
It is difficult to convey the scale of this terror on the ground.
The localized effect of a barrel bomb
is the same as an earthquake measuring 8 on the Richter scale.
To give you an idea of what that means
the terrifying earthquakes in Italy in January this year
measured around 5.7,
so imagine that, 50 times a day.
Whole buildings would collapse,
the people living and working there would be crushed,
and any survivors would be trapped beneath the rubble
with no prospect of being rescued.
Families, neighbors, and civil society volunteers
would rush to help,
but without the necessary training and equipment to help those trapped,
they were helpless.
Hundreds of people were dying each day.
In 2013, the Syrian regime gave civilians a choice:
leave these areas or be killed.
For most of our communities, leaving was not an option,
but nor was waiting to be killed,
so in northern Aleppo,
a group of carpenters, bakers, builders, and taxi drivers
choose to take matters into their own hands.
After receiving
a week of training from an international NGO
and a small equipment pack,
they returned to the community and began to conduct rescue operations.
Two days later, they save a family of four from the rubble.
This was the beginning of the White Helmets.
Four years on, we are now over 3,200 trained community volunteers
working in 120 teams across Syria
in the areas outside the control of the regime.
We have saved the lives of 87,500 people …
(Applause)
Thank you.
We have saved the lives of 87,500 people,
and by this stage of the conflict,
have more experience in responding to bomb attacks and airstrikes
than any other organization in the world.
Our teams are trained in a wide range of different skills.
They include community warning and preparedness,
urban search and rescue, and firefighting,
emergency medical service, and other technical skills
such as marking and clearing explosive remnants of war.
Although our teams are initially set up to provide rescue services,
we quickly realized that our existing skills
together with the equipment and training we received
enabled us to do much more for our communities
than just rescuing them after an attack.
When we weren’t pulling people out of the rubble,
we could use our skills
to provide medical services, educate the community,
reconnecting electricity, water, and reopen roads, hospitals, and schools.
We use the equipment we received for doing many things,
we use our fire trucks to distribute drinking water
in areas of need,
and we used our rescue diggers to respond to floods and snow storms.
In some cases,
we have even been able to protect infrastructure.
For example, when the Syrian regime used incendiary cluster bombs
to destroy the harvest in Homs in 2016 to starve the population,
we stationed White Helmets teams around the fields
to put out the fires and protect the crops
which were a vital source of food for the people.
In short, the White Helmets have become the Swiss Army knife
for community service delivery in crisis.
We have seen how much can be achieved with how little;
that, when that investment
is made directly into the community for the benefit of the community.
The diversity in our backgrounds is critical to our success
and our shared training has provided us
with a common language as well as a flexible tool kit
for delivering the needs of the community as they evolve.
As a female member of the White Helmets,
I have experienced the diversity firsthand.
Women have been part of the organization since the beginning,
and we, too, are diverse.
In our ranks, we have mothers, teachers, students, accountants,
journalists, and many other professions.
Although we remain a minority in the organization,
our numbers are growing
helped by increasing the recognition and unique and valuable role
that female several defenders
can play in serving their own communities.
For example,
through community awareness campaigns and providing medical services,
we have enabled access
to otherwise close gender, and community, and cultural groups.
We offer a unique conduit
for humanitarian needs assessment, and engagement
far beyond Syrian civil defense, civil defense limits.
At first, women were an anomaly,
but over time, we were accepted by the whole communities.
We are no longer the hidden victims of the war.
We are respected and honored
for serving our communities, for saving lives,
and for giving hope to those in despair.
Where are we now?
Our core mission
is to save lives and deliver essential services,
but the work of the White Helmets
has an impact far beyond the communities we serve.
We established ambulance networks
which support local clinics and international organizations
including Médecins Sans Frontières and other NGOs.
White Helmets have facilitated the delivery of humanitarian aid
and have conducted emergency repairs in ceasefire areas
enabling the return of displaced families.
We are the main organization clearing unexploded munitions inside Syria.
We provide daily cessation of hostilities
to the Office of the UN Special Envoy.
We document chemical weapons,
cluster bombs, and other banned weapons
which are reported by Human Rights Watch and others.
One hundred and sixty five of our volunteers have been killed,
and over 480 have suffered life-changing injuries.
Our work has frequently referred to
as the most dangerous job in the world, in this state,
in a war that has claimed
the lives of 450,000 civilians
with over 50% of families displaced.
Our greatest contribution
has not been to save 87,500 lives
but to give hope where previously there was none.
Hope, by its nature, looks forward.
We hoped and imagined that the conflict would end sooner,
and we would lay down our tools and return to our normal lives.
Today, we know
that what it has happened to our country will not be undone,
and for most of our volunteers, there are no homes to return to.
Our vision now
is that what we have rebuilt in the past four years
will play an essential role
in the reconstruction, recovery, and the reconciliation of our country.
We hope that the teams that are today using their tools
to break through the rubble, searching for survivors,
will, in the future, use those same tools
to rebuild houses, roads, and local community infrastructure.
One day, fighting will end.
When that happens,
the greatest challenge
is not to rebuild roads between communities
but to rebuild trust between them.
Trust has been destroyed inside Syria,
trust in the government who claimed
it had a responsibility to protect its civilians,
trust and the desire or ability in the international community
to take an action on their behalf,
and trust in our fellow Syrians to behave towards one another with humanity.
We owe our success to date
to the trust placed in us
by the desperate communities we serve.
This trust has been earned by our actions
through the legitimacy, and representativeness,
through the credibility of our members,
and the humanitarian values they embody,
and through the clear mission of the organization:
save lives and serve the community.
In the same way, White Helmets have brought hope in hopelessness.
Our vision is to help restore trust where there is none.
Every single one of us has taken an oath to save lives
regardless of political, religious, or sectarian affiliation.
We have rescued combatants from all sides
including regime soldiers, Russian soldiers, Hezbollah,
opposition fighters, and even ISIS.
The devastation of war does not distinguish between its victims,
so peace should not distinguish between its beneficiaries.
The future needs more White Helmets, ordinary people like us,
who, with the training, can volunteer to rebuild the fabric of our society.
I look around at who these people will be;
most of them were children when this war started.
At the time, they used to play soldiers;
today, they play White Helmets.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Cheers)
(Applause)
”
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