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Faced with violence, Ukraine is offered the help of the Syrian White Helmets, the latter having themselves fought against Russian troops in their country.
During the war in Syria, the White Helmets rescued thousands of people from the rubble of buildings bombed by Russian forces in rebel areas.
AFP
Armed with solid experience acquired during the war in their country where Russian forces intervened, Syrian opponents are mobilizing to help Ukrainians treat the wounded, help refugees or prepare for possible chemical attacks.
After the start of the war in Syria in 2011, sparked by pro-democracy protests, President Bashar al-Assad lost control of part of his country until Russian troops came to his rescue in 2015, to put him back in the saddle. On February 24, the Russian army invaded Ukraine, causing the death of hundreds of civilians and the flight of more than 10 million Ukrainians.
Syrian opponents, who like the Ukrainians expect Russian forces to be held to account for these devastating interventions, believe that a special “bond” has been forged with them. “Given our experience in Syria, we are probably among the best able to understand the pain of the Ukrainian people,” said AFP Raed al-Saleh, leader of the White Helmets, rescue workers engaged in Syrian rebel areas.
“Syrians have lived through the bombings, killings and displacements caused by Russian forces,” he explains. “Time and space have changed but the victims are the same, the civilians, and the assassin is the same, the Russian regime”
Yesterday Aleppo, today Mariupol
During the war in Syria, which claimed an estimated 500,000 lives, the White Helmets rescued thousands of people from the rubble of buildings bombed by Russian forces in rebel areas. The fate of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, besieged and devastated by the Russian army since the end of February, is not unlike that of Aleppo, Syria’s second city. In 2016, the rebel-held eastern neighborhoods were ravaged by Russian aerial bombardment during a long siege.
Faced with violence in Ukraine, a group of associations created the Syria-Ukraine Network (SUN) which helps Syrian doctors to go to Ukraine to treat the wounded, explains to AFP the coordinator, Olga Lautman, a Ukrainian. In addition, “we will cooperate with Syrian experts specializing in war crimes and chemical attacks,” she said. It came from a “desire of the Syrians to use their experience to help”, she says, speaking of the “bond” between the two peoples.
In the province of Idleb, one of the last regions to escape the control of the regime, doctors from the Academy of Health Sciences are training Ukrainian colleagues and nurses online, says its president Abdallah Abdelaziz Alhaji. Ukrainians especially want to know more about chemical attacks, he says. “They want to take advantage of our experience.” The White Helmets also make video tutorials to teach Ukrainians how to care for the wounded.
If for the moment there is no evidence of the use of Russian chemical weapons in Ukraine, the Syrian forces have several times been accused of having used them in Syria.
“We warned you”
For Charles Lister, of the Middle East Institute, Syrian activists “seek to ride the wave of anti-Russian sentiment to promote the cause (of the opposition) in Syria but also to stimulate new geopolitical relations with Ukraine”.
Observers have noted similarities in the tactics of Russian forces employed in Syria and Ukraine, such as targeting infrastructure, establishing so-called humanitarian corridors and emptying towns of their inhabitants.
The most important question for Syrian activists and Ukrainians remains whether Moscow and Damascus will be held accountable for their actions in these wars. “If Putin is held accountable for his crimes in Ukraine, that means he will be in Syria too. But if he gets away with it, then the next crime is just a matter of time,” Saleh said.
For analyst Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, “Syrians want to embrace the Ukrainian cause because it helps them draw international attention back to their own tragedy and tell Westerners, ‘We had you. warned but you preferred to look elsewhere.
(AFP)