The White Helmets, the volunteer rescue organization in Syria, has not received any of their regular funding from the U.S. in recent weeks, putting their future activities in jeopardy, according to reporting by CBS News.
The group, formally known as Syrian Civil Defense, has saved tens of thousands of lives and has received widespread praise, including from Trump’s State Department. The volunteers were the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary in 2016. They are also a frequent target of conspiracy theorists and pro-Assad media outlets who accuse them of staging attacks and having links to terrorists.
President Trump froze more than $200 million for recovery efforts in Syria in March as part of his push to withdraw the U.S. from the conflict and “let the other people take care of it now.” At a donor’s conference in Brussels in late April, the U.S. pledged zero dollars for humanitarian efforts in the country.
The White Helmets say they have received no formal announcement that the U.S. has permanently cut off the aid, but according to CBS, “An internal State Department document said that its Near East Bureau needed confirmation from the administration to green light funding for the White Helmets in Syria by April 15th or the department would initiate ‘shut-down procedures on a rolling basis.’ ” The U.S. is not commenting publicly on which programs have been cut off. Others may include landmine removal and food aid.
The White Helmets say that U.S.
funding accounted for a third of their budget. It’s not clear how much that currently is, but a 2016 Newsweek article put their annual budget at $30 million, most of which is spent on heavy equipment for removing bodies from under collapsed buildings as well as $150 monthly stipends for volunteers.
The U.S. may not be willing to pay to help Syrians on the ground, but it will still shell out to bomb them. As of February 2018, the U.S. military had spent more than $18 billion on Operation Inherent Resolve, the military intervention targeting ISIS in Iraq and Syria—the majority of it on airstrikes. This operation has successfully decimated ISIS’s area of control but also killed thousands of civilians.
U.S. taxpayers spent an estimated $92.4 million just for the 66 Tomahawk missiles used in last month’s strike on Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons sites. (The full cost of the operation is unknown but significantly higher.) It was, in large part, the White Helmets who brought the chemical attack to the world’s attention, prompting that strike.
