AP, New York :
Thousands of miles from his ravaged homeland in the comfort and security of midtown Manhattan, Raed Saleh chokes up as he recalls some of the horrors he has witnessed as a rescue worker in northern Syria.
“Two Americans and one Brit were killed, and the entire world mobilized to fight Daesh,” he said, referring to the Islamic State group by its Arabic acronym. “In Syria, some 200,000 people have died: Why doesn’t anyone care?”
From New York, Saleh says he has been in touch with colleagues in Syria over the phone and Internet since airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition began Tuesday. “We were rescuing people from Syrian regime strikes. Today we are rescuing people from coalition strikes,” he said. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory of Human Rights reports that at least 13 civilians have died so far in coalition strikes, while the Pentagon said Friday it had not received any reports of civilian casualties from coalition airstrikes.
Saleh is a member of the Syrian Civil Defense force, a group of volunteers in northern Syria known as the White Helmets who risk their lives saving others in one of the most dangerous countries on Earth. From Idlib province, he traveled to the U.S. this week as part of a campaign to raise awareness for the group’s work on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meetings. In a crumbling nation where public services such as hospitals barely exist and sectarian hatreds abound, the work undertaken by the young, unarmed volunteers of different backgrounds is inspiring.
In amateur videos posted by activists online, the men are seen with their signature white hats and beige uniforms searching through the rubble of collapsed buildings for survivors, leading away bloodied victims and in several cases pulling out toddlers alive from under heaps of shattered concrete blocks.
The rescuers mostly deal with the aftermath of government air attacks. But they also respond to deadly car bombings, shelling and sniper fire in a tough, broken terrain. Syria’s civil war, now in its fourth year, has killed more than 190,000 people and displaced millions of others, according to the U.N. Hundreds of thousands have been wounded.
Among the prime killers are barrel bombs – makeshift, shrapnel-packed explosive devices that Syrian forces have been dropping on rebel-held neighborhoods from helicopters. Residents call them “barrels of death.”
