Week seven

White Helmets

As the war worsens, rescue workers risk their lives on the front linesBY JARED MALSIN / GAZIANTEP, TURKEY | PHOTOGRAPHS BY MOHAMMED BADRA

In Syria, it’s been all too easy to lose the plot. Things began simply enough, another promising bud in the Arab Spring—­ordinary citizens marching peacefully against a Middle Eastern despot.
It was a heart-­lifting display, maybe a bit tardy after the movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and Libya, but you certainly knew whom to cheer for. The good guys were in plain sight, chanting “Freedom” and “Peace” from orderly rows. Until the government forces opened fire.

But as the crowds scattered for cover and, before long, took up arms themselves, what steadily enveloped the conflict was not so much the fog of war as its miasma. Opposition to the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad shattered into more than 1,000 armed groups. The most successful gathered under the banner of jihadism, either al-Qaeda or eventually ISIS, its even more repugnant spin-off. There’s nothing to like there. Then the neighbors started in, sending guns or money or troops—Iran, Russia, Hizballah, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and finally the U.S.

All wars produce ­confusion—for chaos, nothing else comes close—but even the most brutal contests produce a glimmer of hope, or at least some sense of what is driving people to put their lives on the line. Yet to outsiders, 5½ years of revolution and war in Syria might appear to have produced mostly villains, along with refugees and numbing images of suffering on a blasted landscape that recalls Stalingrad.

Enter the White Helmets. Ordinary Syrians emerged from the dust that hangs over the rubble of cities like Aleppo, double-­timing it into some of the most dangerous places on earth to do what the world has refused to do—save Syrian lives.
In a war that seemed to have no one to pull for, here was Khaled Omar retrieving a 10-day-old baby from the boulders that had been his mother’s home, still alive after hours beneath the rubble. (Omar would live only another year; he was killed by a mortar this August.)

Here was an unnamed rescuer setting Omran Daqneesh into the bright orange seat in the back of an ambulance, encased in powdery grit and shock after yet another an airstrike. And here, safe and sound in New York City, was Raed Saleh, head of the White Helmets, working the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly but eager to return to the place where over 140 of his colleagues have perished saving what they estimate to be 60,000 of their neighbors. “At the end of the day, this is my country,” he says.

The White Helmets work across the shattered interior of Syria, wherever Assad’s aircraft roll out barrel bombs or Russian fighters direct their missiles. But more and more, that work is in Aleppo. The country’s largest city, it is where the forces of Assad and his allies are ramping up for a possibly titanic assault. As many as 300,000 people are living under siege in the city’s eastern section, which the rebels have held since the early days of the war, but are now cut off from the countryside beyond.

http://time.com/syria-white-helmets/

KEYWORD

1. bud-萌芽，未成熟的事物
2. scatter-使消散；使分散；使潰散
3. steadily-穩固地；平穩地
4. regime-政體；政權；統治（方式）
5. brutal-殘忍的，冷酷的；野蠻的；粗暴的
6. repugnant-厭惡的；反感的
7. retrieve-重新得到，收回
8. rubble-粗石；碎石；瓦礫堆
9. mortar-研缽，乳缽；臼研機
10. missiles-飛彈，導彈