In what should be the defining image of the 'jihadist coup' in Damascus, Germany's foreign Minister Annalina Baerbock shook hands with the White Helmets outside Saydnaya prison. While this handshake with a male member of the bogus 'civil defence' organisation was not actually shown in the DW news report below, it was clearly about to take place - unlike Baerbock's aborted offer to shake hands with the Takfiri chief Ahmed al Sharaa, which took place later in the morning. That failed handshake with Al Sharaa which left Baerbock to shake her own hand after Al Sharaa declined her invitation - as seen below, made news around the world, symbolising the contradiction between Sharaa's strict Islamist ideology and Baerbock's conflicted 'feminazism', of which more later. Below a frame from the famous non-handshake sequence, illustrating the awkwardness of this moment:
Rather than focus on the significance of this visit of Europe's two leading foreign ministers, and how the simple fact of their appearance in Damascus legitimised the un-elected and unrepresentative new 'government', questions over whether Baerbock was snubbed provided a convenient distraction for media commentators. There were however legitimate questions over her slightly intimidating cowgirl-style wardrobe choice, given the full black chador preferred for the women of Idlib. But we can forget the question of the Takfiri take-over and Jolani make-over for the moment, as it was Baerbock's earlier meeting with the White Helmets for a tour of Saydnaya prison that set the tone of her visit and of Germany's involvement in the new colonial enterprise of 'Greater Israel'. Unlike France, Qatar and Turkiye, Germany has had little obvious presence in Syria since the start of the war in 2011, and no apparent dealings with the White Helmets - who are chiefly a creation of the UK and a leading tool in their destabilisation and regime change operations in Syria. With this background, Baerbock's evident collaboration with the 'Oscar-winning' Helmets was quite surprising, and quite worrying, so it's worth transcribing what she says - as translated - at this presser, to follow below:
DW:
"This is where the ousted regime tortured, and murdered thousands of opponents. The prison has become a symbol of atrocities, committed during Assad's regime."
Annalina Baerbock:
"You simply can't imagine the horrors that happened in some places. But people have gone through hell here, near the Syrian capital Damascus. They were killed in ways that are unimaginable in a civilised world. That is why it is important that I was here today, together with the French Foreign Minister, and also on behalf of the European Union.
Here to thank groups like the White Helmets, who made it clear for years, that there could be no normalisation with the Assad regime, which was built on barbarism and torture."
DW:
"Baerbock says her visit signals the possibility of a new relationship between Syria and Europe."
As the second largest supplier of weapons to the Israeli State, and for the leading role Germany played in its creation and sponsorship before and after WW2, Baerbock is on thin ice talking about 'unimaginable horrors', when the civilised world has watched these nightmares of barbarism and torture take place in Gaza for the last fifteen months, committed by the West's chosen attack dog without restraint.
Need one spell them out - children chopped to pieces or burnt alive, killed by grenades dropped from quad-copters operated by some video-gamer in Tel Aviv, London or Berlin. Hospital staff stripped and blindfolded, carted away in the back of trucks to the torture hell-hole of Sde Teiman or Ofer prison, to be raped by dogs or soldiers, starved and beaten and turned into zombies by torture. 'Israel' has it all, ably assisted and enabled by its Western collaborators.
The Zionists' crimes have exceeded anything we have experienced in our lifetimes, even after the atrocities and abuses of twenty years of war on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria - atrocities all carried out by the invading and attacking forces and their proxy militias.
However - the war crimes and atrocities routinely carried out by the White Helmets and the terrorist groups for whom they provided propaganda cover come pretty high up the list, particularly if one includes the massive toll of the war as a whole. The role of the White Helmets in maintaining the Western campaign against Syria was crucial, including their active participation in some events, like the 'Sarin attack' on Khan Shaikoun of April 4th 2017, whose false propaganda led directly to a cruise missile attack on Syria ordered by the Trump administration.
The coordinated campaign to promote the White Helmets' false narratives about Syria and the Assad government is well illustrated by this report compiled by the Atlantic Council, with input from leading Western disinformation experts Eliot Higgins and Elizabeth Tsurkov. "Breaking Ghouta" leads with the illustration below, and focuses on alleged Russian and Syrian disinformation about the Khan Shaikoun and Douma false flag chemical attacks.
The report’s focus on RT as a propaganda outfit is significant, as the Russian news agency had offices and reporters in Syria and was able to gather information first hand from witnesses and military sources. One of RT’s greatest reports followed the Atlantic Council’s disinformation on Khan Shaikoun a year later, when Syrian and Russian militaries finally liberated the town from its thousands of terrorist occupiers, and found the caves where the White Helmets had staged the ‘Sarin attack’ videos, with solid evidence of their presence there, shown below.
Scenes from the - allegedly - desperate attempts by the White Helmets to save the victims of Sarin gas poisoning by hosing them with water were shown repeatedly to Western audiences at the time and for months afterwards, despite production faults that revealed the staging of the scene. Unlike some of the 'civil defence rescuers' previous productions, and 'child rescues' where child actors have been previously 'buried', only some of the 'Sarin victims' in Khan Shaikoun were faking it. Few noticed that the real victims - young children recently kidnapped from nearby villages in government-held territory - showed clear signs of carbon monoxide poisoning. The red-flushed cheeks and gasping of the boy seen in this short sequence are NOT symptoms of Sarin poisoning, which makes victims unable to breathe and turns their skin blue from lack of oxygen. These poor children are then subjected to violent undressing and hosing down by their torturers, who also take no precautions to protect themselves from - supposedly - the highly toxic nerve agent.
It was a year and a half after the 'Sarin' attack when RT visited and filmed inside the cave network from which the White Helmets and their takfiri partners had been operating. The site was built into a hillside west of the town, and the cave entrance could be seen in some of the videos released at the time. RT's video is in the article linked above, but I download it here for reference. The cave complex was blown up not long after its discovery, to prevent it being re-occupied. Note at the start of the report how Russian food aid packages are being delivered to the previously besieged town, symbolic of the steady progress northwards following the liberation of Damascus in May 2018.
One of the significant markers in Syria's return to peace and freedom, and relative safety from attacks on civilians in Government-secured areas was the extraction of the remaining White Helmets from Southern Syria. Following calls for these 'Volunteer rescuers' to be rescued themselves, a joint Israeli-Jordanian operation saw several hundred of the group's members bused across the border into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights before they were transferred to Jordan, and then took flights to the UK and Canada for a hero's welcome. I wrote about it at the time, in a style that suited the relative optimism in Syria, in "From Green Buses to Green Suits". I never conceived at that time five years ago that these 'social media influencers' would return, either to the heart of Syria in Damascus or to the centre of the West's disinformation and regime change operations. So much has been exposed about their true role and nature, and is known to all the governments and agencies who order and pay them, that one wonders how long such a fraud can persist? And so we may ask the question posed in my title - which one is the devil? Those who committed the 'unspeakable crimes', as detailed by Maxim Grigoriev in interviews with victims and witnesses and former White Helmets members? Or those in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Whitehall, Tel Aviv or Langley - or Berlin - who created and funded their regime change agents and ensured that their media organisations gave them the desired profile?
DM January 7th 2025