The former school principal joined the White Helmets in 2022 as a medic, drawn to its humanitarian mission through a 12-year war that has carved Syria into cantons held by rival armed groups.
"When we remove someone alive, we forget all the pain and the fatigue and everything that is happening to us... Our goal is to save people from this destruction." They say they have lost hundreds of volunteers over the years - including four in the earthquake - but have rescued thousands of people, earning them praise in the West, which also provides a large part of their funding.Ismail Abdallah, head of the group's media center in Sarmada, Idlib, said even years of responding to aerial bombardments had not fully prepared them for the massive scale of the earthquake's damage.
The overwhelming scale of the disaster has been met with a trickle of help from the international community, who have donated money but sent little physical aid and none of the heavy equipment required to save lives in the week since the quake. Aid organisations have said they face security problems operating in the region, while the European Union's envoy to Syria said it was"absolutely unfair" to accuse the EU of failing to provide enough help.Stuck in the middle of the conflict, the White Helmets' members say they are neutral humanitarians. They say on their website that they receive funding from governments including the United States, France, Germany and Qatar.
"All of this made us put more effort into monitoring and following up and publishing ," Abdallah said at the Sarmada media center as a dozen people worked to download and publish images brought in from the field.
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