Syria’s band of brothers

Two months ago, a photo of 4-year-old Omran Daqneesh, dust covered and bleeding in the back of an ambulance in Aleppo, conjured a burst of sympathy from the West for the victims of the Syrian civil war. Since then, Russia and the Syrian regime have increased their air war on opposition-controlled areas of Aleppo, creating new Omrans every day.

Just this morning, rescuers in Aleppo sent out a photo of a school-aged boy in denim shorts. He dangled from the side of a building, his legs trapped under a pile of broken concrete and twisted rebar. The airstrike on his neighborhood killed 13 people, including children.

Many such photos come from the rescue group Syrian Civil Defense, also known as the White Helmets, whose members race to the scene of bombings in Aleppo to try to save as many people as they can. The nonpartisan force of 2,900 volunteers responds to air strikes in 120 locations around Syria. They are teachers, tailors, bakers, and even former militants who laid down their arms to alleviate the suffering of their fellow Syrians as the country’s civil and medical infrastructure crumbled during years of civil war and Islamic State (ISIS) attacks.

Mohamed Farah, one of the subjects of the recently released Netflix documentary The White Helmets, joined the group after fighting with the opposition side of the civil war for three months.

“It is better to do humanitarian work than to be armed. Better to rescue a soul than to take one,” Farah says in the film.

Director Orlando von Einsiedel and producer Joanna Natasegara filmed a group of White Helmets from Aleppo as they trained at a site on the Turkish side of the Syrian border. Beyond the training scenes and interviews, the documentary features footage taken by the White Helmets themselves as they responded to bombings.

“We could only show a tiny percentage of the horror these people witness, without making the whole film completely unwatchable,” von Eisiedel and Natasegara wrote on IndieWire.

By showing the devastation in Aleppo through the eyes of the White Helmets, the documentary reveals how love for neighbors can endure even in the most inhumane conditions. In one scene, a White Helmet pulls a 1-week-old baby from a collapsed room through a hole the size of a loaf of bread. He bursts into tears as he cradles the crying but otherwise unharmed baby. Khaled Omar Harrah, who saved the baby, died in an airstrike in August.

“I’m willing to sacrifice my soul for the sake of the people,” Farah, the former fighter, says at the end of the documentary. “This job is sacred.”

Most of the bombs to which the White Helmets respond are dropped by Russian planes in alliance with the Syrian government. Moscow and Damascus have accused the White Helmets of being allied with terror groups. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad dismissed the group’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, which it didn’t win.

“What did they achieve in Syria?” he asked during an interview with the Associated Press.

The White Helmets claim to have helped victims after ISIS car bombings and say they would respond to attacks in regime-controlled areas of Syria if the government would let them. More than 140 White Helmets have died in the war, and airstrikes targeted three of the group’s operation centers in September.

The United States and its Western allies have issued verbal condemnations of Syria’s campaign of annihilation in Aleppo, and the United Nations has bemoaned how the government blocks aid from getting to the city. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry earlier this month called for a war crimes investigation into Russian and Syrian actions in the civil war. Diplomatic efforts to broker a truce between Assad and his opponents have failed numerous times.

Britain and the United States threatened over the weekend to level economic sanctions against Russia and Syria, a move that generated a meager response. Syria announced this morning it would observe a “humanitarian pause” to fighting in Aleppo this Thursday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. to allow civilians to evacuate the city.