DAMASCUS, Syria — When a dozen firefighters showed up within minutes to douse a mattress that accidentally caught fire on the roof of his apartment building, Mohamed Bassem Said was gobsmacked.
Said, 65, lived most of his life under Assad family rule. Father-and-son dictators had portrayed themselves as the sole providers of safety and services to Syrians. But they were corrupt, and so were many of the first responders working for them, Said says. It got worse when civil war broke out in 2011.
"Whenever you needed to call someone from the state, for sanitation issues, plumbing or electricity — let alone violence during the war — they'd always take bribes," he says. "But these new guys don't ask for anything! It's 100 times better."
The new firefighters who responded to Said's building on March 30, putting out the flames before anyone was injured, wore gold and navy uniforms — and signature white helmets. They're Syria's most famous first responders.
Founded in 2013, the White Helmets began as volunteers based mostly in rebel-held areas, and gained international fame for running into harm's way to rescue civilians. They've been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize many times. A documentary about them won a 2017 Oscar.
Now, with Syria's civil war over, the White Helmets are taking on a new challenge: Their founder, Raed Saleh, has been appointed to Syria's Cabinet as minister of emergencies and disaster management, and the force he started 12 years ago is expanding its services — for the first time — to the entire country.
Into the halls of power where they were vilified
Syria's former president, Bashar al-Assad, didn't trust the White Helmets.
He associated them with the rebels trying to oust him, and he plastered Damascus with billboards vilifying the White Helmets as traitors and terrorists. Assad and his ally Russia spread conspiracy theories about these famous first responders — who mostly stayed out of the capital.
But with Assad's ouster on Dec. 8, a convoy of White Helmets rolled south from Syria's rebel-held northwest, into the heart of the capital.
"I felt joy, grief and shock all jumbled together," recalls Amer Zarifeh, 32, a member of the rescue group who grew up in Damascus but hadn't been home since 2018.
Now Zarifeh lives in a Damascus firehouse where the White Helmets have set up new headquarters.
Quadrupling their workload
In the opposition-held northwest, the White Helmets served about 5 million people. Now they're stretching their resources to eventually meet the needs of more than 20 million Syrians. And they're doing this at a time when their budget has been cut.
The United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, used to be the White Helmets' biggest funder. But the Trump administration has canceled millions of dollars in funds for the Syrian organization as it dismantles USAID and slashes foreign assistance.
Even with the war over, their workload has grown, with an average of 15,000 missions per month, says Farouq Habib, the White Helmets' deputy leader.
"Most of our country is destroyed. Half of our people lost their homes and they are displaced, either internally or they became refugees outside Syria," he says. "Now, our main mission is to deal with the legacy of the war — to help find missing people, and deal with mass graves and cluster munitions."
As the country's main civil defense group, the White Helmets are also fighting fires and repairing roads, water pipes and other infrastructure.
But their conflict-related work isn't over: They've also deployed in recent months to help victims of Israeli air and artillery attacks across Syria, and to victims of sectarian attacks on Syria's coast.
They started as butchers, bankers and shopkeepers
During the war, the White Helmets had about 3,000 members. Now they have 3,300 and counting, Habib says. They began as volunteers, but now get salaries. The average public sector salary in Syria is currently around $70 a month; the White Helmets NPR interviewed said they earn at least double that.
They're recruiting even from the ranks of former Assad regime firefighters. NPR visited two firehouses in Damascus where people who served on opposite sides of the civil war are now working together. At least one former regime firefighter was working for free.
Some are career first responders, but many more are former shopkeepers, teachers and gas station attendants.
"I was a regional manager at a private bank in Syria," Habib says. "When the revolution started, some people carried guns, some people left, and some people volunteered."
Some White Helmets were rescued by the group before joining
Before the war, Mustafa Bakkar raised chickens and worked at his family's butcher shop in Douma, northeast of Damascus. Ten years ago, the war came to his street.
"There were lots of cluster munitions, and shrapnel. I was hit in the stomach," Bakkar, now 38, recalls. "I had never heard of the White Helmets. They didn't even have ambulances back then. They drove these little microvans, with first aid kits in the back."
When Bakkar found himself in the back of one of those little vans, bleeding and being ferried to safety, he made a promise to himself: If he survived, he would join them. Ten years later, he's an operations chief in Damascus.
"I felt like, what kind of people are these, to come and save a person dying on the floor?" Bakkar recalls. "And I thought, if I could do something like that, how beautiful it would be to provide such a service."
The White Helmets have lost more than 300 members since 2013, and the group alleges more than half of those were killed in targeted strikes by Assad's forces and his Russian allies.
The White Helmets get a glimpse of what peacetime could be like
As Bakkar describes the trauma of the past decade — of war, atrocities and paying it forward, saving other people — his phone buzzes with an emergency call.
It's a woman frantic for help from the White Helmets. She sounds desperate.
Her cat, Tabboush, is stuck in a tree. (His name means "fatso" in Arabic.)
Bakkar and his colleagues chuckle. God willing, all emergencies should be like this one, they say. But as in any crisis, they rush out to help.
"Part of our work is psychological support for the public," Bakkar explains, as he suits up and runs down to the firetrucks. "This whole country has PTSD."
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