How Syria's White Helmets earned a nod from Netflix and the Nobel Peace Prize

When the White Helmets were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this month, it provided a glimmer of hope in the unrelentingly brutal conflict in Syria. As part of the Syrian Civil Defence, this group of 3,000 ordinary civilians with no military training have become heroes, braving bomb-struck war zones to rescue the victims of attacks.

Orlando von Einsiedel, who has made a documentary about them called The White Helmets, says: “Their work cuts through politics. They’re people like you and me — teachers, shopworkers — who found themselves in an extraordinary situation and decided not to pick up a gun and not to flee Syria but to go out and save strangers. The focus is on stopping the bombs, it doesn’t matter who they are from, it just matters that they are falling every day in civilian areas.”

They lost out on the Nobel to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, for his efforts to negotiate peace with the Farc guerillas. As the announcement was made, a White Helmets training centre in Hama was bombed. They tweeted: “Back to work.”

They were “gutted” to miss out on the prize, says Einsiedel, who is 36 and lives in south London. He’s currently in the US with Raed al-Saleh, leader of the White Helmets and a former electrical goods salesman, showing the film to UN ambassadors and policy-makers. They woke up early to watch the Nobel ceremony. But despite not winning, the nomination meant a lot to them, says Einsiedel: “They’ve been working under the radar — this shows the world isn’t ignoring them.”

Einsiedel found out about the White Helmets in 2014, when his partner showed him a video of a baby being pulled out of the rubble of a three-story building. “His house was hit by a barrel bomb and he was trapped under rubble for 16 hours. What I found most striking was who was doing the rescuing.”

The documentary shows footage from the five weeks that Einsiedel and his team spent with them on a training course in southern Turkey, interspersed with scenes from Syria that the White Helmets filmed themselves. Lots of it comes from a boy called Khaled Khatib. “He was 17 when the war started. He began filming it on his phone and a lot of the most striking images are his. One of the most heartbreaking things is that so many of the group are young and have spent a significant percentage of their lives in conflict.”

Einsiedel was “taken aback at the physical and psychological violence in Syria”. “At the end of a day spent dodging bombs, when these men get to a wi-fi zone their phones start to vibrate. Almost every day there was a message saying someone had been killed.

“One of the most emotional moments of my career was when they went back into Syria at the end of training in Turkey knowing what they were going back to. They could have stayed in Turkey but every single one of them chose to go back. We had to ask ourselves, if war came to London would we have it in us to do what they do? I don’t know if I could.”

Syria can be “difficult to engage with”, and solutions often feel intangible but, Einsiedel says, “The White Helmets are a contrast from aerial views of bombing.