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SECRETARY-GENERAL BAN KI-MOON: This morning, we awoke to reports of strikes on two more hospitals in Aleppo. Let us be clear: Those using ever more destructive weapons know exactly what they are doing. They know they are committing war crimes. Imagine the destruction, people with their limbs blown-blown off, children in a terrible pain with no relief, infected, suffering, dying, with nowhere to go and no end in sight. Imagine a slaughterhouse. This is worse. Even a slaughterhouse is more humane. Hospitals, clinics, ambulances and medical staff in Aleppo are under attack around the clock. According to Physicians for Human Rights, 95 percent of medical personnel who were in Aleppo before the war have fled, been detained or killed. This is a war against Syria's health workers.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch has accused Syrian government forces of using toxic chemicals in two recent attacks in Aleppo that killed five civilians and injured dozens. The group also said new information has emerged indicating the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or Daesh, has recently used chemicals as a weapon inside Syria.

On Wednesday, President Obama addressed the crisis in Syria during a town hall meeting on CNN.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The key in Syria at this point is, unless we can get the parties involved to recognize that they are just burning their country to the ground, and get it on a diplomatic and political track, frankly, there's going to be a limit to what we can do. We will try to mitigate the pain and suffering that those folks are undergoing. This is part of the reason why our approach to refugees, for example, has to be open-hearted-although also hardheaded to protect our homeland. But at the end of the day, there are going to be challenges around the world that happen that don't directly touch on our security, where we need to help, we need to help lead, but just sending in more troops is not going to be the answer.

Good morning. Actually, you know that all the cameras and all the media is now fixing on Aleppo, this city that are being attacked by the Russian airstrikes and the regime, the Syrian regime forces, and that maybe the American people and all-maybe most the West know nothing about our cause. They only know that there is, you know, ISIS, and there is people who are fighting for some reason or for no reason. You know that the regime has blacked out all the independent media in here, and he is only the only media who are allowed to go there and there.

Actually, people are really upset about what Mr. Obama said, what Mr. Obama does, actually, every now and then. The U.S. administration did nothing for to stop this ongoing slaughter in Syria. And it became really complicated, year after year, and even day after day. You know that a couple of-you know, today is the first anniversary of the Russian intervention in Syria. So, this means that one year ago, if the U.S. did something about Syria, they had nothing to-I mean, they were not obliged to do these marathon negotiations with the Russians. Two years ago, there were no, for example, bombing in the European country and in other places rather than Syria and Iraq. Three years ago, there were even no ISIS. Four years ago, there was no-there was no Jabhat al-Nusra. Five years ago, there were only people who are seeking freedom and dignity and demonstrating very peacefully in the street. So the more you delay or the more the U.S. and the international community are late to do something to stop this ongoing massacre in Syria, the more it's become-

I think the main reason for the collapse of the ceasefire is, initially, the deal between the U.S. and Russia was not political. It was really only focusing on the military aspect of the conflict. And for the Russians, what was essential and important was basically maintaining the Syrian regime and making sure that the boundaries between the jihadist groups and the moderate military groups are blurred, and pushing most of the moderate groups into an alliance with al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups. For the-for the U.S., the goal of that deal was basically to collaborate and coordinate the strikes against ISIS. And in the end, the Syrian opposition or the Syrian population didn't get anything, and the deal was basically offering to the Russian that they could maintain the Syrian despot.

So, there was total refusal and rejection of the deal by the Syrian population for obvious reasons, and it was basically reducing their revolution into a humanitarian conflict that would basically lead to opening a few corridors here and there and that some of the aid would reach the besieged areas in Aleppo and so on. But in the end, it was really benefiting the Syrian regime, not any of the opposition. And despite that-

STAFFAN DE MISTURA: Who do you think would not agree, would not agree with the fact that the Syrian air force needs to be grounded? Well, obviously, President Assad is clearly not happy about it; otherwise, he would have been not able to do what he's been claiming publicly to do, in Darayya and elsewhere, to reconquer the whole Syria territory. And to do so, he needs the air force.

On the other side, put yourself in the place of the armed opposition and their sponsors. Do they really find it easy for them, or do they like the idea of disconnecting from al-Nusra, which, in their view, has been one of the biggest fighters against Assad, but at the same time everybody recognizes, including U.N., is al-Qaeda, regardless whether they change their name? Then you would have an answer: who has no, at the moment, keen interest in making the deal working.

[inaudible] the level and the scale of the violence against the Syrian population in Syria is basically due-it's because of the monumental resilience and resistance of the Syrian population. We have to remember that the Syrian revolution has been going for five years, and it has many, many enemies, including the U.S. and Russia and Iran and Hezbollah and Turkey and Saudi Arabia and so on and so forth. And all these different forces, for different reasons, are trying to crush the Syrian revolution. The Syrian regime has been, since the beginning, trying to crush the secular and the progressive dimension of the revolution, and pushed the jihadists and empowered them and released them from prison, and they have become what they are today. And the Russian also are trying to basically break that kind of difference or differentiation between the moderate and the secular, to a certain extent, and the jihadist groups. And by using that type of violence and massacring the population, slaughtering people in Aleppo, it's pushing the moderate groups and al-Qaeda to basically form an alliance, and, as such, pushing the West to basically choose the lesser evil, and that lesser evil being the Syrian regime as opposed to al-Qaeda and ISIS.

And even the U.N. played a very detrimental role in the Syrian conflict. I mean, the reports that show how the U.N. has been helping and dropping aid to the besieged city of Deir ez-Zor, which is under the control of the Syrian regime, but never dropping aid to any of the areas controlled by the opposition, or some of the funding that reached the Syrian military that was sent by the U.N. and so on. So the role of the U.N. is really detrimental. De Mistura is basically and clearly biased toward the Syrian regime.

PRESIDENT BASHAR AL-ASSAD: If there's really besiege-or siege around the city of Aleppo, people would have been dead by now. This is the second-more importantly, they have been shelling the neighboring areas and the position of the Syrian army for years, nonstop, nonstop shelling of mortars and different kind of little bombs. How could they be starving while at the same time they can have armament? How can we prevent the foods and the medical aid from reaching that area, and we cannot stop the armament from reaching that area? ...

They accuse Syria of attacking hospitals. So you have hospitals, and you have doctors, and you have everything. How could you have them? How could you have armament? That's the question. How can you get armament to your people, if you claim that you have people in the grassroots, while you don't have food? They have to explain. I don't have to explain. The reality is telling.

So, the Syrian regime, very early, understood the importance of the media and creating a discourse, in addition to what's happening on the ground, the military aspect of the conflict. And it was able, unfortunately, to create a parallel reality and create a media apparatus and information, propaganda, that is relayed by a number of different network, including RT, the Russian TV, but also a number of different websites and news outlets here in the U.S.-for example, Mint media and CounterPunch and others, who are basically repeating such silly things. I mean, anyone can verify and see that there is a siege around Aleppo. It's not very difficult to do. If journalists wanted really to talk to people on the ground and interview them and get their views, it would be very easy. But the Syrian regime basically understands that and is using the media and that type of discourse as a weapon against the revolution, basically trying to confuse the different audiences and telling them that there are different truths, there are biases, we're not sure-basically, creating confusion and challenging what's happening on the ground.

Well, today, The Intercept obtained-yesterday, obtained internal U.N. emails that revealed also that U.S. and European sanctions are having an extremely detrimental effect on ordinary Syrians and making access to aid supplies more difficult. Yasser Munif, could you respond to that?

I also wanted to mention that, as your previous guest mentioned earlier, that today we are witnessing or celebrating the first anniversary of the Russian intervention. And we are organizing a number of revolts in more than 30 different cities around the world on October 1st to basically raise awareness and tell people what's happening. There will be revolts, protests, rallies, sit-ins, to basically try to break the siege around the Syrian revolution and tell people that the narrative that they're hearing about the civilian war and the intervention and so on are a part what is happening. The other part is the resilience of the Syrian population, its resistance, and the ongoing Syrian revolution with its creative dimension and what people are doing within different-in many a different ways.

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Worse Than a Slaughterhouse: 250,000 Trapped in East Aleppo Amid Devastating Bombing Campaign

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The Obama administration is threatening to cut off diplomatic talks with Russia on Syria in the wake of a devastating bombing campaign by the Syrian government and Russia in the city of Aleppo. On Wednesday, the two largest hospitals in East Aleppo were forced to close after being hit by airstrikes.

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SYRIAN MAN: [translated] Oh, God! Oh, God! God, please help us! Oh, God! Oh, God! You are seeing our situation!

SYRIAN GIRL 1: [translated] I want my mother. Take me to my mother.

SYRIAN GIRL 2: [translated] The plane hit us. I do not want to go to the school.

STEPHEN O'BRIEN: Each month, I have come before you and presented an ever-worsening record of destruction and atrocity, grimly cataloguing the systematic destruction of a country and its people. While my job is to relay to you the facts, I cannot help but be incandescent with rage. Month after month, worse and worse, and nothing is actually happening to stop the war, stop the suffering.

SAMANTHA POWER: What is so remarkable and troubling about the presentation we've heard today is that what Russia really wants from the U.N. is credit. Congratulations, Russia, you've stopped, for a couple days, from using incendiary weapons. Thank you for not using cluster bombs in civilian areas. Thank you for staying the hand of brutality with regard to bunker buster weapons. You don't get congratulations and get credit for not committing war crimes for a day or a week.

Meanwhile, Syria continues to dominate foreign policy discussions in the presidential race. Donald Trump warned in an interview Tuesday that Hillary Clinton's policy on Syria could lead to World War III.

Well, she has no plan for Syria. And, look, with her you'll end up in World War III. She doesn't know what she's doing, just like with Libya, just like with everything else she's done. So, Syria now is no longer Syria. Syria is Russia and the new Iran, that we built through the Iran deal, which is the worst-one of the worst negotiated deals I've ever seen.

NATO is seeking to station more troops in eastern Europe in what's been described as the biggest military buildup on Russia's borders since the Cold War. As part of a U.S.-backed plan, NATO is planning to send battle groups to Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, with forces ranging from armored infantry to drones. As tension mounts between Russia and the U.S. over the crisis in Syria, National Intelligence Director James Clapper said Tuesday he fears Russia could shoot down a U.S. aircraft if a no-fly zone were to be imposed over Syria.

Well, our next guest says that two mutually exclusive, competing narratives are dominating discussions around Syria-and neither is sufficient to understand what's happening in the country. In a new article in The Nation headlined "The Debate over Syria Has Reached a Dead End," Bassam Haddad writes, quote, "There has been increasing gravitation toward two mutually exclusive narratives: (a) that of 'pure and consistent revolution,' and (b) that of 'external conspiracy.' Both narratives carry grains of truth, but both are encumbered by maximalist claims and fundamental blind spots that forfeit any common ground necessary for enduring cease-fires or potential transitions, as well as post-war reconciliation," he writes. Bassam Haddad is the director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies program at George Mason University and is director of the Arab Studies Institute.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! So, why don't you lay out what these competing narratives are and why you call this a dead end at this point?

I simply was trying to-tried to establish some sort of accountability on behalf of the people that push certain arguments or narratives on both of these sort of dominant sides. What I call the "pure revolution" narrative is, of course, some sort of a shortcut to a much more complex position. Both of these depictions are. But in all cases, it represents a view that assumes that, from the very beginning of the uprising or revolution, the same values that actually existed at the time have been sustained throughout the last five-and-a-half years by the rebels and so on, whereas, in reality, the actual uprising has been transformed into what we are seeing today, to avoid the nomenclature of what is exactly happening today in terms of giving it a name. And that also reveals another shortcoming regarding the actual, of course, external intervention on behalf of the opposition that has short-circuited the opposition, that has rendered it less unified, less transparent, less inclusive and, most detrimentally, less independent. They also have a problem, the proponents of a pure revolution narrative, in trying to disentangle the good rebels from the bad rebels, if you will, or the jihadists from the nationalists within the rebel groups, but it is extremely difficult to disentangle these two, as it is extremely difficult to disentangle Syria today from the problems that we are witnessing in the region.

On the other side, we also see a dominant narrative-and, of course, there are many other narratives, but these are the ones that you are always confronted with when you talk to anybody about Syria, whether it's a family member, a policy analyst or a friend. The other narrative focuses on a conspiracy excessively, focuses on external designs on Syria excessively, as if there is no reason for Syrians to actually rise up on their own and basically struggle for ending a four-decade repressive regime, not just politically, but also economically. And it does this at the expense of Syrians, because it sees external imperialist forces, which do exist and have actually wreaked havoc in the region to the n th degree, but it only sees those forces, and internally it sees, for the most part, jihadists. And what disappears in this narrative are ordinary Syrians that are actually opposed to both. Syrians, in this narrative, become invisible.

And if you try to hold a position that rejects this sort of pure revolution narrative, which is unrealistic and difficult to accept when you are looking at what's happening on the ground, or when you try to reject the conspiracy or external designs narratives, you are basically accused of being either a traitor to the nation or an imperialist or even a jihadist. And you're not allowed to oppose the regime, for instance, from a perspective that is different from that of the opposition. And you're not allowed to be in the opposition to the regime without being labeled a pro-West, pro-U.S., pro-imperialist speaker or advocate. And that puts us in a situation that prevents the development of a middle ground that-as cliché as it sounds, that puts Syria first, over and above all these designs.

What is at stake here is not what is happening now, because the regime, as we see it today and as we saw it in the past several decades, is not going to be part of Syria's future, no matter how much everyone insists on that side that it will be. It's actually, for the most part, a bargaining chip to use during negotiations to increase the leverage of that side of the argument. What might stay with us, however, is the new configurations that you are witnessing developing in Syria, including various groups that are externally supported and funded. These kinds of movements, in my view, will stay with us for the long haul, and this is why there's a lot of controversy about what should not be controversial, which is a democratic uprising against a dictatorship. But things have become so complex that to actually rid the real world of this complexity and just focus on the ideals is actually counterproductive for the purposes of an uprising itself.

Bassam Haddad, there's so much to discuss. We're going to break and then come back to this, director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies program at George Mason University. This is Democracy Now! We'll be back in a minute.

[break]

"Ya Haif (O, Shame)" by Samih Shuqair, here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

We continue our look at Syria. In a Guardian opinion piece published earlier this month, Russia's ambassador to the U.K. said that his country is fighting ISIS, who, quote, "brought the conflict to a new degree of barbarity and cruelty unseen since the days of Nazi Germany. Massacres, public tortures and executions, and a slave trade on an industrial scale were a daily reality in the areas held by Isis." He goes on to say, quote, "Those who fight in eastern Aleppo shamelessly use civilians as a human shield, block their passage to safety through established humanitarian corridors, and hamper the delivery of humanitarian aid."

Our guest is Bassam Haddad, director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies at George Mason University, co-founder of Jadaliyya and director of the Arab Studies Institute. His recent piece in The Nation is headlined "The Debate over Syria Has Reached a Dead End." He's also author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience. Nermeen?

The brutality that we have seen by the regime is not something new. It is not something that can be explained by addressing international intervention only. It is a manifestation of how the regime operates when it's under threat. And it's not just the identity of the opposition that makes the regime act this way. The regime would act this way when faced with any threat. It could be Mother Teresa or a Marxist movement; it would react in the same manner. What complicates the situation and what makes this a difficult, intractable context is the identity of the supporters of the uprising and the revolution, which includes conservative, oil-rich countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and their external allies, including the United States and as well as Turkey early on, which helped actually bring in thousands of external fighters. The identity of these players, of these supporters, has turned this into a conflict that is much larger than Syria. It became a conflict that is much more than just about Syria. And if we don't realize this development and the implications of this development, we will be-if we don't have this diagnosis, in my view, we will be suggesting solutions that actually do not work. They might be even counterproductive.

We all, I think, have a duty, moral, political and intellectual, to call for the end of the killing. The manner in which we call for this, however, actually matters, because some of these calls are not going to be heeded. A lot of calls, for instance, address the United States as if the advocates of democracy and independence for Syria have the same interests as the United States, and they do not. The history of the United States' involvement in the region shows otherwise. So, it is not about calling or not calling for the end of the killing. That is not an issue. The end of the killing and the end of the massacres and the end of the atrocities, committed mostly by the regime, at this point, and the Russians, especially at this point, I should say, is a no-brainer. There is no individual that will actually say, "No, let us go on," unless they are firmly on the regime's side in a way that actually doesn't take the interests of most Syrians into consideration. The question is: How do we go about doing that? And it's important to actually descend from our lofty ideals and our grandstanding, you know, statements to discuss the complexities of the situation, which, actually, unfortunately, will not be to the liking of any party. But that is the problem. We are looking for a solution that satisfies one party exclusively, and it's not going to happen, especially after fall 2015, when the Russians intervened on the side of the regime and prevented any potential collapse. We are stuck in a situation where the best option is the suboptimal outcome. This is extremely depressing in view of the killing that's taking place. But it is not something that we can negotiate, unless there is a tectonic shift that we cannot anticipate in Syria, and especially before the elections or before the transfer of power in the United States.

I did not see that particular piece. I know the-I heard about the headline. But it is not also a-either a puzzle or it is not surprising. The coverage, whether it is by Arab satellite stations or our mainstream stations here in the United States, and perhaps in Europe, have actually approached the Syrian situation in such a manner that highlights excessively and exclusively certain atrocities, which are, in fact-and that is no, you know, surprise-which are, in fact, committed by the regime and its allies, especially Russia at this point. But when it comes to other kinds of conflicts, which involve the bombardment of civilians, as well, by those who are supporting the rebels in Syria, such as Saudi Arabia and the United States, that is fueling and refueling Saudi Air Force or jet fighters as it bombards the rebels and civilians, this sort of coverage, on Yemen, is actually not just lacking, it's almost absent, with the exclusion of major atrocities such as we have witnessed or heard about a couple of weeks ago with the killing of several hundred civilians or Yemenis on the side of the rebels by Saudi jet fighters. As far as Mosul is concerned, it's actually a similar issue, except, in the case of Mosul, there is a consensus against ISIS.

But the manner in which the media proceeds in producing propaganda, that completely eliminates what is being addressed or what is being argued on the other side, is actually horrendous. And this is something that has fed into this solidification of these binary narratives on Syria, the dominant ones. I mean, there are many other ways of understanding Syria, and there are ways that are more productive. It's just that they are drowned out by propaganda, by the the sound of the-of guns and jet fighters and bombs. And it is no wonder why today even a brother and a sister within one family, in Syria or outside Syria, who care about the Syrian situation, are actually on complete opposite ends of the spectrum in addressing the problem and the solution.

Well, I'd like to turn to an excerpt from the book by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami titled Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War. The authors explain how extremist groups grew to such prominence in the Syrian opposition, writing, quote, "If the FSA"-that is, the Free Syrian Army-"had been seriously supported from outside, if Assad had not been so generously armed and funded by Russia and Iran ... then the armed struggle might have lasted months rather than years, and civil activism might have quickly regained its role. But the war stretched on, and the liberated areas became death zones. This was the vacuum in which jihadism would thrive." So, Bassam Haddad, I'd like you to respond to that, as well as the claim that some make that if the U.S. hadn't intervened and pushed for arming various groups, the Syrian opposition would not be in the state that it's in, while others say that the U.S. didn't support the opposition enough.

The problem with such propositions, because they are emotionally-they sound emotionally correct. The problem with these propositions is that they don't actually gel with the political realities on the ground, and they don't actually comport with historical experience. For instance, the idea of, had the U.S. supported the Free Syrian Army early on, things would have been different, and a vacuum wouldn't have been grown in which the jihadists were able to fill, has two issues, has two problems, at least two problems that I can-that I can immediately think of. First, it assumes that the opposition is not a fragmented-the rebels, by late 2011 or 2012, were not already a fragmented whole, and it assumes that there is a central command that can actually take care of this sort of support and do something with it. But that's not the most important problematic assumption. The other assumption-and if you look at the history of support for rebel groups, the other assumption is that there is consensus among all possible interventionists on supporting the rebels. But there is not. The interventionists are actually split. So, supporting the rebels early on, in however scenario we can imagine, would have actually led not to a success of a rebel movement against the entrenched, brutal, authoritarian regime; it would have led instead to an escalation and an arms race, because the supporters of the regime would have naturally came in earlier with much more viciousness, much more force, to actually respond by supporting the regime in similar, if not in more extensive, ways, for reasons that we are witnessing right now. The support of the regime so far has been much more vigorous and bold about going farther than the supporters of the opposition. So, those two assumptions do not hold. Maybe in a reality in which the rebels are supported by the most powerful possible interventionists across the region and the world, that would have actually made sense, but it actually doesn't hold water in the real world, given Syria's allies.

No, I'm joking. No, I think we have a serious problem in the sense that we expect so much out of the elections and out of new administrations in the U.S. And I'm not saying things will not change, but I think there is a consistency in U.S. policy that will not be subverted simply by the coming to power even-even of a personality such as Donald Trump.

What will change, I think, is not necessarily the best way to look at this. The best way to look at this is: What is the state of the battlefield in Syria and the state of the international moods vis-à-vis what is happening in Syria by the time Clinton or somebody takes over? And that is why the Russians and the Syrian regime are pushing for a most brutal assault, which I think we haven't seen yet mature, but we probably will, unfortunately. They are pushing for this assault in order to take Aleppo, control what is called "useful Syria," suriya al-mufida, and use that as a-as leverage for any kind of negotiated settlement that might take place later on, if at all. And by that time, it will actually have raised the bar so much for a U.S. intervention that it would be very difficult to do very much, perhaps besides some sort of settlement, unless an all-out confrontation or war is on the table. But it is not on the table now as a function of the problematics of enforcing, for instance, a no-fly zone, which is very close to going to war with Russia, which many policy wonks today, or in the past week, for instance, have been saying, "Oh, it's not such a big deal. The U.S. can take out Russia," and we are underestimating how the threat of credible force by the U.S. will actually affect Russian responses. Perhaps. But also perhaps not.

The appetite, however, definitely is not there right now, and definitely not in the next few weeks, for very obvious reasons, having to do with the legacy of the Obama administration, which has been described as very problematic for various reasons. But many others differ on whether that was actually the wrong thing to do. The point is that I think that-

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Bassam Haddad: We Have a Duty to Call for End to Killing in Syria & How We End It Matters

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As the United States accuses Russia of bombing civilians in Syria, we speak with Bassam Haddad, director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies program at George Mason University. In an article headlined "The Debate over Syria Has Reached a Dead End," he argues, "There has been increasing gravitation toward two mutually exclusive narratives: (a) that of 'pure and consistent revolution,' and (b) that of 'external conspiracy.'

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POPE FRANCIS: [translated] I want to underline and repeat my closeness to all the victims of the inhumane conflict in Syria. It is with a sense of urgency that I renew my appeal and implore with all my strength those responsible that an immediate ceasefire is put in place and that this is enforced and respected at least to allow the evacuation of civilians, especially children, who are still trapped by cruel bombardments.

ZEID RA'AD AL-HUSSEIN: The Security Council was unable to take any decision in respect of halting the actions in eastern Aleppo last week. And it very much raises the question in my mind, when speaking of the Security Council: Security for whom? Certainly not for the people of eastern Aleppo. Certainly not for them.

We turn now to look at a group in Syria known as the Syrian Civil Defense, or the White Helmets. The group of some 3,000 volunteers has been credited with saving over 60,000 people from the rubble of buildings in war-torn Syria. Last month, the group won a Right Livelihood Award, known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. The group is also the focus of a new documentary titled The White Helmets. This is the trailer.

WHITE HELMET VOLUNTEER 1: [translated] Don't give mom a hard time, OK?

REPORTER: The latest missile attacks on hospitals and schools in rebel-held areas that left up to 50 civilians dead.

WHITE HELMET VOLUNTEER 2: [translated] We are the first to arrive when there is a bombing. Everyone knows the truth about Syria, but no one can stop the killing. In the White Helmets, we have a motto: "To save a life is to save all of humanity."

The trailer for the new Netflix documentary The White Helmets. We go now to London, where we're joined by Orlando von Einsiedel, the director of The White Helmets. His previous films include the Oscar-nominated documentary Virunga.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! Why don't you start off by laying out just who the White Helmets are and why you did this documentary about them, Orlando?

We wanted to make this film for two reasons. The first is that Syria is such a hard issue to engage with. The war has been going on for five years now. It's so sad and it's so upsetting that there isn't-the international community hasn't been able to find a solution. And I think a lot of people have just turned off. But the White Helmets, their story is a story of hope. It's a story which cuts through politics, and it's a story which resonates with people around the world. And also, the narrative which has come out of Syria for the last couple years, until very recently, has really focused on ISIS and terrorism and the refugee crisis. And clearly, those are very important issues, but the story of what's happening to the millions of Syrian civilians who daily live under horrendous bombardment from the Assad regime and, more recently, its ally, Russia, that's a story which has slipped down the headlines. And the story of the White Helmets brings that very much back into focus.

We worked very closely with a young man, a young White Helmet volunteer called Khaled Khateeb. He was 17 when the war started, and he began documenting it on his mobile phone and then moved to cameras and eventually to video cameras. And many of the White Helmets' most, I guess, iconic photographs were taken by-by Khaled.

We shot the film in southern Turkey during a training course by the White Helmets, and Khaled joined us on that training course, and we spent five weeks living and working with him. And the very small contribution we could make to his filming was to help improve his documentary filming techniques. And then, after the training course, Khaled went back into Syria along with the other White Helmets that we'd been filming with, and he continued to do his everyday job of documenting their rescues, except in this case he shared the raw footage with us. So what you see in the film is a combination of the material we gathered and Khaled's work inside Aleppo.

WHITE HELMET VOLUNTEER 2: [translated] I thought that I was searching under the rubble for a baby that had died. But all glory is to God. We were not meant to leave the area without hearing a sound. After 16 hours under the rubble, a baby less than a month old, still alive, under the dust, under the ceilings that had fallen on him. We called him the "miracle baby."

The reality is that this is what the White Helmets are doing day in, day out, in Aleppo and across Syria at the moment, especially in Aleppo, because the last 10 days have seen horrendous bombardment. And you're right, the man in the clip, Khaled Harrah, was killed about six weeks ago on a-during another rescue that he was doing, and a mortar round landed and, sadly, killed him.

I think what was-what was very shocking making this film was the violence that they experience every day in Aleppo, you might expect, but even when they're in somewhere safe, like Turkey, the psychological violence these guys go through every day was incredibly shocking. Almost every evening, when they came back from the training and they'd get back online, their phones would start to vibrate wildly as the day's news came in. And it was very common that there would be a message saying, you know, one of your colleagues, one of your friends, one of-even one of your family members, has been killed. So, yeah, I mean, it was a difficult-it was very difficult to witness that.

But I think, despite all of that, one of the things which is most striking for me, personally, was the hope that these guys still have. After all that they've been through, in spite of everything, they still have hope. And as long as they have hope, I think we all have to have hope, as well.

MOHAMMED FARAH: [translated] Before joining the White Helmets, I was with an armed group. I fought for the opposition for three months. But I saw that the regime's campaign was targeting civilians. And I thought, "It is better to do humanitarian work than to be armed, better to rescue a soul than to take one."

In terms of criticism, I mean, frankly, in making this, we did a lot of in-depth research. We went through dozens of hours of material. It's very clear to us that this is-the White Helmets are nothing but a humanitarian group.

FAROUQ AL-HABIB: We know that there are always political games trying to politicize everything happening in Syria. But our humanitarian message is obvious and clear for everybody. It's working impartially and neutrally to help all the Syrian people, wherever and whenever. The White Helmets teams are allowed to respond to attacks in any area in Syria. They will be always ready to help.

Orlando von Einsiedel, thank you so much for being with us, director of The White Helmets. Previous films include the Oscar-nominated documentary Virunga. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Stay with us.

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The White Helmets: As Syria Death Toll Mounts, Meet the Rescue Workers Saving Thousands of Lives

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In Syria, renewed bombing has reportedly killed more than 150 people this week in rebel-controlled Aleppo. On Wednesday, at least 15 people died after airstrikes hit East Aleppo's biggest market. Meanwhile, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports at least four children were killed and 10 wounded earlier today when shells landed near a school in western Aleppo, the area controlled by the government.