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Why no-one could save the man who co-founded the White Helmets

From the makers of Tunnel 29 and The Ratline comes the latest podcast from Intrigue. Mayday.

The death of James Le Mesurier, at the age of 48, made headlines around the world. His body was found in the early hours of 11 November 2019, on the cobblestones of Ali Pasha Street on the West side of Istanbul, Turkey. He had apparently fallen from the roof of his apartment.

Days before, the Russian foreign ministry had accused him of being a British spy, a claim vigorously denied by Britain’s then ambassador to the UN Dame Karen Pierce. Rumours swirled in the Russian, Syrian and Turkish media.

The Turkish police were on high alert. It had only been a year since the state sanctioned murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, at the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul. There were concerns that something similar might have happened to Le Mesurier. The Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, made the bizarre claim that the whole thing was in some way connected to the death of Jeffrey Epstein.

Questions about who James Le Mesurier really was had dogged him for years. That’s because he was the co-founder of an organisation called the White Helmets, a civil defence force that works in rebel held areas of Syria. Dressed in hard hats and fleece jackets, they rescue people from under the rubble of buildings bombed by the Syrian and Russian militaries. James Le Mesurier’s charity, Mayday Rescue, was responsible for providing the White Helmets with training and equipment.

James Le Mesurier co-founder of the White Helmets

In what has been a brutal and fiercely contested war, the White Helmets were seen by many as the good guys. A Netflix documentary about them won an Oscar in 2016 and that year they were also nominated for the Nobel peace prize. Le Mesurier was awarded an OBE for services to the protection of civilians in Syria. To all intents and purposes, James Le Mesurier and the White Helmets were heroes.

In death, James Le Mesurier left behind a tangled knot of truth and lies. Untangling that knot would mean finding out who he really was and how he came to die.

But Le Mesurier also attracted deep suspicion. A former soldier, he had served as a military intelligence officer in Bosnia. After leaving the army, he worked as a private security contractor in the Middle East. It led some to question: why was a former British soldier running a humanitarian group in Syria? The fact the White Helmets are funded by states including the UK and the US was, for some, further grounds for suspicion.

The Russian and Syrian governments fuelled the idea of a conspiracy. Using the United Nations as a platform, they promoted the idea that James Le Mesurier and the White Helmets were guilty of an increasingly wild and gruesome list of crimes. Kidnap, torture and organ harvesting were just some of the claims on the charge sheet. An online network of bloggers, activists and bots were publishing similar allegations.

The White Helmets removing casualties from a bombed building. Image source: Getty Images.

The Syrian and Russian government’s had good reason to want to damage the credibility of James Le Mesurier and the White Helmets. Footage from the GoPro cameras they use to document their rescues have attracted the worlds’ attention to the Russian and Syrian bombardment of civilians in Syria. Evidence collected by the White Helmets was used to help prove President Assad’s responsibility for chemical weapons attacks against civilians, including children. Were those crimes ever to be prosecuted, the White Helmets’ evidence could be crucial.

Which could explain why the Russian and Syrian militaries appeared to treat them as a legitimate target. In the aftermath of an attack on a convoy witnessed by the White Helmets in 2015, three of their centres were hit by air strikes. Speaking to a Dutch journalist at the time, Le Mesurier said ‘if it was a coincidence, it’s one hell of a coincidence’. The Russians insisted they and the Syrians weren’t responsible for the attack.

When news of James Le Mesurier's death broke, many of his friends suspected the Russians of carrying out a murder akin to the attacks on Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal. The long list of Russian dissidents who have died after falling out of windows or off balconies only added to the suspicions.

And then there were reports that in the days before his death, he had been accused of fraud and embezzlement.

In death, James Le Mesurier left behind a tangled knot of truth and lies. Untangling that knot would mean finding out who he really was and how he came to die. It’s a story which goes to the heart of a very modern war.

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