Mr. Farouq Al Habib:

Chairman, members of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, ladies and gentlemen, allow me first to thank you for giving me this opportunity to testify about the ongoing tragedy that the Syrian people are living through and about the work Syria Civil Defence, SCD, also known as the White Helmets, is doing to ease that suffering. I would like also to thank the Irish people for their generosity in hosting Syrian refugees. We, as Syrians, have huge respect for the people of Ireland, who historically supported the rights of oppressed people in the Middle East.

My name is Farouq Habib. When the Syrian revolution began, I was working as a banker in a private Syrian bank. My belief that my people have the right to live with dignity and freedom obliged me to join the peaceful movement to defend human rights in Syria. Currently, I am working for Mayday Rescue Foundation, managing the training and equipment programme for SCD rescue teams in Syria and acting as a political adviser to their leadership. The White Helmets is an organisation of more than 2,700 volunteers operating from 111 centres across eight provinces in Syria from the south to the north, founded on the values of impartiality and humanity. It is currently the largest grassroots organisation inside Syria established for, and working on, a response to indiscriminate attacks on civilians, especially from barrel bombs. It does this by conducting search and rescue operations, fire fighting and emergency evacuation, and carries out these tasks daily. To this day, the teams have rescued more than 30,000 civilians from under the rubble. Please see this video as a short testimony of our work. It was made by one of my colleagues.