MADRID, October 7. /TASS/. Visits paid by employees of the White Helmets organization operating in Syria to Europe and other states constitutes a threat for these countries, Russian expert, Director of the Foundation for the Study of Democracy Maxim Grigoriev said in Madrid on Monday.

According to him, "clear evidence" has already been "provided that the incident of chemical attack in Douma was falsified as well as other chemical attacks in Syria." "It is enough to check out Facebook and other social network materials, many White Helmets members are posing with weapons, tell stories of them taking part in armed hostilities. It is evident that when this people arrive in Europe and other countries poses a direct threat to these countries," he said. "Being a non-governmental organization, I can’t have data on how many of these people crossed borders of a specific European country," Grigoriev added.

"White Helmets is an organization created and financed by western countries," the expert believes. "Firstly, the primary task of the organization is an information and propaganda war against Syria." "Secondly, it is justifying and supporting aggression of these countries against Syria," the expert underlined. "Thirdly, it is forming a structure in Syria, which would unite many opposition forces and would serve as a channel of financing these groups to pay wages to members of these opposition and sometimes terrorist groups."

"When Soviet troops were in Afghanistan back in the day, the US and other states actively funded organization, which later came to be called terrorist, it was the US that trained [former head of Al-Qaeda eliminated in 2011 Osama] bin Laden," he said. According to the expert, "largely, these pseudo Islamic terrorists that are now organizing attacks in Europe, their predecessors or them themselves, appeared back then in the 1980s when these groups created with the direct US support."

"And later, these very groups began attacking the US 20 years later," the expert said. Grigoriev also supposed that it had happened "because a number of countries believes that clandestine financing terrorist groups is a convenient tool to achieve its aims in other countries."

White Helmets

The Syria Civil Defense (commonly known as The White Helmets) is a non-governmental organization created in the Syrian territory in 2014. The group is notorious for uploading to the world web photographs and videos allegedly illustrating destruction and casualties caused by the Syrian government army and its allies. The organization has more than once been accused of fabricating fakes. Some of the alleged victims shown in the video as victims of a chemical attack in Douma eventually testified as witnesses at a news briefing arranged by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to refute the very instance of chemical attacks.

Russia’s official position is the SCD is part of a media campaign unleashed against the Syrian authorities. The Russian Foreign Ministry said in January 2018 the White Helmets "have long cooperated with terrorist groups" and "utterly discredited themselves by stating provocations and spreading flagrant falsehoods.".