The Times Magazine 47he smiles. “There are so many other things
that should have got me by now.”
He becomes momentarily enraged when
discussing the death of James le Mesurier,
cofounder of the Syrian White Helmets relief
organisation, whose body was found beneath
a balcony in Istanbul last year. The two men
were friends and colleagues and had met
many times. They shared many of the same
values – and many of the same enemies too.
Le Mesurier, formerly an officer in the
Royal Green Jackets, had become the focus
of a campaign to discredit the White Helmets
conducted by an array of troll armies,
pro-Assadists and conspiracy theorists:
some harnessed to Russian disinformation
campaigns, others working unilaterally.
Trolls accused the White Helmets of being
an al-Qaeda front and suggested le Mesurier
was a terror financier. Under increasing strain
and already suffering depression, le Mesurier
broke. His body was found beneath the White
Helmets offices in Istanbul. He had apparently
taken his life.
Soon trolls were tweeting, “De Bretton-
Gordon, you’re next.”
“There are some f***ing arseholes in the
world,” he snaps. “I don’t know whether James
committed suicide or not – it seems that he
did – but there was a metaphorical hand from
others pushing him off that balcony.”
In this gruelling battle for narrative that
took the life of his friend, de Bretton-Gordon
has found that his enemies are drawn from
across a wide spectrum.
The upper echelon includes Vladimir Putin,
who singled out de Bretton-Gordon in a phone
call during negotiations to establish a ceasefire
during the battle of Aleppo in 2015, in which
the Russian president warned that the former
soldier should desist from making further
accusations concerning chemical attacks.
Other foes lie closer to home. The Working
Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media,
a UK-based platform co-founded by the
conspiracy theorist and academic Piers
Robinson, published a specious report last
summer on the 2018 chlorine gas attack in
Douma in which it described de Bretton-
Gordon as an “agent” likely working on behalf
of an MI6 covert influence programme.
De Bretton-Gordon, who becomes
a visiting fellow at Magdalene College,
Cambridge, this autumn, studying
humanitarian intervention, snorts at the
suggestion that his work is done at the
behest of anyone but himself, and describes
the notion of taking orders from the
government as “ridiculous”. Yet his hybrid
work portfolio, together with extensive
connections in the security establishment
and his appointment last autumn as a
commissioned reserve officer in the army’s
Staff Corps, has nevertheless given the
conspiracy theorists considerable ammunition.
Moreover, his moral-based advocacy
for western intervention against Assad
has continued long after the dominance
of Islamist groups in the rebel movement
made most interventionists squeamish,
earning him few allies.
“Of course we all want everything to be
lovely in the world,” he says, unapologetically.
“No one wants to kill anyone. But sometimes
to get there, to achieve stability, you have to
get the knife out. And I get the feeling we
have lost our nerve in this regard.”
He still holds out for eventual justice
though, and in this respect his personal
involvement training members of the Syrian
medical charity UOSSM to collect samples
from chemical attack sites has had direct
consequences on the passage of the conflict,
and possibly Assad’s future too.
Angered by the piling civilian body count
and the regular chemical attacks, and piqued
by this early failure to get a sample out, he
began training UOSSM staff in 2013, creating
a “CBRN Task Force” of Syrian medical
personnel with knowledge not just in the
treatment of chemical casualties, but also in
“chain of custody” procedures that have since
resulted in several samples from chemical
attack sites being successfully removed from
Syria for analysis abroad: an evidential chain
that he hopes may one day see Assad in the
dock of an international court for war crimes.
“Look at Bosnia and Kosovo – even years
later the generals who committed war crimesin the Balkans ended up in the dock,” he
expands. “The only real thing we can give the
Syrian people one day is justice, and the only
way we are going to do that is with evidence.”
Yet the world may have lost interest in
justice by the time the war finally ends.
The last time I called de Bretton-Gordon
from the field, in October last year, I phoned
him from northeastern Syria, during an
offensive by Turkish troops and their Syrian
proxies against the Kurdish YPG. While
I was present at a Kurdish field hospital,
a 13-year-old boy, Mohammed Hamid, was
rushed through the doors, his torso and arms
excoriated by flame after he had been set
alight in a Turkish bombardment.
The boy’s screams of pain were so terrible
as to silence the moaning of lesser wounded
soldiers, and hush the talk of medical staff.
It appeared that he may have been burnt
by a type of incendiary weapon. Checking
other Kurdish clinics in the war zone, I saw
a pattern of unusual burns among casualties:
deep pitting and blistering, suggestive of white
phosphorus munitions, which are banned from
use in a direct role against humans.
I rang de Bretton-Gordon to describe what
I had seen and sent him photographs of the
wounds, only to find that he had already been
contacted by the Kurds and had a file full of
burn images from the casualties. Similarly
concerned that an incendiary chemical was
being used, he had liaised with medics who
had taken tissue samples from the casualties
and had stored them in a refrigerator in
Sulaymaniyah, northern Iraq.
There was one big problem. No one
would analyse these samples to see if white
phosphorus was indeed to blame. There
appeared little motivation among any western
organisation to investigate a sample that
might prove that Nato member Turkey, or its
Syrian proxies, was using white phosphorus
against the coalition’s Kurdish allies.
“I still feel guilty to my Kurdish friends,”
he recalls, sounding momentarily tired. “The
samples are still in Sulaymaniyah, for anyone
with the bollocks to test them. I went through
all the channels I knew to get them tested and
the answer was ‘no’.”
The refusal to analyse the samples from
burnt allies felt totemic of the overall collapse
of international morality: the passive
acceptance of a new chemical reality.
“It was symptomatic, and shocking,” he
says. “It really left a bad taste in my mouth.
No one gives a f*** about it, because it seems
we can apparently use chemical weapons.
Why not use something else? Why not use
a pathogen next time? Why not use Covid?”
Three decades on, the man who as a captain
was once embarrassed by his near-suffocation
in the desert sounded shamed again – this
time by a world shorn of conviction. nMohammed Hamid, 13, injured in an
incendiary bomb attack, October 2019