James Le Mesurier
Former Army officer and founder of Mayday Rescue, whose ‘White Helmets’ first-response teams saved thousands of lives in Syria
JAMES LE MESURIER, who has died aged 48, was a former British Army officer who founded Mayday Rescue, the charity that trained the civilian White Helmets first-response teams that saved thousands of lives in war-torn Syria.
A humanitarian whose work was informed by hard military experience, he was convinced that the best way to end conflicts was not through outside intervention but by training locals in the skills needed to save lives.
His work won praise from Syrian civilians, humanitarian groups, and Western governments, but also made him the target of a propaganda campaign by the Russian and Syrian governments, who accused him – without presenting evidence – of being a spy and working with terrorists.
James Le Mesurier was born on May 25 1971 into a military family in Singapore to Lt Colonel Benjamin Le Mesurier, an officer in the Royal Marines, and his Swedish wife, Ewa. He was educated at Canford School, the University of Ulster, and the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, where he studied International Relations and Strategic Studies.
Always passionate about soldiering, Le Mesurier went to Sandhurst straight from university, graduating top of his class and winning the Queens’ Medal. He was commissioned into the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Green Jackets in 1994, where he served alongside General Nick Carter, the current Chief of the Defence Staff. Contemporaries considered Le Mesurier an exceptionally talented soldier who loved his job and possessed a gift for organisation and clarity of thought.
His military career included operational tours as part of the United Nations peacekeeping forces in Bosnia and Kosovo, and a stint as a policy adviser on security and justice for the United Nations mission to Kosovo, where he helped to uncover a major corruption scandal involving an energy company.
While deployed to the Balkans he met his first wife, Aurelie Marle, in Sarajevo.
After leaving the Army in 2000, he worked on the Jericho Monitoring Mission set up as part of the Ramallah Agreement, where he was part of an international team responsible for monitoring six Palestinian militants. He went on to private-sector appointments at the Abu Dhabi-based private security consultancies, Olive Group and Good Harbour, where he led the team responsible for urban planning security practices.
In 2011 he moved to Istanbul to join ARK, a group trying to find peaceful solutions to the Syrian civil war which had just broken out. That led directly to the founding in 2013 of Mayday Rescue, an organisation built on Le Mesurier’s conviction that traditional models for stabilising conflicts were flawed. The most effective model for saving lives in wars, he believed, was soft security delivered by the local people most affected.
The small groups of volunteer rescuers trained by Mayday in paramedic and urban rescue skills became known as the Syrian Civil Defence Forces, or the White Helmets. By 2017 they had more than 3,000 volunteers operating across Syria.
Friends described Mayday as Le Mesurier’s perfect job, in which his compulsive passion for adventure, his gift for leadership, and the clarity of thought that had distinguished him as an infantry officer could be focused on a simple question he wrote on the wall of his Istanbul office: “What would save more lives?”
Well aware of the practical limits of humanitarian work amid the violence in Syria, he adopted a utilitarian mantra for the group: “Whatever we can, whenever we can, for as long as we can.”
But the nature of the work meant that the White Helmets became not only first responders but also first witnesses, and their footage and testimony of the aftermath of barrel bombings and chemical attacks played a key role in exposing atrocities committed by Syrian government forces against civilians.
As the war intensified, White Helmets were designated a terrorist group by the Assad government and deliberately targeted by “double tap” bomb attacks designed to kill first responders rushing to the scene of airstrikes.
By the middle of 2017, 206 of the group’s 3,300 volunteers had been killed and 500 had suffered life-changing injuries. It was, he pointed out, a grim statistic that exceeded military casualty rates in Afghanistan, Iraq, or even the trenches of the First World War.
Meanwhile, the Russian and Syrian governments launched a propaganda smear campaign that claimed, variously and without evidence, that the group was linked to al-qaeda, faked evidence of chemical attacks, and that Le Mesurier was a British spy.
The attacks often became bitterly personal. Three days before Le Mesurier’s death Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry’s spokeswoman, accused him of being an MI6 agent working with “terrorists”.
The White Helmets’ mantra was: ‘Whatever we can, whenever we can, for as long as we can’
Although Le Mesurier maintained his unflappable demeanour in public, in conversations with journalists and colleagues he did not hide his anger at the smears.
Despite being urged by some colleagues to take legal action against Russian media outlets for the smears, he demurred. “The money we would spend defending our reputation would be better spent saving lives in Syria,” he told one journalist.
Instead, he became a vocal critic of Russia’s propaganda campaigns on Twitter and at conferences. Giving the lie to allegations that he was a shadowy spy, he made himself freely available to reporters and never dodged or avoided awkward questions.
In summer 2018, when the last rebel-held areas in southern Syria fell to regime forces, Le Mesurier frantically lobbied the British and Canadian governments to avert what he feared could become a massacre.
The effort resulted in the escape of nearly 500 White Helmets and their families to Jordan via Israel, in an extraordinary operation that he later described with characteristic understatement as “a staff-college level” planning exercise.
At the time of his death he had been looking for other areas where the White Helmets model could make a difference. In 2018 he led a Mayday team to Somalia, where they trained with the volunteers of Mogadishu’s Aamin Ambulance service, another group made up of locals dedicated to saving civilian lives. In 2016, Le Mesurier was appointed OBE.
He was a passionate sailor, buying and painstakingly restoring an old Omani police patrol boat when he lived in Abu Dhabi. He also loved dogs, rescuing one in the Balkans, two in Abu Dhabi, and another in Dubai.
After his divorce from his first wife, Aurelie Marle, he met Sarah Tosh, with whom he had two daughters. He is survived by his third wife, a former UK diplomat and fellow Mayday executive, Emma Winberg, whom he met while they were planning an emergency response to the possible collapse of the Mosul Dam in Iraq. They married in 2018.
James Le Mesurier’s body was found in the street below the flat he shared with his wife in Istanbul. The cause of his death has yet to be established.
James Le Mesurier, born May 25 1971, died November 11 2019