French Christian NGO's links to pro-Assad Syrian militia

AA man in his sixties dressed in military fatigues is sitting in a comfortable armchair somewhere in Syria. “I want to thank SOS Chrétiens d'Orient,” he says, “we will never forget [its] support.” Interviewed in 2019 by a member of the right-wing French association, the man, referred to as “Monsieur Simon”, presents himself as “a son of Mahardeh [editor's note, a Christian village north of Hama, in western Syria], “a civilian who took up arms to defend his city”. He then pays “great tribute to the leader Bashar al-Assad” and the Russian army.

The head of a Christian militia supervised by the Syrian regime, this man – his full name is Simon al-Wakil - is accused of war crimes in the Hama region of west-central Syria, an accusation he denies. During the four years that SOS Chrétiens d'Orient (SOSCO) has supported him, he has remained in uniform.

Officially, SOSCO is a neutral party in the Syrian conflict. A 'National Defence Partner' of France since 2017, the NGO describes itself as an “apolitical” association that “since 2013 has been legally operating at the heart of the secured disaster areas of the Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon), but also in Egypt, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Armenia”.

The seven-year-old NGO’s founders, Charles de Meyer and Benjamin Blanchard, both started out as parliamentary assistants to Jacques Bompard – the current far-right mayor of Orange, in south-east France. They also spent a few hours in police custody together in the spring of 2013, after being arrested at a protest against same-sex marriage. Blanchard would later become assistant to the former Front National (FN) MP Marie Christine Arnautu, while De Meyer still works in the European Parliament for pro-Putin MEP Thierry Mariani of Rassemblement National (the Front National's new name).

“The association bears witness to the superior vocation of France, to rebuild the link with the Christians of the Orient,” reads the English-language version of the NGO’s website. “A duty that is not simply humanitarian, but also cultural and civilizational.” But the NGO’s ambitions in Syria were not always so peaceful.

'What if we Catholics went to fight in Syria'

In 2013, Assad's propaganda machine was working on overdrive: threatened by military intervention from France, the United Kingdom and the United States, the Syrian president was seeking to distract attention from the chemical attacks his forces had committed that August in Ghouta, near the capital Damascus.

In early September, rebels and jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra attacked the majority-Christian town of Maaloula, north-east of Damascus. The battle proved the perfect opportunity for the regime to create a diversion, reinforcing its image as the protector of the country’s minorities. It was also what drew SOS Chrétiens d'Orient to Syria.

Days later, on September 17, 2013, one of the NGO’s early members, Olivier Demeocq - who would step down a few months later, published a piece entitled 'What if we Catholics went to fight in Syria', suggesting taking up arms might be the best way to “defend Syrian Christians”. The article was published – a month before SOSCO filed its statutes – on Boulevard Voltaire, an identitarian website founded by far-right politician Robert Ménard and current mayor of Béziers who was fined for inciting racial hatred in 2017.
Demeocq, then-SOSCO’s secretary, now calls his idea “absurd”. “At the time, I just asked myself this question: should we die for Syria?” he told Mediapart. “And I published the editorial to find out the feelings of as many people as possible. As the project matured, I realised that it was clearly more appropriate to do a good deed and celebrate Christmas in Syria rather than playing the hero.”

He led the 'Christmas in Syria' operation in December 2013 along with the NGO’s founders. The trip was supervised by the regime and made possible by one of Demeocq’s former patrons, Frédéric Chatillon.

Chatillon, a well-known figure on the French far-right, is the former head of the GUD (Groupe Union Défense – a notorious far-right students’ union) and the boss of a communications agency, Riwal, which has worked with the Syrian Tourism Ministry and the Rassemblement National (RN) party in France. Chatillon was sentenced to 30 months in prison – 20 months of which were suspended – and a fine of 250,000 euros in June 2020 for fraud and abuse of corporate assets in a trial centring on the financing of RN Parliamentary election campaigns in 2012.

According to Olivier Demeocq, a few hotheads tried to use the Christmas trip to join forces with the Syrian army. “Among those accompanying me, not one dreamed of being Santa Claus, that was clear,” he says. “But the Syrian authorities always said that they were not at all interested in military reinforcement.”

Demeocq remembers that one evening, after taking photos in local orphanages and handing out toys, some of the group met George Chaoui, a man subject to European restrictive sanctions for being a member of the Syrian Electronic Army of hackers. George is the son of Hala Chaoui, a Franco-Syrian businesswoman with close personal ties to the regime who organised SOSCO’s trip in Syria.
Among the group, Demeocq recalls someone called Mickaël Takahashi. Nicknamed 'Samurai', Takahashi ended up joining pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass in Ukraine with far-right group Unité Continentale, then went on to join the Peshmerga in Iraq, fighting against the Islamic State, before returning to France to work as security at a 'gilets jaunes' or 'yellow vest' demonstration in Paris, alongside other former volunteers of the Ukrainian conflict.

A few months after the Syrian Christmas trip, Olivier Demeocq wrote another article on Boulevard Voltaire, this time saying he wanted to “help Syria without using arms”.
But other SOSCO members seem never to have lost their fascination with weapons. In photographs sent to Mediapart, former Head of Mission in Syria, Alexandre Goodarzy – who was kidnapped in Iraq for 66 days at the start of 2020 – and Director General Benjamin Blanchard pose in a Syrian house with a Kalashnikov, machine guns, a machete and even a rocket launcher (see below).
SOSCO refused to explain the context of the photos to Mediapart, saying that it didn’t have to answer to “a political trial” and that our questions “constitute[d] an unwarranted intrusion into the life of the association”. Goodarzy declined to answer any of our questions and referred us back to “[his] employer”.

The NGO channels much of its energy into Mahardeh, a small town twenty or so kilometres from Hama in western Syria. SOSCO describes the town as a “symbol of Syrian resistance to international terrorism”, and praises militiamen who the NGO says have rallied to defend it. In 2016, Alexandre Goodarzy appeared in a video “supplying blankets and food to the National Defence of Mhardeh [Mahardah], which is under repeated assaults from Al-Nusra”.

Militias serving Assad and his allies

The Mahardeh soldiers who Goodarzy was helping resupply are part of the National Defence Forces, a militia created by the regime whose origins lie in the early days of the conflict. At the dawn of the revolution, in 2011, Assad loyalists organized themselves into local militias known as “popular committees” to quell the emerging uprising. In 2012, with the Syrian army haemorrhaging defectors, the regime took charge of these militias, training them to lead counterinsurgencies in their villages to allow the regular army to focus on military operations. These militias became known as the National Defence Forces (NDF).
These fighters, who are paid by the regime, are also occasionally mobilised for major Syrian army offensives. They have in the past used these as an opportunity to plunder villages captured from the rebels, as shown in this 2013 Reuters report.
“Iran and Hezbollah in particular played an important role at the beginning: they helped the National Defence Forces to organize themselves, trained them, and even sent them for training in Lebanon and Iran,” says Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a researcher at the Washington Institute and specialist in the Syrian civil war.
“The Iranians spent a lot [of money on the NDF] until the Russians arrived in 2015. Since then, in this area [of Syria], it’s mainly been the Russians who are in control,” adds Ziad Majed, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the American University of Paris and co-author of the book Dans la tête de Bachar el-Assad ('Inside the Head of Bashar al-Assad').

In Mahardeh, the NDF is commanded by Simon al-Wakil. 'Monsieur Simon' – as SOSCO calls him – is a Christian businessman who, according to the NGO, spent his fortune on organising the defence of his community.

“In the beginning, it was more of a citizens movement. People who just wanted to defend their city,” says an activist living in Mahardeh who calls herself 'Chams'. “Until Simon al-Wakil started paying and arming them. Then Simon asked men to follow him on operations out of town. About 20 accepted, but many gave up and resumed their normal lives.”

In an interview with Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi in 2019, Simon al-Wakil, a large, bespectacled man with greying hair, said that he and his men had had “the honour of participating with the Syrian army in the war against terrorism, in Hama, Idlib, Khanasser and Aleppo”. He also proudly acknowledged working with the fighters of the Syrian Nationalist Social Party (SSNP), a neofascist movement allied with the Syrian regime.

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the 2019 government offensive in Hama and Idlib – in north-west Syria – gave rise to looting by these militias, who sold their loot just outside Mahardah, in the nearby Christian town of Suqaylabiyah. The local NDF forces there are led by a small, bearded man called Nabel al-Abdullah.
Al-Abdullah is no stranger to SOS Chrétiens d’Orient either. He was even among the guests at the marriage of Alexandre Goodarzy to former SOSCO volunteer Fimy Hanna in Maaloula in August 2018. Fahed al-Wakil, Simon al-Wakil's son and a fighter in his father’s militia, was also there, and published photos on his Instagram page. Goodarzy declined to respond to our questions about inviting militiamen to his wedding.
SOS Chrétiens d'Orient regularly visits the Mahardeh NDF. In photos obtained by Mediapart taken in the summer of 2016 – when the NGO visited the town with Charlotte d’Ornellas, a columnist with far-right French magazine Valeurs Actuelles – Benjamin Blanchard, Alexandre Goodarzy and SOSCO volunteers pose smiling in front of NDF artillery pieces. The NGO’s communications team, Blanchard and Goodarzy all refused to comment on the interest in militia paraphernalia. D'Ornellas did not respond to our requests either.

Contrary to the SOSCO narrative, “Mahardeh was never besieged or threatened,” Ziad Majed explains. “The rebels [editor's note, led by Hayat Tahrir Al-Cham, formerly affiliated with Al-Qaeda] launched an offensive on the region in 2017 to open a new front, but they lacked the firepowerand failed. The regime led a counter-offensive with Hezbollah and the NDF, and succeeded in stopping them for good.”

Simon al-Wakil said in early 2019 that he has lost around 50 men since the start of the conflict, in addition to around 100 civilians killed in rebel strikes.

SOSCO awards for warlords

“The National Defense Forces have repeatedly committed human rights violations, it is common knowledge,” said Sara Kayyali, Syria researcher for Human Rights Watch (HRW). “Any NGO operating in Syria should know this.”

But that did not deter Alexandre Goodarzy and Benjamin Blanchard from awarding 'Monsieur Simon' a SOSCO-engraved plaque for “the liberation of Mahardeh” in November 2019, as shown in a video on its YouTube channel. “We never claimed to remain neutral vis-à-vis Al-Qaeda,” the self-described “apolitical” NGO told Mediapart, adding: “Rewarding Christians who defend themselves against Islamist barbarism for their survival and the defence of their wives, their children and their village is absolutely part of our philosophy.”

SOSCO gave the same award to Nabel al-Abdullah for the “liberation” of Suqaylabiyah. The NGO launched its first project there – to rebuild six houses – a few months ago.

Yet Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ), a Syrian NGO based in France, accuses Al-Abdullah of creating training camps for children in Suqaylabiyah and Mahardeh “with the aim of increasing the number of NDF”. And they say that this is done with the support of Simon al-Wakil.

'We bring Monsieur Simon the other things that make up part of a soldier's daily life'

In a 2015 post published on the Suqaylabiyah NDF’s Facebook page, photos taken in what’s described as the “lion cubs’ dormitory” show several children lying on mattresses on the floor – half of them in military fatigues. “It was the first day of the training program,” the post reads.

In a photo report from Syrian opposition media Al Shaam, young recruits are seen handling Kalashnikov magazines. “We see this kind of practice on all sides of the Syrian war,” says Majed. “Young people are trained in military discipline and weapons handling from 15 to 18 years old, and can be sent to fight as soon as they come of age – even before.”

SOSCO told us that the Suqaylabiyah lion cubs in the photos were merely taking part in “scouting activities”, before appearing to celebrate the fact that Syrian children could be trained to fight. “In the event that this hypothesis is true, we remind you of the heroism of the adolescent children engaged in the resistance against Nazism, los Cristeros [editor's note, Catholic rebels in Mexico in the early 20th century] and the peasants in the Vendée [a royalist uprising during the French Revolution].”

Militiamen Nabel al-Abdullah and Simon al-Wakil are also accused of having committed or participated in seven war crimes, killing several hundred civilians in the Hama region in 2012, 2014 and 2017. Both deny the accusations. According to a report by the Syrian NGO Pro-Justice, which is led by Wael Sawah, in the town of Halfaya, barely one kilometre from Mahardeh, 25 civilians died in shelling of their homes allegedly ordered by al-Wakil in 2012 – the same year the town was indiscriminately bombed by the Syrian Air Force.

According to a 400-page 'Blacklist' of war criminals produced by human rights group Pro-Justice, the militias of al-Abdullah and al-Wakil were also implicated in a massacre of 100 women and children – “ten of whom were slaughtered with knives, and their bodies burned” – on a single day in June 2012 in al-Qubeir, a town six kilometres from Mahardeh. Al-Wakil denies the claims.

In Tartus, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, just north of Lebanon, NDF militias allegedly executed 23 women and 14 children in 2013, according to a Human Rights Watch investigation. “The National Defence Forces are, as a collective, a violator of human rights,” says Sara Kayyali of HRW. “It could be problematic for SOS Chrétiens d'Orient to support these militias since we know they have committed abuses. Their organization has not done anything to show that they reformed their methods.”

In 2019, the NGO described on its website how an “amused” Simon al-Wakil had shown SOSCO volunteers “the way they talk about him in the pro-jihadist media, the so-called massacres they accuse him of, the way they slander him. We think he’s steadfast.” 

But this September SOSCO told Mediapart it was not aware of the accusations, adding: “The inhabitants of Mhardeh [Mahardeh] and Squelbiye [Suqaylabiyah] did not choose to take up arms, they were forced to do so by Al-Qaeda.”

But the fighters the association described in its responses to us as “Christians defending themselves against Islamist barbarism” appear not to enjoy unanimous approval from the community they supposedly protect. During a rebel offensive in 2017, residents even demanded that they leave.

A statement, posted on Facebook by the NGO Syriens Chrétiens pour la Paix ('Syrian Christians for Peace'), denounced the “occupation” of their town by Hezbollah, Iranian militias and those loyal to Assad. “Since these militias entered, they have attacked neighbouring villages, our Syrian brothers. They placed military equipment between houses and apartment buildings, and we, the people of Mahardeh, had no say. Many of us have fled out of fear that if the Free Syrian Army enters, we will be bombarded [editor's note, by the planes of the regime and its allies],” it said.

The statement accuses Simon al-Wakil and his men of playing only a secondary, symbolic role in the fighting in Mahardeh to show that “Christians are among these forces and that we are with them and support them”, despite the risk of fuelling “the hatred of Sunnis against Christians”.

“The regime, as well as the National Defence Forces and the Iranian militias, placed their guns between houses, near churches and throughout the city,” says Chams, thus using the conflict as a means of accusing the rebels of targeting the Christian community.

According to a researcher from NGO Syrians for Truth and Justice, the Mahardeh NDF even used the Saint George monastery, which is strategically perched on a hill in the south-east of the city, to “repeatedly bomb the surrounding towns at the end of 2012”.

“These attacks, supposedly carried out to protect Christians, actually put them in danger, because they associate all Christians with the regime and manufacture hatred between the communities,” says Samira Moubayyed, of Syrian Christians for Peace.

Indeed, Simon al-Wakil was against peaceful protests denouncing the regime even before the “popular committees” morphed into the NDF, according to an article from Arabic Post, and erected checkpoints at the entrance to Mahardeh to deny entry to members of the opposition. SOS Chrétiens d'Orient declined to comment on this.

Despite the militias being armed and paid by the regime, SOS Chrétiens d'Orient has still contributed to their war efforts. The NGO has run several funding drives specifically for Mahardeh. In May 2019, 15,600 euros were raised on a crowdfunding site to provide material assistance to the town. Two months later, an auction for Mahardeh was hosted at the Cogolin Yacht Club on the French Mediterranean coast by the town's far-right mayor, Marc-Étienne Lansade (RN), alongside controversial conservative pundit Éric Zemmour and former TV host Vincent Lagaf. Almost 20,000 euros were raised, according to the association.

By SOSCO’s own admission, part of its aid goes to the militia and those closest to the fighters. In an interview with pro-Kremlin media Sputnik in 2019, then-Head of Mission in Syria Alexandre Goodarzy said SOSCO provided food “in particular to families whose husbands go into battle”.

In December 2018, the Almodon news site, which is close to the Syrian opposition, reported that a “delegation from the organization SOS Chrétiens d'Orient and the management of the monastery of Saint-Jacob Al-Maqta went the [Mahardah] region and gave equipment and assistance to the militia leader”.

This was despite the fact that a “humanitarian organization must provide aid in a non-discriminatory manner, and based on the real needs of the populations”, says Kayyali of HRW. Without expressly denying the support it gave to the militiamen, SOSCO told Mediapart that the soldiers “just defend themselves and their families against the Islamic State and al-Qaeda”.

In a SOSCO internal document obtained by Mediapart, SOSCO say they collected more than 13,300 euros in August 2016 to provide “food parcels and blankets to the families of martyrs and volunteers”. While in a 2019 post on SOSCO's website, the NGO wrote that since it is “impossible to deliver medicine, [it brings] Mr Simon and his men the other things that make up part of a soldier's daily life: coffee, tea, maté and a little tobacco”. In doing this, SOSCO is admitting to participating – albeit modestly – in the war effort, rather than working to improve the lives of all civilians.

For Moubayyed of NGO Syrian Christians for Peace, “the goal is above all to spread the idea in the West that the militias supported by SOS Chrétiens d'Orient protect Christians”. Between 2016 and 2019, donations collected for 'Monsieur Simon' and Mahardeh amounted to at least 48,900 euros, according to information we have been able to gather.

Goodarzy told Sputnik in August 2019 that he had spent only “10,000 euros out of the 50,000”, on the basis that the city “was still recently under fire”. But the NGO told Mediapart in September that to date it had “spent around 80,000 euros on the towns of Mahardeh and Suqaylabiyah”, the money going on a hospital and a church.

Much of the NGO's financial accounting is opaque. In 2016 and 2017, 810,772 euros were only accounted for in “sworn statements”, according to the NGO's auditor Actheos. This makes it impossible to know how – or in which country – the money was spent.

But to give an idea of the scale of expenditure, SOSCO spent 800,000 euros on its Syria projects in 2016 alone, according to estimates based on the internal document we obtained.

SOSCO told Mediapart that using sworn statements is “common for young NGOs whose accounting services are being structured”. It also blamed the Arabic language, saying: “French accountants don’t read Arabic and take the precaution of not accepting handwritten receipts, which are frequently used in the Orient”. Actheos, which certified the association's financial reports despite the hundreds of thousands of unaccounted for euros, did not answer our questions, invoking the need to respect “professional confidentiality”.

“As long as the funds are not used to arm the militias but for humanitarian aid, choosing a local leader who is legitimate and has power over his people doesn’t shock me,” says a former SOSCO volunteer.

But other former volunteers contacted by Mediapart worried about SOSCO’s untraceable cash transfers on the ground. Due to restrictions imposed by US and European sanctions on the regime, some volunteers said they had to carry wads of dollars from Lebanon into Syria to give to those heading up the NGO’s projects.

“I remember it very well,” recalls another former volunteer. “I put [cash] in my socks and in my belt because, in a country like this, you don't carry it around in your backpack. We had a safe in Damascus [at the NGO’s headquarters] and Alexander Goodarzy was in charge of it, but we weren't aware of what was being taken out.” Goodarzy gave cash directly to local church officials, said the former volunteer, a claim the SOSCO told us was “completely false.” Goodarzy himself refused to comment.

“Expressing support for these militias is a matter of freedom of opinion. On the other hand, financing them has legal implications,” says Kayyali of HRW, who raises the question of SOSCO’s potential complicity in the militia’s actions.

No such accusation has ever been made against SOSCO, and such legal proceedings are complex, given the context of civil war and the difficulty of collecting evidence or testimony, investigators specialising in crimes against humanity told Mediapart. SOSCO says any accusations of complicity are “delusional”, adding that it is “a humanitarian NGO that [helps] victims of the war and the terrorism of ISIS and Al Qaeda”.

Not all of Mahardeh's inhabitants seem to have lasting memories of SOSCO’s humanitarian aid. In his Sputnik interview, Alexandre Goodarzy claimed to have “helped [Mahardeh's] hospital by repainting its walls, by bringing it medical supplies”. According to Mahardeh-based activist Chams, however, “they also promised an ambulance, medical and protective equipment… Nothing ever happened. They put a few volunteers to work, but the rest just remained promises”.

SOS Chrétiens d'Orient rejects these claims, saying: “The management, caregivers and patients of Mahardeh hospital saw these donations first-hand.” This summer, the association's Twitter account posted a few photos of water tanks and solar panels on the roof of the Mahardeh hospital.

A helping hand from the French Armed Forces Ministry

SOSCO’s close ties to the militias of Bashar al-Assad, with whom France has had no diplomatic relations since 2012, did not stop the country’s Ministry of Armed Forces naming them a 'National Defence Partner'. This label was awarded to the NGO in February 2017 by an order personally signed by foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, according to Libération.

In 2016, according to the association’s activity report, the French army sent several tons of medical equipment from Toulon in southern France to Lebanese capital Beirut for SOSCO, free of charge. The final destination of the shipment of compresses, medical beds and clothes was Syria. The Armed Forces Ministry did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Any French organization with French army reservists among its members can obtain 'National Defence Partner' status. Several former volunteers contacted or identified by Mediapart are former soldiers, or reservists, such as François-Xavier Gicquel, SOSCO’s Director of Operations, who was forced to resign from the Front National after giving a Nazi salute to commemorate the death of Benito Mussolini in 2012.

The Defence Partner label does not confer any particular privileges, but it does give SOSCO a certain establishment respectability, despite its ongoing criticism of France's policy in Syria. France, the NGO says, has let the jihadists take over and wants to see Bashar al-Assad toppled.

“The topic was never mentioned,” says Édith Gueugneau, a Socialist Party mayor and former MP who was at the time one of the four parliamentarians on the Military Reserve's High Council – the body normally responsible for discussing which organisations become National Defence Partners – when SOSCO was given the status. “I think it was reserved for the circle very close to the president of the Republic [Emmanuel Macron] and the minister [Le Drian]. It obviously stuck out to us, and we asked for explanations. But, personally, I never got any answers."

The press service of the Armed Forces Ministry told Mediapart that it “had decided not to renew the partnership with SOS Chrétiens d'Orient, which will end in 2020,” without giving the reason why. “Maybe we were finally listened to,” says Gueugneau.

Back in Mahardeh, the NGO’s real agenda has been clear for a while now, according to the activist Chams, who said: “The SOS team came to be seen as an organization affiliated with or supported by the regime.”

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• The original French version of this report can be found here.

 English version by Frank Andrews

Editing by Michael Streeter