White Helmets (Syria Civil Defence)

The Situation

The White Helmets (Syria Civil Defence) is a volunteer rescue organization conducting search and rescue in active conflict zones across northwest Syria. Having saved over 120,000 lives since founding, they operate under some of the world's most dangerous and logistically complex conditions. Failure is not an operational inconvenience. It costs lives.

Real-time coordination across dispersed field teams relied on messaging apps and radio. There was no centralized command layer, no early warning system, and no unified situational picture. The result was a reactive organization in an environment that demanded the opposite.

What We Did

One Primero built a mobile coordination platform and AI-powered early warning system designed specifically for conflict-zone rescue operations.

The platform gave field teams structured incident reporting and real-time dispatch, replacing fragmented voice coordination. Team leaders gained a unified operational picture: active incidents, team locations, and available resources in a single view.

The early warning layer identified patterns in threat data and surfaced escalating risks before they became active incidents. Both systems were built to operate under the connectivity constraints that conflict zones impose. Reliability in those conditions is a design requirement, not an assumption.