An award-winning CNN reporter revealed that she and her crew taken captive in Sudan in a terrifying, two-day ordeal as they were reporting on the humanitarian crisis during the civil war in the region.
Chief International Correspondent Clarissa Ward, 44, recounted in an op-ed for CNN published Wednesday how she and her crew were detained by a militia just hours after arriving earlier this month in North Darfur.
“We had come to Darfur to report on the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, never intending to become part of the story,” Ward wrote. “But months of planning came apart in moments when we were detained by a militia led by the man everyone called the general.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The Peabody-winning reporter said as fighters surrounded their vehicle with “rifles drawn,” the “general” shouted at the crew to not film.
Scott McWhinnie, the cameraman, and Brent Swails, a producer, worked to reassure the angry leader that they weren’t filming.
But to their shock, the general whipped out a gun and fired it at a bird.
“I was relieved that the gun wasn’t pointed at us but still disturbed by his erratic behavior,” Ward wrote.
While the crew’s driver was hauled off in chains to a town jail, the crew was interrogated for three hours in a windowless room by eight men who asked questions such as: “Why are you here?” “Who sent you here?” “Who gave you permission to be here?”
“We answered their questions but got no information in return: who these men were or what they wanted with us,” Ward wrote.
After the questioning, they were ordered back into their vehicle and told to follow a convoy ahead of them. But at one point the general stopped the vehicle, yelled, and shot his gun.
“The goal, presumably, to scare us. It worked,” Ward said.
Ward told their captors in Arabic that they were frightened, and that she was a mother of three boys.
“The general looked disinterested, but I could see the security chief’s face soften.
‘Don’t be frightened, don’t be frightened,’ he assured me, ‘We are human beings,’” Ward said.
She said over the next two days, the crew was held by the general, the security chief and around a dozen militants, some who appeared to be no older than 14.
But on the final day of their ordeal, the general and the security chief appeared to be in “good spirits.”
He informed them that they would be freed, saying, “We thought you were spies but now you can go home.”
She said she and McWhinnie then posed for a photo-op with the security chief. The picture, which showed Ward standing “awkwardly” in a red scarf and blue shirt, a militant in camo and McWhinnie in a black shirt, was taken in their “makeshift prison.”
They went home afterward, and never made it to their intended destination of Tawila for their reporting assignment.
“As a journalist, one never wants to become the story,” Ward said. “And yet our experience is instructive in understanding the complexities of the conflict in Darfur and the challenges of getting food and aid to those who need it most and getting the story out to the world.”
