Journalist Clarissa Ward was a part of a CNN workforce that reported it had found and helped to free a person nonetheless locked up in a Syrian jail, apparently unaware that Bashar Assad’s regime had fallen.
CNN’s cameras captured the second Ward got here throughout the person, cloaked in a blanket in a locked cell of an in any other case already-emptied jail, and assisted him out into the open air.
“We have been seeking to do a narrative in regards to the tens of hundreds of Syrians who’ve vanished into Assad’s dungeons, and significantly additionally about one American journalist, Austin Tice, who was disappeared,” Ward later reported on CNN.
“However once we began to look inside one facility, we discovered one thing that we by no means might have imagined,” she stated.
After a guard shoots the lock off the door, Ward is proven coming into the cell, the place a darkish blanketed type is seen within the nook.
“Is there somebody there?” Ward asks a number of instances. When a guard approaches, a person emerges from beneath the duvet, together with his fingers raised.
In response to a CNN translation, the person stated he had been within the cell for 3 months.
“You’re OK, you’re OK,” Ward tells him. She presents him water whereas he clutches her hand, taking massive gulps.
As they stroll him out into the daylight, he stares up on the sky in reduction.
In response to Ward, the captors fled throughout the fall of Damascus, leaving the person with no meals or water for not less than 4 days. He stated he had been taken from his residence, interrogated about his cellphone and crushed.
The person, apparently in shock, is assisted right into a car by paramedics after talking with the workforce about his ordeal.
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“In almost twenty years as a journalist, this was some of the extraordinary moments I’ve witnessed,” Ward said of the incident on social media.
A insurgent offensive overthrew Assad’s regime on Sunday, ending the Assad household’s 50-year rule. The insurgent forces have since begun emptying Syria’s political prisons.
