Clarissa Ward had 4 days to sleep at her dad and mom’ home in France and watch her two sons, ages 1 and three. She then went again to work once more, making her means from Qatar to Pakistan, the place she reported from the Afghanistan border.
Ward, CNN’s chief worldwide correspondent, was a center-stage broadcast reporter within the ultimate days of the conflict in Afghanistan, as she delivered her accounts with gunshots usually within the background, just like these in Kabul within the usually chaotic ultimate days. . America’s longest conflict. With his crew, he subsisted on eggs, cookies, and cliff bars, overlaying the US withdrawal and the Taliban’s sudden return to energy. At occasions, she could not assist exhibiting emotion within the air.
Ward, 41, informed France final week: “I can’t sit down with an Afghan woman and cry from her heart that her daughters have grown up in Taliban-led Afghanistan and will not be affected at all.” “And I don’t think that makes me a lesser reporter that I’ve been affected by.”
Her job consists of assignments in different battle zones together with Baghdad and Aleppo, Syria, which frequently places her in danger – and at an amazing distance from – her privileged youth.
As she explains in her 2020 memoir, “On All Fronts,” she was born in London to an American mom, an inside designer, and a British father, an funding banker. By the age of 8 she had 11 completely different nannies. The home was, for a time, a sequence of city homes on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which her mom renovated and flipped. It was then on the elite British boarding colleges Godstow and Wycombe Abbey.
The concept of pursuing a profession in journalism got here to her on September 11, 2001, when she was in her senior yr at Yale University, the place her main was comparative literature. The assaults made her understand that there was a world that was essentially completely different from what she knew, a world that was poorly understood in America and Europe.
“It sounds strange, but I knew I had to go to the front lines to hear the stories of the people who lived there and tell them to the people back home,” she wrote in her ebook.
After an internship at CNN, she studied Arabic and gained on-camera expertise as a reporter for Fox News in Beirut, Lebanon and Baghdad. She left for ABC, the place she labored out of Moscow and Beijing, and was employed by CBS News president David Rhodes in 2011. He shot video of himself as a vacationer slipping into war-torn Syria and sneaking footage overseas on reminiscence playing cards stitched into his underwear. His protection earned him a Peabody Award.
Rhodes stated, “It’s an art and a skill, and it takes a lot of experience to make the decisions you need to make in order to do this coverage safely, clearly, because you only need one.” It requires having the ability to learn a troublesome scenario.” Now Group Director of British media firm Sky.
“Globally there are single digits in the number of people who are really good at it,” he stated. “He’s one of those people.”
Ward joined CNN in 2015 and returned to Syria, once more in secret, making him one of many few Western journalists behind insurgent traces. In 2018, she was promoted to chief worldwide correspondent, changing Christiane Amanpour, who moved on to an anchor position at CNN and PBS. Ward was quickly reporting from the Taliban-controlled Balkh province of Afghanistan. For her newest reporting tour, Ward arrived within the nation on August 2 with plans to remain for 2 weeks.
“I never would have guessed that they would have turned two weeks into three weeks, and we would be there for the fall of Kabul, and the fall of Kabul in a matter of hours, hardly fired in a way on a quiet Sunday afternoon. , “He stated.
Earlier within the month, she was on the entrance traces with US-allied Afghan troops in Kandahar. Three days later the Taliban captured the town.
“I reached out to one of the soldiers on WhatsApp and said, ‘What happened to you?'” he stated. “He just wrote: ‘We’re gone.’ I think it was just the beginning for me to really understand why this was not resolved so quickly, in no small part, because the Afghan security forces were no longer interested in fighting this battle.”
By 14 August, Ward and his crew had moved to a fortified compound in Kabul. They had been anticipating a break in motion when Taliban troops arrived.
“By breakfast time, we knew they were at the door,” she stated. “In the afternoon, they started making their way into town.”
On August 16, she wearing a full-length black abaya, reported from a road filled with Talibanis exterior the US embassy. “They’re just chanting ‘Death to America,'” she stated whereas dealing with the CNN digicam, “but they seem friendly at the same time. It’s absolutely bizarre.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, rapidly tweeted, posting a video of Ward’s report back to Twitter, with the remark, “Does America have any enemies for whom CNN won’t cheerlead?” (CNN’s Department of Corporate Communications responded rapidly this yr in reference to Cruise’s choice to go away his Houston residence throughout a winter storm from his personal Twitter account: “Instead of rushing to Cancun in tough times, @clariswordworld risking his own life to tell the U.S. what’s going on.”) The shaming of his work by senators and different conservatives highlights how journalists do their work when reporting from battle zones in occasions of deep polarization. Or how one can flip statements into political dialogue factors. .
“As someone who is not strongly involved in political coverage in any way, shape or form, I always get a little uncomfortable when you get into the narrative somehow,” Ward stated.
Another report, broadcast dwell as she stood amongst Taliban members in Kabul, outlines a selected problem she had beforehand handled in Afghanistan: “They informed me to face up simply because I’m a lady, ‘ he informed the viewers.
As the times handed, she interviewed girls who had been afraid to go away their houses and others looking for a means overseas. From exterior Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport on 18 August, Ward reported that Taliban fighters had overwhelmed up these making an attempt to flee and opened hearth on the group.
His current stories from Afghanistan caught his new consideration: his Instagram followers grew from 60,000 to 250,000 in per week. With the elevated visibility got here scrutiny from critics on social media and elsewhere, who discovered fault with their August 20 report, which solid doubts that the US might pull off the deliberate mass evacuation.
“I’ve been here at the airport for 12 hours, eight hours in the airfield and I haven’t seen a single American plane take off,” she stated on Air that day. “How are you going to evacuate 50,000 individuals within the subsequent two weeks? It simply cannot be like that.”
A number of days later, President Joe Biden stated the US had helped evacuate greater than 70,000 individuals from August 14 to August 24. The New York Times reported final week that greater than 123,000 individuals have been evacuated from the nation since July.
Ward defended the August 20 dispatch, saying it needs to be interpreted within the context of “live, in-the-moment reporting.”
“We were at the airport since 7 a.m. local,” she stated. “From 7 am to 10 am, we saw three US planes take off with an evacuation, but then they came to a sudden halt for about 10 hours.” At the time, she stated, she didn’t see how the US might full the evacuation within the time it had set for itself.
CNN President Jeff Zucker praised his reporting, citing not solely his Afghanistan protection, however the poisoning of Russian opposition chief Alexei Navalny this yr, a navy coup in Myanmar and the influence of the pandemic on India.
“I would find it hard to say that Clarissa wasn’t the most important fare I’ve ever made,” he stated. “He’s ready to go where most others won’t.”
Ward flew to Qatar on August 20 from Kabul together with his crew and Afghans working for CNN. Prevented from going straight to her London residence because of pandemic restrictions, she is reunited in France together with her youngsters and husband, Philipp von Bernstorff, a German depend and businessman, whom she met at a Moscow ceremonial dinner in 2007.
She stated she sees herself as a reporter who tries to provide viewers a greater understanding of what’s taking place in battle zones, in addition to seize the experiences and reactions of these straight affected.
Of the military’s withdrawal, he stated, “It is not my job to say whether it has been handled well or not.” “It’s my job to give those people a voice and say how they feel.”
Ward stated she would proceed to cowl Afghanistan. He stated the Taliban are “talking” about not violating girls’s rights for now.
“Our job as journalists is to stay around long enough to find out if they are walking,” she stated. “If we start to back down from retaliation, retaliatory killings, women’s rights or women’s education, we need to tell that story. And I feel very, very strongly about that.”
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With inputs from TheIndianEXPRESS
