Clarissa Ward had 4 days to make amends for sleep and see her two sons, ages 1 and three, at her dad and mom’ residence in France. Then she was off once more, again to work, making her method by Qatar to Pakistan, the place she reported from the Afghanistan border.
Ms. Ward, CNN’s chief worldwide correspondent, was a center-stage broadcast reporter as she delivered her accounts, usually with gunfire ringing within the background, on what it was like in Kabul within the usually chaotic remaining days of America’s longest war. Alongside together with her crew, she subsisted on eggs, cookies and Clif Bars whereas protecting the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban’s sudden return to energy. At instances, she couldn’t assist exhibiting emotion on the air.
“I can’t go and sit with an Afghan girl crying her coronary heart out that her daughters are going to need to develop up in Taliban-led Afghanistan and be simply unmoved by it,” Ms. Ward, 41, stated in a video interview from France final week. “And I don’t assume it makes me a lesser reporter that I’m moved by it.”
Her job has included assignments in different battle zones, together with in Baghdad and Aleppo, Syria, usually placing her in peril — and at an important distance from her privileged youth.
As she recounts 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. She had 11 totally different nannies by age 8. Dwelling, for a time, was a collection of townhouses on Manhattan’s Higher East Aspect, which her mom renovated and flipped. Then it was onto the elite British boarding colleges Godstowe and Wycombe Abbey.
The concept of pursuing a profession in journalism occurred to her on Sept. 11, 2001, when she was in her senior 12 months at Yale, the place her main was comparative literature. The assaults made her understand there was a world radically totally different from all the things she knew, a world that appeared poorly understood in the US and Europe.
“It sounds presumptuous, however I knew I needed to go to the entrance traces, to listen to the tales of people that lived there and inform them to the individuals again residence,” she wrote in her e-book.
After an internship at CNN, she studied Arabic and acquired on-camera expertise in Beirut, Lebanon and Baghdad as a reporter for Fox Information. She left for ABC, the place she labored out of Moscow and Beijing, and was employed away in 2011 by David Rhodes, then the president of CBS Information. She posed as a vacationer to slide into war-torn Syria, taking pictures video herself and sneaking the footage in another country on reminiscence playing cards stitched into her underwear. Her coverage earned a Peabody Award.
“It’s an artwork and a talent, and it requires a number of expertise to make the judgments that you should make to do that protection safely, frankly, since you simply want to have the ability to learn a tough scenario,” stated Mr. Rhodes, who’s now a bunch director of the British media firm Sky.
“There are single-digit numbers of individuals globally which might be actually good at this,” he added. “She is a type of individuals.”
Ms. Ward joined CNN in 2015 and returned to Syria, once more undercover, making her one of the few Western journalists behind rebel lines. In 2018, she was promoted to chief worldwide correspondent, changing Christiane Amanpour, who had moved on to an anchor function at CNN and PBS. Ms. Ward was quickly reporting from Afghanistan’s Taliban-controlled Balkh province. For her newest reporting tour, Ms. Ward arrived within the nation on Aug. 2, with a plan to remain two weeks.
“I by no means would have guessed that these two weeks would have become three weeks, and we might be there for the autumn of Kabul, and the autumn of Kabul would happen in a matter of hours, with hardly a shot fired on a form of quiet Sunday afternoon,” she stated within the interview.
In the beginning of the month, she was on the entrance traces with U.S.-allied Afghan troops in Kandahar. Three days later, the Taliban took the town.
“I reached out to one of many troopers on WhatsApp, saying, ‘What occurred to you?’” she stated. “He simply wrote: ‘We left.’ I believe that was the start of me actually understanding that the explanation this was unraveling so shortly, in no small half, was as a result of Afghan safety forces have been simply not any longer in preventing this struggle.”
By Aug. 14, Ms. Ward and her crew had moved on to a fortified compound in Kabul. They have been hoping for a break within the motion when Taliban troops arrived.
“By breakfast time, we knew they have been on the gates,” she stated. “Within the afternoon, they began to make their method into the town.”
On Aug. 16, wearing a full-length black abaya, she reported from a avenue stuffed with Taliban revelers exterior the U.S. Embassy. “They’re simply chanting ‘Demise to America,’” she stated, going through the CNN digital camera, “however they appear pleasant on the similar time. It’s totally weird.”
Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, shortly pounced, posting a video of Ms. Ward’s report on Twitter with the remark, “Is there an enemy of America for whom CNN received’t cheerlead?” (The CNN company communications division shortly responded from its own Twitter account with a reference to Mr. Cruz’s resolution this 12 months to leave his Houston home during a winter storm when a lot of the state misplaced electrical energy: “Moderately than operating off to Cancun in powerful instances, @clarissaward is risking her life to inform the world what’s taking place.”) The shading of her work by the senator and different conservatives highlighted how journalists might discover their work or statements become political speaking factors whereas reporting from battle zones in a time of deep polarization.
“As an individual who’s emphatically not concerned in political protection in any method, form or type, I’m all the time a bit of uncomfortable while you get form of shoehorned into the narrative in some way,” Ms. Ward stated.
Another report, broadcast stay as she stood amongst Taliban members in Kabul, underlined a specific problem she had handled earlier than in Afghanistan: “They only instructed me to face to the facet as a result of I’m a lady,” she instructed viewers.
As the times wore on, she interviewed girls too fearful to depart their homes and others frantically looking for a method in another country. From exterior Kabul’s Hamid Karzai Worldwide Airport on Aug. 18, Ms. Ward reported that Taliban fighters had beat individuals attempting to flee with truncheons and fired on crowds.
Her current studies from Afghanistan introduced her new consideration: Her Instagram follower depend shot as much as 250,000, from 60,000, in per week. With the elevated visibility got here the scrutiny of critics on social media and elsewhere, who discovered fault together with her Aug. 20 report expressing skepticism that the US may pull off the deliberate mass evacuation.
“I’m sitting right here for 12 hours within the airport, eight hours on the airfield and I haven’t seen a single U.S. aircraft take off,” she stated on the air that day. “How on earth are you going to evacuate 50,000 individuals within the subsequent two weeks? It simply, it could’t occur.”
Days later, President Biden said the US had helped evacuate greater than 70,000 individuals from Aug. 14 to Aug. 24. The New York Occasions reported final week that greater than 123,000 individuals had been airlifted in another country since July.
Perceive the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan
Who’re the Taliban? The Taliban arose in 1994 amid the turmoil that got here after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, together with floggings, amputations and mass executions, to implement their guidelines. Right here’s extra on their origin story and their record as rulers.
Ms. Ward defended the Aug. 20 dispatch, saying it needs to be interpreted within the context of “stay, in-the-moment reporting.”
“We had been on the airport since 7 a.m. native,” she stated. “From 7 to 10 a.m., we noticed three U.S. planes take off with evacuees, however then they abruptly stopped for roughly 10 hours.” On the time, she added, she didn’t see how the US may full the evacuation within the time it had set for itself.
CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker, praised her reporting, citing not solely her Afghanistan protection, however her dispatches this 12 months on the poisoning of the Russian opposition chief Alexei Navalny, a navy coup in Myanmar and the impression of the pandemic on India.
“I’d be laborious pressed to say Clarissa wasn’t an important rent I’ve made,” he stated. “She’s keen to go the place most others received’t go.”
Ms. Ward left Kabul on Aug. 20, alongside together with her crew and Afghans who had labored for CNN, on a flight to Qatar. Prevented from going straight to her London residence due to pandemic restrictions, she was reunited in France together with her kids and husband, Philipp von Bernstorff, a German depend and businessman whom she met at a Moscow banquet in 2007.
She stated she views herself as a reporter who tries to supply viewers with an understanding of what’s taking place in battle zones, whereas additionally capturing the experiences and reactions of these straight affected.
“It’s not my job to say whether or not it has been dealt with effectively or not,” she stated of the troop withdrawal. “It’s my job to present a voice to these individuals and say that is how they really feel.”
She stated she would proceed protecting Afghanistan. The Taliban, for now, are “speaking the discuss” by way of not violating girls’s rights, she stated.
“Our jobs as journalists is to stay round for lengthy sufficient to search out out if they’re strolling the stroll,” she stated. “If we do begin to see retaliation, reprisal killings, strolling again of ladies’s rights or girls’s training, we must be telling that story. And I really feel very, very strongly about that.”