CNN’s Clarissa Ward confirmed Tuesday evening that her recent story on the release of a Syrian prisoner was, in fact, about a Bashar al-Assad regime torturer, discussing for nearly four minutes how the blunder from the outlet highlighted the “complexities” of the Syrian war.
Ward and her team at the outlet published a video on Dec. 11 showing the group entering a prison allegedly “deep in the belly of the regime’s air force intelligence headquarters,” where they found a solo prisoner left in a concrete building. However, following the release of the footage, a Syrian fact-checking organization called Verify-Sy refuted the network’s claim that the prisoner found was a “rebel fighter” named “Adel Ghurbal.”
On “The Lead with Jake Tapper,”the host, Tapper, said Ward had “kept up” with the story after the network discovered they had been given a false identity, asking the international correspondent what further information she was aware of.
“Well, Jake, obviously from the minute we witnessed this astonishing moment, we’re trying to dig up more information on this prisoner,” Ward began. “We weren’t able to find anything with the name he gave us, but in the days after our report aired, CNN started talking to people in the city of Homs who told us that his real name is in fact Salama Mohammed Salama. He is reportedly a lieutenant in the Air Force Intelligence Directorate. He is also known as Abu Hamza.”
“He was known to run Air Force intelligence checkpoints in the city of Homs. He’s accused of extorting and harassing people. We have now been able to corroborate the information those residents gave us with a photograph of Salama, and it’s clear that far from being an ordinary guy as he presented himself to be, he was a part of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime who somehow found himself in prison,” Ward said.
Ward continued to explain how the outlet was still unaware of why the man was arrested, citing that Verify-Sy claimed he had an alleged dispute “over profit sharing of extorted funds with a higher-ranking officer.” Tapper then pressed the journalist about how the story highlights the “complexity with regards to Syria’s prisons and detention centers.”
“I mean, listen, Jake, it certainly captures the complexity with regards to Syria’s prisons and detention centers. This regime collapsed with lightning speed. Thousands of prisoners were released, and the reality is that we know almost nothing about who was held, on what charges, where all these detainees have gone now,” Ward said. “And when the guard, who was one of the rebels, when he opens that cell door, you can see the shock on his face. He literally said to the man, ‘I had no idea you were in there for all these days.’ Assad used these prisons as a weapon to hold on to power and this industrial-scale detention of his opponents.”
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“But this clearly shows it wasn’t just opponents who were incarcerated, and it wasn’t only opponents who fell afoul of the regime. Also important to note, we visited three separate detention facilities while we were in Damascus,” Ward said.
Ward went on to describe how she and her team had found “vast amounts of documentation” that were “largely unprotected” and had been destroyed or burned by the regime of former Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad. In response, Tapper asked Ward to discuss how the story “speaks to the challenges of reporting in war zones and chaotic situations” following criticism of the network.
“I think we need to be humble about the challenges. It is a chaotic atmosphere. There is a huge amount of flux,” Ward said. “It is very difficult to verify information in real time on the ground. I mean, we spent one day at the notorious Sednaya prison as rescue workers were desperately hammering away, trying to find an underground red section of the prison that didn’t even ultimately exist, and they spent days on that search. Stories take unexpected turns.”
“We continue to report them, you know, without fear or favor, but it is immensely challenging in this environment, and I think we need to be transparent about that,” Ward said.
Reports of Al-Assad fleeing the country to Russia surfaced on Dec. 8, after rebels and the Syrian army announced the end to his 24-year-old regime. Since the former president’s fall from power, the country has begun attempting to return to normalcy, with banks and shops in the foreign country’s capital, Damascus, reopening on Dec. 10, according to CBS News.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/CNN/”The Lead with Jake Tapper”)
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