Clarissa Ward of CNN Appears Again on the Afghanistan Conflict

Clarissa Ward had 4 days to atone for sleep and see her two sons, ages 1 and three, at her mother and father’ residence in France. Then she was off once more, again to work, making her means via Qatar to Pakistan, the place she reported from the Afghanistan border.

Ms. Ward, CNN’s chief worldwide correspondent, was a center-stage broadcast reporter within the final days of the battle in Afghanistan as she delivered her accounts, usually with gunfire ringing within the background, on what it was like in Kabul within the usually chaotic ultimate days of America’s longest battle. Alongside together with her crew, she subsisted on eggs, cookies and Clif Bars whereas overlaying the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban’s sudden return to energy. At occasions, 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 ideal 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 sequence of townhouses on Manhattan’s Higher East Facet, which her mom renovated and flipped. Then it was onto the elite British boarding faculties 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 notice there was a world radically totally different from every part she knew, a world that appeared poorly understood in the USA 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 folks again residence,” she wrote in her guide.

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, capturing video herself and sneaking the footage overseas on reminiscence playing cards stitched into her underwear. Her protection earned a Peabody Award.

“It’s an artwork and a talent, and it requires plenty of expertise to make the judgments that you’ll want to make to do that protection safely, frankly, since you simply want to have the ability to learn a troublesome state of affairs,” 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 folks.”

Ms. Ward joined CNN in 2015 and returned to Syria, once more undercover, making her one of many few Western journalists behind insurgent traces. In 2018, she was promoted to chief worldwide correspondent, changing Christiane Amanpour, who had moved on to an anchor position 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 changed into 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 type of quiet Sunday afternoon,” she stated within the interview.

Firstly of the month, she was on the entrance traces with U.S.-allied Afghan troops in Kandahar. Three days later, the Taliban took 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 had been simply not any longer in preventing this battle.”

By Aug. 14, Ms. Ward and her crew had moved on to a fortified compound in Kabul. They had been hoping for a break within the motion when Taliban troops arrived.

“By breakfast time, we knew they had been on the gates,” she stated. “Within the afternoon, they began to make their means into town.”

On Aug. 16, wearing a full-length black abaya, she reported from a avenue stuffed with Taliban revelers outdoors the U.S. Embassy. “They’re simply chanting ‘Loss of life to America,’” she stated, going through the CNN digital camera, “however they appear pleasant on the similar time. It’s completely 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 choice this 12 months to go away his Houston residence throughout a winter storm when a lot of the state misplaced electrical energy: “Moderately than working off to Cancun in powerful occasions, @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 changed into 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 means, form or type, I’m all the time just a little uncomfortable if you get form of shoehorned into the narrative one way or the other,” Ms. Ward stated.

One other report, broadcast stay as she stood amongst Taliban members in Kabul, underlined a selected 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 ladies too fearful to go away their homes and others frantically looking for a means overseas. From outdoors Kabul’s Hamid Karzai Worldwide Airport on Aug. 18, Ms. Ward reported that Taliban fighters had beat folks attempting to flee with truncheons and fired on crowds.

Her latest reviews from Afghanistan introduced her new consideration: Her Instagram follower rely shot as much as 250,000, from 60,000, in every 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 USA 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. airplane take off,” she stated on the air that day. “How on earth are you going to evacuate 50,000 folks within the subsequent two weeks? It simply, it may possibly’t occur.”

Days later, President Biden stated the USA had helped evacuate greater than 70,000 folks from Aug. 14 to Aug. 24. The New York Instances reported final week that greater than 123,000 folks had been airlifted overseas since July.

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 about 10 hours.” On the time, she added, she didn’t see how the USA 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 a very powerful 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 youngsters and husband, Philipp von Bernstorff, a German rely and businessman whom she met at a Moscow feast 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 immediately 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 offer a voice to these folks and say that is how they really feel.”

She stated she would proceed overlaying Afghanistan. The Taliban, for now, are “speaking the speak” by way of not violating ladies’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 girls’s rights or ladies’s training, we must be telling that story. And I really feel very, very strongly about that.”