Girl Who Cried for Mother Now Reads English Cnn
Clarissa Ward of CNN Looks Back on the Afghanistan State of war
The network'due south main international contributor, i of the most visible reporters during the withdrawal of U.Southward. troops, decided to go a reporter afterward an epiphany on nine/11.
Clarissa Ward had four days to catch up on slumber and see her two sons, ages 1 and 3, at her parents' home in France. So she was off again, back to work, making her way through Qatar to Islamic republic of pakistan, where she reported from the Afghanistan border.
Ms. Ward, CNN'due south main international correspondent, was a heart-phase circulate reporter equally she delivered her accounts, oftentimes with gunfire ringing in the background, on what information technology was similar in Kabul in the ofttimes chaotic final days of America's longest war. Along with her crew, she subsisted on eggs, cookies and Clif Confined while covering the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban's sudden return to power. At times, she couldn't help showing emotion on the air.
"I can't become and sit with an Afghan woman crying her heart out that her daughters are going to take to grow upward in Taliban-led Afghanistan and exist only unmoved by it," Ms. Ward, 41, said in a video interview from France last week. "And I don't think it makes me a bottom reporter that I am moved by it."
Her chore has included assignments in other conflict zones, including in Baghdad and Aleppo, Syria, often putting her in danger — and at a great distance from her privileged youth.
As she recounts in her 2020 memoir, "On All Fronts," she was born in London to an American mother, an interior designer, and a British begetter, an investment banker. She had 11 different nannies past historic period 8. Home, for a time, was a series of townhouses on Manhattan'southward Upper Due east Side, which her mother renovated and flipped. Then it was onto the elite British boarding schools Godstowe and Wycombe Abbey.
The idea of pursuing a career in journalism occurred to her on Sept. 11, 2001, when she was in her senior year at Yale, where her major was comparative literature. The attacks made her realize there was a world radically different from everything she knew, a world that seemed poorly understood in the The states and Europe.
"It sounds presumptuous, only I knew I had to go to the forepart lines, to hear the stories of people who lived there and tell them to the people back home," she wrote in her book.
After an internship at CNN, she studied Standard arabic and got on-camera experience in Beirut, Lebanese republic and Baghdad as a reporter for Play tricks News. She left for ABC, where she worked out of Moscow and Beijing, and was hired away in 2011 by David Rhodes, so the president of CBS News. She posed as a tourist to slip into war-torn Syria, shooting video herself and sneaking the footage out of the state on memory cards stitched into her underwear. Her coverage earned a Peabody Honour.
"It'due south an art and a skill, and it requires a lot of feel to make the judgments that you demand to make to do this coverage safely, frankly, because you just need to be able to read a difficult situation," said Mr. Rhodes, who is at present a group director of the British media company Heaven.
"There are single-digit numbers of people globally that are really practiced at this," he added. "She is ane of those people."
Ms. Ward joined CNN in 2015 and returned to Syria, again underground, making her one of the few Western journalists backside insubordinate lines. In 2018, she was promoted to chief international correspondent, replacing Christiane Amanpour, who had moved on to an anchor role at CNN and PBS. Ms. Ward was presently reporting from Afghanistan's Taliban-controlled Balkh province. For her latest reporting tour, Ms. Ward arrived in the country on Aug. 2, with a plan to stay 2 weeks.
"I never would accept guessed that those two weeks would have turned into 3 weeks, and nosotros would be there for the fall of Kabul, and the fall of Kabul would take place in a thing of hours, with hardly a shot fired on a sort of placidity Sunday afternoon," she said in the interview.
At the start of the month, she was at the front lines with U.Due south.-allied Afghan troops in Kandahar. Three days later, the Taliban took the city.
"I reached out to one of the soldiers on WhatsApp, maxim, 'What happened to you?'" she said. "He but wrote: 'Nosotros left.' I think that was the beginning of me actually understanding that the reason this was unraveling then quickly, in no small office, was because Afghan security forces were just not interested any longer in fighting this fight."
By Aug. 14, Ms. Ward and her coiffure had moved on to a fortified compound in Kabul. They were hoping for a suspension in the action when Taliban troops arrived.
"By breakfast time, nosotros knew they were at the gates," she said. "In the afternoon, they started to make their way into the urban center."
On Aug. 16, dressed in a full-length black abaya, she reported from a street filled with Taliban revelers exterior the U.Due south. Embassy. "They're simply chanting 'Expiry to America,'" she said, facing the CNN camera, "but they seem friendly at the same time. Information technology's utterly bizarre."
Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, apace pounced, posting a video of Ms. Ward'southward written report on Twitter with the comment, "Is there an enemy of America for whom CNN won't cheerlead?" (The CNN corporate communications section speedily responded from its own Twitter account with a reference to Mr. Cruz's decision this year to leave his Houston home during a winter storm when much of the state lost electricity: "Rather than running off to Cancun in tough times, @clarissaward is risking her life to tell the world what's happening.") The shading of her work by the senator and other conservatives highlighted how journalists may find their work or statements turned into political talking points while reporting from conflict zones in a time of deep polarization.
"Every bit a person who is emphatically not involved in political coverage in any way, shape or form, I'm always a little uncomfortable when yous go kind of shoehorned into the narrative somehow," Ms. Ward said.
Another written report, broadcast alive as she stood among Taliban members in Kabul, underlined a particular challenge she had dealt with before in Afghanistan: "They just told me to stand to the side because I'm a adult female," she told viewers.
Every bit the days wore on, she interviewed women too fearful to leave their houses and others frantically trying to find a way out of the country. From outside Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airdrome on Aug. eighteen, Ms. Ward reported that Taliban fighters had beat people trying to escape with truncheons and fired on crowds.
Her recent reports from Afghanistan brought her new attention: Her Instagram follower count shot upwards to 250,000, from 60,000, in a week. With the increased visibility came the scrutiny of critics on social media and elsewhere, who found fault with her Aug. xx written report expressing skepticism that the United States could pull off the planned mass evacuation.
"I'm sitting hither for 12 hours in the airport, eight hours on the airfield and I haven't seen a single U.S. aeroplane take off," she said on the air that day. "How on earth are you lot going to evacuate fifty,000 people in the adjacent two weeks? It simply, it can't happen."
Days later, President Biden said the U.s.a. had helped evacuate more than 70,000 people from Aug. 14 to Aug. 24. The New York Times reported last week that more 123,000 people had been airlifted out of the country since July.
Ms. Ward defended the Aug. 20 acceleration, saying information technology should exist interpreted in the context of "live, in-the-moment reporting."
"We had been at the airport since 7 a.grand. local," she said. "From 7 to 10 a.yard., we saw three U.South. planes take off with evacuees, but so they abruptly stopped for approximately 10 hours." At the time, she added, she didn't run across how the United States could complete the evacuation in the time information technology had fix for itself.
CNN's president, Jeff Zucker, praised her reporting, citing non only her Afghanistan coverage, but her dispatches this year on the poisoning of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, a military insurrection in Myanmar and the affect of the pandemic on India.
"I'd exist hard pressed to say Clarissa wasn't the most important hire I've made," he said. "She'due south willing to go where most others won't get."
Ms. Ward left Kabul on Aug. xx, along with her crew and Afghans who had worked for CNN, on a flight to Qatar. Prevented from going direct to her London abode because of pandemic restrictions, she was reunited in France with her children and husband, Philipp von Bernstorff, a German count and businessman whom she met at a Moscow dinner party in 2007.
She said she views herself as a reporter who tries to provide viewers with an understanding of what is happening in disharmonize zones, while also capturing the experiences and reactions of those direct affected.
"Information technology'due south non my chore to say whether it has been handled well or non," she said of the troop withdrawal. "It'due south my job to give a voice to those people and say this is how they feel."
She said she would continue covering Afghanistan. The Taliban, for now, are "talking the talk" in terms of not violating women'south rights, she said.
"Our jobs as journalists is to stick around for long enough to find out if they are walking the walk," she said. "If nosotros do start to see retaliation, reprisal killings, walking dorsum of women's rights or women's educational activity, we need to be telling that story. And I feel very, very strongly about that."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/06/business/media/clarissa-ward-cnn-afghanistan.html
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