CNN reporter Clarissa Ward has opened up about the 48 hours she and her team were held captive in North Darfur, describing a “clawing sense of panic” as a rival militia interrogated them for hours in an open-air setting.
In a piece for CNN, Ward detailed the fear she felt throughout the harrowing experience. “Sleep, when it came, was a mercy, a reprieve from the clawing sense of panic at not knowing when I would be able to see my children again,” Ward wrote.
“As a journalist, one never wants to become the story. And yet our experience is instructive in understanding the complexities of the conflict in Darfur and the challenges of getting food and aid to those who need it most and getting the story out to the world,” she continued.
Ward and her team originally travelled to North Darfur in an attempt to get to the town of Tawila, a home for the more than 100,000 people who have been displaced by fighting in the city of El Fasher, Sudan. Tawila is currently under the control of SLM-AW, a faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement that is a neutral party in the midst of the Sudan’s ongoing civil war.
However, the CNN team, which also included cameraman Scott McWhinnie and producer Brent Swails, never made it to Tawila.
When the team arrived at the agreed upon meeting place in Abu Gamra, they couldn’t find their hosts. Instead, they were taken in by a rival militia that interrogated the team for three hours in a windowless room. “We answered their questions but got no information in return: who these men were or what they wanted with us,” Ward wrote.
The CNN team was then taken further into Darfur. After Ward tried to appeal to her captors by telling them she was a mother, the security chief demanded that each CNN member give him their partner’s cell phone number. He then called each of the partners and told them that their loved one was safe but “we would be imprisoned for many years if they spoke about it to anyone.”
The team was detained out in the open under acacia trees. The detention lasted for roughly 48 hours with guards as young as 14 years old watching over them. On the last day of their detention, the general and security chief disappeared for “about six hours.” When they returned, they declared that they no longer believed the CNN reporters were spies and that they would be allowed to return home.
“A wave of relief crashed through my body. There were smiles and handshakes with our captors. We posed awkwardly for a photograph at the edge of the mat that had been our makeshift prison,” Ward wrote.
Throughout her recollection of her imprisonment, Ward reflects on the brutal conditions of the Sudan that contributed to making her situation feel hopeless. She chronicles the lack of paved roads, and at one point she reveals that she passed six cell phone towers, none of which worked. Repeatedly, she ties her own feelings of panic and hopelessness to how the people of this war-torn region must consistently feel.
“The world doesn’t see us, the help doesn’t come,” Ward writes at one point, quoting the security chief who held her captive. Ultimately, Ward and her team were allowed to return home unharmed.
