The privilege of witnessing history comes at a price
Reporter Clarissa Ward spends her life heading towards regions of conflict for her job with CNN. On All Fronts is her account of a career which she says is not about thrillseeking but a desire to connect with people and tell stories
Rarely a week goes by without me being asked why I do what I do. What makes someone choose to go to war zones, to put their life in danger. “Your family must go out of their minds with worry,” they say.
For more than 15 years, I have been covering conflicts and crises across the world, most recently as CNN’S chief international correspondent. From Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan and Eastern
Ukraine and the Central African Republic, my career has been devoted to covering some of the toughest and most dangerous stories. I have lived in Beirut and Baghdad and Beijing and Moscow.
From my utterly biased perspective, it is the greatest job there is and I can’t imagine doing anything else. During the course of my career, I have seen the worst of humanity and the best of humanity. In my loftier moments, I marvel at the privilege it has afforded me of witnessing history as it unfolds, of occasionally giving a voice to someone who might not have one or telling a story that might impact a life.
Which is not to say that it comes without risks and challenges. I have been in many precarious situations. I have been blindfolded and interrogated and groped by pro-russian separatists. I have survived numerous bombings carried out by Al Qaeda in
Iraq. I have run for my life from an onslaught of bullets fired by Syrian soldiers. I have been sexually accosted by the son a prominent Middle East dictator. Much more painfully, I have seen too many friends kidnapped or killed, or simply disappeared.
Perhaps no story has affected me more than the Syrian civil war. From my first assignment there, I was hooked. It was November 2011 and the popular uprising against President Bashar al Assad was reaching a boiling point. I was on my own in Damascus on my first assignment as a correspondent for CBS News. As a dual citizen with a UK passport, I had managed to obtain a tourist visa, but my producer had not. And I had no cameraman. I had little experience shooting video and did not underestimate the risks of embarking on such an assignment alone. But I’d been to Syria many times before as a tourist, spoke enough Arabic to get around on my own, and was desperate to cover the story.
Opposition activists had brought me to a funeral in the Damascus suburb of Douma. I looked down at the swell of mourners moving towards me. A coffin was held aloft, touched and blessed by a thousand hands as it swayed down the street. The men carrying it were sweating despite the cool afternoon, pressed in on all sides by chanting protestors. Some of the protestors had caught sight of me and my camera as I had tried to catch up with the cortege and cleared the way. They wanted their story of resistance told. I had struggled through the crowd and jumped on to a flat-bed truck a few yards ahead of the coffin.
“I can’t screw up this shot, I can’t screw up this shot,” I whispered to myself.
Lying in the coffin was a 16-year old boy who had been shot by Syrian security forces the day before. He had become the latest martyr of the rapidly growing uprising.
I took a deep breath and balanced the small point and shoot tourism camera on top of the cab of the truck, willing my hands to stay completely still as the coffin approached. I could see the face of the dead boy now, smooth and grey, his eyes closed, his lips parted a fraction. And then he was gone, carried off on the wave of angry mourners.
Hundreds of people now poured in from all directions. The women marched together at the back of the procession. Rows and rows of them waved banners with slogans
I didn’t realise that I would have my heart broken in a hundred different ways, that I would lose friends and watch children die and grow to feel like an alien in my own skin
demanding justice and the overthrow of the regime of Bashar al Assad. Someone started beating a drum and the crowd hoisted a boy onto a man’s shoulders so that he could lead the chant. “Oh Bashar, you liar,” he chanted, “to hell with you and your speech. Freedom is at the door.”
“Yalla irhal, ya Bashar,” the crowd chanted, clapping rhythmically. “Get out Bashar!”
I looked over the sea of people, cheering and chanting, hands with cell phones raised in the air to capture the protest and beam it out on social media. The crisp November air crackled with the energy and excitement of their voices.
Protests like this were routinely met with a hail of bullets. I was petrified and at the same time enthralled by the bravery of those around me. To this day, I wonder how many of them ended up as casualties of Syria’s war, killed or maimed or simply swallowed up and disappeared.
There’s a common misconception that all war correspondents are adrenalin junkies. I thrive less on danger than I do on connecting with people and telling stories.
Growing up between the US and the UK (my mother is American, and my father is British) I had always wanted to be an actress. I was a member of the National Youth Theatre before moving back to the US to study comparative literature at Yale University. At college, I acted in student films and published a magazine with my friends. My idea of being daring was attending “naked parties” where you disrobed completely at the door and put your clothing in a paper bag until you left.
And then, in the first week of the first semester of my final year, everything changed. I was in a deep sleep when my best friend, Ben, called me.
“Ward, you gotta get over here,” he said.
“A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.”
The next few days were spent in a kind of fugue state, trying to get through to my mother, who was alone in her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, trying to get through to my close friends studying at Columbia, trying to get down to New York from New Haven, trying to get near the crash site to make it real. Every other waking hour was spent in front of the TV watching the news.
I felt a sense of profound shame that I had not been more engaged, that I had not been paying proper attention to what was happening in the world, that I had been so selfabsorbed.
I also felt a sense of purpose and clarity that I had never experienced before. It sounds presumptuous but I knew I had to go there, wherever there was, to try to understand what was happening and explain it to people at home. In the process, I hoped to give people over “there” a sense of what people “here” were really like. I wanted to get to the root of the miscommunication that was fueling this insanity, this mutual dehumanization. We didn’t understand them and they didn’t understand us. That much was clear.
In the weeks after 11 September, the only thing that seemed important or relevant was to communicate. Of course, I was more than a little fuzzy on the details of “where” I needed to go and who “they” were exactly. There was a significant amount of hubris at play and it was going to be a steep learning curve.
I had no sense at the time of what conflict reporting actually entailed. I didn’t understand that straddling different worlds would require taking a wrecking ball to much of what I thought I knew about life, politically and personally. That gradually, but unmistakably, there would be a smashing. A smashing of my preconceived notions, a smashing of what I thought I knew about history, about myself. I didn’t realise that I would have my heart broken in a hundred different ways, that I would lose friends and watch children die and grow to feel like an alien in my own skin. I didn’t understand that the privilege of witnessing history came at a price. But in that moment, only one thing mattered to me: I had a calling.