Clarissa Ward, the CNN journalist who covered the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan

(CNN Spanish) – Clarissa Ward, CNN’s chief international correspondent, has reported for more than 15 years from the front lines of battle around the world, from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan to Myanmar and Iran. Here, a review of his career.

This Friday, Ward boarded a flight into Kabul to leave Afghanistan after several days in which he reported, from the streets and coming face to face with the Taliban, the seizure of power by the movement.

On our flight and getting ready for takeoff pic.twitter.com/bGaYREsbxT

– Clarissa Ward (@clarissaward) August 20, 2021

It was not the first time that Ward had seen the face of the regime: In 2019, he gained unprecedented access to Taliban-controlled territory for exclusive reporting. Ward and CNN producer Salma Abdelaziz spent time at a local madrassa, where dozens of boys and girls carefully studied their Qur’ans, and at a Taliban-run clinic in the town of Pashma Qala. You can read that report here.

Ward, named Correspondent of the Year by the 2019 Gracies Awards, is the author of ‘On All Fronts: The Education of a Journalist’, a memoir that recounts her unique career as a conflict reporter and how she has documented the violent rebuilding of the world. up close.

The military coup in Myanmar

Almost two months after the military coup in Myanmar, Ward and his team were the first foreign journalists allowed to enter the Southeast Asian nation. While there, they reported on the widespread military crackdown and confronted the military junta over the violent crackdown on protests.

And while India was experiencing its second deadly wave of the coronavirus, Ward traveled across the country to cover the ongoing crisis. She was one of three CNN correspondents to report on the rampant spread of the virus, from a sick ward in Uttar Pradesh and from overflowing crematoria in Delhi and the holy city of Varanasi, among other places.

Ward was also part of CNN’s coverage of Joe Biden’s first overseas trip as president, during which he met with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

The poisoning of Russian opponent Alexey Navalny

In 2020, Ward investigated the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, and discovered new evidence identifying Russian security services that followed Navalny for more than 30 trips over three years. As part of this joint investigation with Bellingcat, Ward interviewed Navalny at an undisclosed location in Germany – even showed him photographs of the agents who tracked him down – and confronted a suspected member of the elite toxin team at his home in the outskirts of Moscow.

Last year, Ward also investigated Russian trolls operating out of Ghana and Nigeria to stoke racial tensions and spark social unrest in the United States. For this investigation, which lasted for months, traveled to the headquarters of one of the operations in Ghana, where he interviewed one of them and located the person running the operation, a Ghanaian living in Russia.

It also contributed to the coverage of breaking news from CNN on the covid-19 pandemic, the crisis between the United States and Iran in 2020 and the situation in Ukraine. When Turkey launched a military operation targeting the United States’ Kurdish partners in northern Syria in 2019, Clarissa Ward was on the ground covering the chaos of civilians fleeing their homes amid military strikes.

In 2019, Ward investigated Russia’s use of mercenaries for the series Putin’s Private Army. For this months-long investigation, he secured the first on-camera interview with a veteran of Wagner, Russia’s best-known private military contractor.

He traveled to the Central African Republic to observe the increasing activity of Russian mercenaries on the continent. After visiting a diamond mine linked to a Russian oligarch, Ward and his team followed them and harassed a car full of Russians. Following the publication of their reports, they were the subject of a propaganda campaign in the Russian media to try to discredit their reports.

In 2018 he reported extensively on the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, even getting images exclusive that showed a Saudi operative posing as Khashoggi in an attempt to cover up the murder.

Ward also spearheaded “Shadow Over Europe,” a CNN investigation into the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe in 2018.

Incognito in Syria

In early 2016, Ward traveled incognito to rebel-held areas in Syria – which almost no Western journalist had visited in more than a year – to report on what life was like there under Russian and regime bombing. Less than 24 hours after arriving, Ward witnessed an airstrike on a fruit market that left 11 people dead. You can see (in English) the series of reports “Undercover in Syria” here.

Clarissa Ward, who was one of the last Western reports to visit rebel-controlled Aleppo, was asked to speak at a UN Security Council meeting on the besieged Syrian city in August 2016, where she stated that ” there are no winners in Aleppo. “

Awards

Ward has won multiple awards for his reporting: two George Foster Peabody Awards, two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Awards, seven Emmy Awards, two Edward R. Murrow Awards for Distinguished Journalism, honors from the Association of Radio and Television Correspondents, and the David Kaplan Award 2017 from the Overseas Press Club.

This year he will receive the Network 20/20 Ted Sorensen Award in recognition of “skillfully crafting the first draft of history and providing an original insight into the people and events of our time.”

In 2016, he received the prestigious Award for Excellence in International Reporting from the International Center for Journalists for his extraordinary war reporting in places like Iraq and Syria.

A long career as a foreign correspondent for US media

Clarissa Ward joined CNN in 2015 from CBS News, where she served as a foreign correspondent for four years and was a regular contributor on ’60 Minutes. ‘

On a covert mission to Syria in 2014, he interviewed two Western fighters who joined the jihad. One was a young Somali-American from the Midwest. This made Ward the only Western journalist to have interviewed an American jihadist fighter inside Syria since the start of the civil war.

While on CBS, Ward interviewed world leaders including then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012 and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in 2013, questioning both about the president’s brutal crackdown. Syrian Bashar al-Assad inside Syria.

Before joining CBS, Ward spent two years in Moscow and another two in Beijing as a correspondent for ABC News. It covered the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the 2008 global crisis.

Prior to working at ABC News, Ward was in the Middle East as a correspondent for Fox News Channel, where he covered the execution of Saddam Hussein and other key stories.

Her career began in 2002 as an intern at CNN’s Moscow office. Since then he has worked in Baghdad, Beijing, Beirut, Moscow, New York and London.

Clarissa Ward is fluent in French and Italian; He speaks Russian, Arabic and Spanish at a conversational level and basic Mandarin. She graduated with honors from Yale University, and in 2013 received an honorary doctorate from Middlebury College in Vermont.

You can follow her on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.