Journalist Clarissa Ward was part of a CNN team that reported it had discovered and helped to free a man still locked up in a Syrian prison, apparently unaware that Bashar Assad’s regime had fallen.
CNN’s cameras captured the moment Ward came across the man, cloaked in a blanket in a locked cell of an otherwise already-emptied prison, and assisted him out into the open air.
“We were looking to do a story about the tens of thousands of Syrians who have vanished into Assad’s dungeons, and particularly also about one American journalist, Austin Tice, who was disappeared,” Ward later reported on CNN.
“But when we started to look inside one facility, we found something that we never could have imagined,” she said.
After a guard shoots the lock off the door, Ward is shown entering the cell, where a dark blanketed form is seen in the corner.
“Is there someone there?” Ward asks multiple times. When a guard approaches, a man emerges from beneath the cover, with his hands raised.
According to a CNN translation, the man said he had been in the cell for three months.
“You’re OK, you’re OK,” Ward tells him. She offers him water while he clutches her hand, taking large gulps.
As they walk him out into the daylight, he stares up at the sky in relief.
According to Ward, the captors fled during the fall of Damascus, leaving the man with no food or water for at least four days. He said he had been taken from his home, interrogated about his phone and beaten.
The man, apparently in shock, is assisted into a vehicle by paramedics after speaking with the team about his ordeal.
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“In nearly twenty years as a journalist, this was one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed,” Ward said of the incident on social media.
A rebel offensive overthrew Assad’s regime on Sunday, ending the Assad family’s 50-year rule. The rebel forces have since begun emptying Syria’s political prisons.
