CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward revealed that she and her team were held captive by a militia for two days while reporting in Darfur earlier this month.
The 44-year-old veteran war correspondent traveled to Sudan to report on the civil war, which has ignited a humanitarian crisis with more than 26 million people facing famine.
In an essay she penned for CNN, Ward said she and her team were detained by a militia led by a man who went by the moniker “the general,” just hours after arriving in North Darfur.
Ward, cameraman Scott McWhinne and producer Brent Swails were inside a vehicle when they were surrounded by armed fighters who angrily told them not to film on the scene.
Ward’s producer tried to defuse the situation but the general grabbed a rifle and fired off a round– apparently targeting a bird.
“I was relieved that the gun wasn’t pointed at us but still disturbed by his erratic behavior,” Ward wrote of the scary experience.
The journalist said she had been invited to the town of Tawila by a faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement, which is a neutral party in the civil war.
When she and her team reached the agreed meeting point in the town of Aby Gamra, they were met by a rival militia and two trucks carrying rocket propelled grenades and machine guns.
The team’s driver was hauled off in chains to the town jail and the crew was interrogated individually for three hours in a “small, windowless room.”
After the questioning, Ward and her team were put in their vehicle and ordered to follow a convoy that was headed deeper into Darfur.
Ward wrote that as the general shot his weapon again and shouted at the crew, she pleaded with him saying, ‘I am a mother. I have three little boys.”
Ward said a security chief told them not to be frightened and asked the CNN team for their loved ones’ phone numbers so he could assure them they were okay.
The militia then called the crew’s relatives and said they were safe, while threatening they could be held for many years if they told anyone about the situation to anyone.
The crew was then held for two days under the watch of armed men, some as young as 14, Ward wrote.
After 48 hours, the general informed the CNN team that they would be let go, with the general saying, “We thought you were spies but now you can go home.”
“A wave of relief crashed through my body,’ Ward said. ‘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.”
War between the Sudanese military and the Rapid Support Forces broke out in April 2023 in the capital, Khartoum, and has spread across the country since then. Darfur has experienced particularly intense fighting.
The UN estimates that roughly 20,000 people have been killed and thousands injured since the conflict began.