CNN’s Clarissa Ward Under Fire After Viral Segment Freeing Syrian Prisoner Gets Debunked

CNN’s Clarissa Ward is facing mounting questions over a segment that she produced in Syria last week about a man who was freed from a prison following the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government.

Verify-Sy, part of Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network, looked into the man, who identified himself as “Adel Gharbal,” and determined that there was no record of that person existing.

Instead, Verify-Sy says it identified the man as “Salama Mohammad Salama,” a man they say was “a first lieutenant in Syrian Air Force Intelligence, notorious for his activities in Homs.”

The report continues:

Residents of the Al-Bayyada neighborhood identified him as frequently stationed at a checkpoint in the area’s western entrance, infamous for its abuses.

Abu Hamza reportedly managed several security checkpoints in Homs and was involved in theft, extortion, and coercing residents into becoming informants. According to locals, his recent incarceration—lasting less than a month—was due to a dispute over profit-sharing from extorted funds with a higher-ranking officer. This led to his detention in one of Damascus’s cells, as per neighborhood sources.

Despite his seemingly innocent and composed demeanor in the CNN report, Salama has a grim history. He participated in military operations on several fronts in Homs in 2014, killed civilians, and was responsible for detaining and torturing numerous young men in the city without cause or on fabricated charges. Many were targeted simply for refusing to pay bribes, rejecting cooperation, or even for arbitrary reasons like their appearance. These details were corroborated by families of victims and former detainees who spoke with Verify-Sy.

The report said that the man has been trying to get sympathy from the locals following his release from prison by claiming he was forced to do those things. They say he’s changed his phone number and deactivated his social media accounts in an attempt to “erase evidence of his involvement in armed activities and war crimes.”

The report called on CNN to address whether it “deliberately misled its audience” or if it fell “victim to misinformation,” which they said the network would need to explain what led to the mistake.

CNN said in a statement that no one knew that Ward and her team were visiting the prison featured in the report.

“The events transpired as they appear in our film,” the network claimed. “The decision to release the prisoner featured in our report was taken by the guard—a Syrian rebel.”

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“We reported the scene as it unfolded, including what the prisoner told us, with clear attribution,” the statement continued. “We have subsequently been investigating his background and are aware that he may have given a false identity. We are continuing our reporting into this and the wider story.”

Ward reported from the secret prison inside the regime’s Air Force Intelligence headquarters, where she claimed that she was looking for Austin Tice, an American journalist held captive in Syria since 2012.

“We don’t find any hints of Tice, but come across something extraordinary,” she claimed as the camera crew and an armed guard — who the network identified as a “Syrian rebel,” many of whom are Islamic terrorists — discovered a prison cell with a blanket inside that was allegedly locked.

She claimed the guard made them “turn the camera off while he shoots the lock off the cell door.”

Then, despite the alleged danger, Ward and her camera crew entered the cell first ahead of the armed guard.

Ward then started calling out in English — in a country where Arabic is the official language — to a person appearing to be hiding under the blanket: “Is there someone there? Is someone there?”

The guard approaches the blanket, and at that point, a man emerges from underneath and raises his hands, claiming to be a civilian.

The man they found hiding under blankets wore relatively nice clothes, looked fairly clean, and did not appear to be starving. His hair and beard appeared to be decently groomed, and he did not appear to have any visible injuries.

He claimed to Ward that he had been locked up for three months and had been without food and water for several days.

Ward then jumps in and plays the role of a caretaker: “You’re OK. You’re OK. You’re OK. You’re OK.”

She dramatically exclaims that he “Clutches my arm tightly with both hands” as she cries out for water for the man.

“Does anyone have any water? Water?” she cries out. “OK. It’s water. It’s water. OK. OK. OK. You’re OK. You’re OK. You’re OK.”

Once they brought him outside, Ward and her crew got him a chair set up so they could interview him.

She claimed that he was so weak that he could “barely lift [food] to his mouth.”

“His body can’t handle it,” she claimed. “OK, you are OK. His captors fled during the fall of Damascus, leaving him with no food or water. That was at least four days ago.”

The man claimed that the Mukhabarat Intelligence Services imprisoned him over something on his phone. He claims that he was beaten and kept in the dark the entire time he was in prison.

When asked during a follow-up interview on the network what more she knew about the man and how he ended up in prison, Ward claimed: “Well, we don’t know that much because you can see from the report that he’s in a deep state of shock.”

WATCH:

“You’re okay, you’re okay.”

A remarkable moment as CNN’s @clarissaward and her team find a Syrian prisoner left behind in a secret prison, alone and unaware the Assad regime was no more. pic.twitter.com/Cz6TBWHvts

— Lauren Cone (@LConeCNN) December 11, 2024

Ward later posted the segment on X where she exclaimed that in her two decades as a journalist, “this was one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed.”

She later faced widespread criticism over the segment, including from media critic Stephen L. Miller, who mocked Ward’s post: “As it turns out it’s one of the most extraordinary moments we have witnessed as well.”

RedState writer Bonchie called Ward a “D-list actress posing as a ‘war correspondent,'” saying she “released a notorious Assad regime torturer and then tried to parlay it into clicks.”

Fox News contributor Joe Concha posted on X: “Amazing how Clarissa Ward just flushed her credibility completely down to the toilet by signing on to this staged event.”

“The whole scenario was fake,” said columnist Miranda Devine. “Bad acting, implausible details. Clarissa Ward is kaput.”

Podcast host Gerry Callahan called the segment a “disaster for CNN.”

“The guy had a trimmed beard, clean clothes and manicured nails. They said he’d been in the prison for ‘months,'” he said. “Their star war correspondent, Clarissa Ward, is either the most naive woman in the world or she was in on the hoax.”

“There really isn’t a third option,” he added.