Amid widespread concern yesterday, and calls for silence on the topic by NBC, Richard Engel, NBC's Chief Foreign Correspondent has been freed from his Syrian captors.
Engel and his team were captured last Wednesday and liberated after a firefight that went down at a roadside checkpoint yesterday.
“After being kidnapped and held for five days inside Syria by an unknown group, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel and his production crew members have been freed unharmed. We are pleased to report they are safely out of the country,” the network said in a statement.
The captors were unidentified and were not believed to be loyal to the Assad regime.
Engel, 39, along with other employees the network did not identify, disappeared shortly after crossing into northwest Syria from Turkey on Thursday. The network had not been able to contact them until learning that they had been freed on Monday.
With no claim of responsibility or of a coordinated kidnapping, and no ransom demands, many questions remain about the incident that came to an unexpected, but fortunate conclusion at a standard checkpoint. Engel credits the Ahrar al-Sham brigade, a Syrian rebel group, with his release.
It was al-Sham that engaged Engels captors, killing two of them, before an unknown number of others got away. It's interesting that the Ahrar al-Sham, meaning "Free Men of Greater Syria," considered fundamentalist in their Islamic views are allies of the al-Nusra Front.
The latter group was recently labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, but remains the "most aggressive and successful arm of the rebel force." Both groups themselves are said to be responsible for abductions of their own, performed largely against opposing Sh'ite forces and civilians.
A highly respected foreign correspondent, Engel is one of the only Western journalists to cover the entire Iraq War. He published the experience in a widely praised book titled, "War Journal: My Five Years In Iraq." Fluent in Arabic, Engel accessed parts of Iraq unlike anyone else. Even George W. Bush called him to the White House for a private briefing and the resulting book is one of the definitive works from that conflict.
From yesterday:
Turkish media is reporting that veteran journalist Richard Engel, NBC's chief foreign correspondent and Middle East bureau chief, and his Turkish colleagueAziz Akyavaş are currently missing in Syria.
Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reports that Engel and Akyavaş haven't been in contact with NBC News since Thursday morning.
John Cook of Gawker reports that NBC has been "asking every reporter who inquires about the pair to participate in a news blackout," but the Turkish reports have already been referenced by journalists and others thousands of times on Twitter.
Prominent investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill argues that NBC's news blackout should be respected, although the news has been picked up by outlets including The Daily Mail, The Houston Chronicle, and The Atlantic Wire:
There are processes going on that other media are not privy to and you should respect that. It could mean life/death for the missing journo
— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) December 17, 2012
The desire to get a "scoop" should be put in check when there are very good reasons--namely the lives of our colleagues-- to stay quiet
— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) December 17, 2012
There are cases where the families/employers ask for coverage. There are actual strategies at play and that should be respected.
— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill)December 17, 2012
Turkish news channel NTV notes that Turkish journalists who have been arrested and detained in Syria do not have any information about the journalists' whereabouts.
[UPDATE 4:50 p.m.]John Cook at Gawker has published a response to readers wondering why Gawker decided to publish their post against NBC News' wishes:
The rationale for the blackout was offered in off-the-record conversations, so I can't present their argument here. But I will say this: No one told me anything that indicated a specific, or even general, threat to Engel's safety. No one said, "If you report this, then we know, or suspect, that X, Y, or Z may happen." It was infinitely more vague and general than that.
As I wrote in the post, when the New York Times maintained a blackout about David Rohde, the rationale was clear: I was directly told that the Times had reason to believe that the people who had Rohde would harm him if news got out. There was nothing approaching that level of specificity or argumentation here. I would not have written a post if someone had told me that there was a reasonable or even remote suspicion that anything specific would happen if I wrote the post.
Also: There was in practice no blackout. Xinhua and Breitbart had published English language accounts. There were probably like 100 posts to Twitter per minute about him. This was a situation where the information was freely available on the internet, and in the region—these are large Turkish outlets reporting this information. It was out.
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