Transcripts For CNN CNN Presents 20120312

>> this is the story of a cnn team that got into syria's most dangerous city. to reach a handful of citizens risks their lives every day. to see firsthand, to bear witness, and to tell the world about the suffering, the grief, and the courage of homs. this is the account of "72 hours under fire." [ explosion ] >> reporter: for more than a year, the regime and dictator bashar al assad have used brutal force to put down a popular uprising in syria. across the country, protesters demands change, chanting, "down with the regime." >> this is another rocket. >> reporter: the city of homs became the beating heart of a growing uprising. but the syrian military sealed off one neighborhood as it tried to crush the revolt. >> the assad regime is shelling relentlessly these neighborhoods. there are snipers positioned in areas that are, you know, killing people as they try to leave their homes. >> it's a civilian neighborhood where people were living normal civilian lives, being bombarded on a massive scale by its own armed forces. >> reporter: for four months, a debate continued at cnn. how, when, and if to get into homs and baba ama. >> various trips have gotten canceled for various reasons. sometimes the plug was pulled at the last minute. >> we have to weigh the risks. for me, homs was the story. >> no story is worth dying for, but at the same time, when it comes to a story like syria, and others as well, you have to be there. you have to be in it, seeing it, smelling it, listening to it, so that you at the end of the day can do justice to what the people are suffering. heartbreaking footage shows that no one seems to have been spared the violence. adults and children, also. >> arwa damon was leading the charge on this. very big on that story. arabic speaker. tough, brave, resourceful. as determined as we've got. >> reporter: early in february, news emerged from homs of intense and indiscriminate shelling by regime forces. >> the death toll on monday utterly devastating. the majority of the casualties happening in the flash point city of homs. my colleague, amir turned to me and said, i think there's a massacre happening in homs. every day there's a death toll. and suddenly the death toll in that one particular neighborhood of homs had gone up to over 100. [ speaking foreign language ] >> reporter: videos uploaded showed terrible suffering and courage. >> there were very few voices coming out, and two of the loudest and strongest voices were with dr. mohammad and dr. abi. they ran the underground medical clinic with only 15 others. but they would still go on video every single day and say, this is my case. this is why this person was injured and this is what i need to treat them. but i can't. [ speaking foreign language ] >> reporter: plans were revised to get a cnn team into homs. along with arwa damon, neil holsworth, a veteran journalist. and handling security, kim crockette, former british special forces and an expert in balancing safety with front line news coverage. >> for me, that was a very experienced, highly accomplished team. these are your determined and strong-willed individuals. but they're also smart individuals. >> we got the call, we just had to refresh the objectives, what are we trying to achieve? what are we are going to go for. >> i had a backpack, basically. >> you mapped it out in every sense, do we have the right communications systems, how are we going to track this team. who are we going with? how are we getting there? if someone gets injured, what are we going to do? but i will say this. with all the preparation we do and all the things we've set up and all the backstops we have, you're going into a war zone. you are on your own. >> i went to see my mom when it seems like this trip was going to materialize and my dad was out of town, but i went to see my mom and spent some time with her and i actually wrote a letter for the first time to my family and i went to see some very close friends as well, just in case. >> what was it about this trip? >> there was a lot of unknown going in. you know, sometimes you just get that gut feeling. >> you know, i didn't really go and say good-bye to anyone or anything like that, but probably one of the reasons why i didn't, i didn't want to think of it like that. so i tried to block that part of it out of my mind, really. >> we sat down with the team, we talked it through. at each point we tried to decide, what are we trying to achieve here? what could happen? >> we went in knowing the risk we were taking and were prepared to do that for the story. >> every scenario considered meticulous planning, but ultimately, arwa, neil, and tim would have to rely on others in their journey into a city under siege. >> it involves a fairly elaborate process of being moved through farmlands, back roads, trying to avoid the government and being at various safe houses. and at every single leg, every single stop, you have a different person who's responsible to move you on. someone who knows the details of the lay of the land around you. >> reporter: as the team left for homs, those at cnn headquarters were holding their breath. >> they have moved out of that safe house. >> at one point when they had just crossed the border, the truck stopped on the other side of the field on the dirt road, and for a journalist, that's a bad place to be. >> reporter: alone, on a dirt road, in the middle of the night. a worrying start to a misoms. ♪ our machines help identify early stages of cancer and it's something that we're extremely proud of. you see someone who is saved because of this technology, you know that the things that you do in your life, matter. if i did have an opportunity to meet a cancer survivor, i'm sure i could take something positive away from that. 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>> five days. >> five days. and if you wanted to, i don't know, just pick up and drive there without any of this. how long would it take? >> a couple hours. >> a couple hours. what do you find when you go in there? what's the sense of the place? >> looking around, it's dark, there's no lights. it's one of the eeriest -- the eeriest place i've ever been, i can tell you. >> what are you thinking, then? >> well, it's trying to assess what we're coming into. it's 3:00 in the morning, the shelling is about to start in a few hours time. we really hadn't slept much the day before, and we really didn't sleep much in the few hours before the bombardment started. and it started almost on the dot. and it was quite intense. >> describe how it unfolded. >> well, we're basically lying on the floor in this room. we've got our equipment around us. then, you just start hearing explosions around you. some were in the distance and all of a sudden, one would be right out in the street. it was very random in its nature. >> the shelling started as it does, just about every single morning, with daybreak. and it's pretty much nonstop. and this is why the cry we're hearing from the streets here is, please, please, do something to stop the violence. >> you were in special forces. how did this rate, this whole experience? >> we had more incoming rounds within the first ten minutes than in the seven months that i was in bosnia in the war. >> here we have just one of many buildings that have been hit in this artillery barrage. >> reporter: when the bombardment eased, the team could see for the first time exactly what had happened to homs. >> the streets are mostly deserted. the majority of residents are staying indoors or have already fled. you always wonder what life is like for people in these places. and you're driving through, is it's mostly deserted. most of the buildings have sustained some sort of damage. to see the roof on that one -- and then you'll see a kid peek their head out from a doorway, or you'll see a man walking in the street, carrying an ak-41 over his shoulder and a bag of diapers over the other. and there's all these people and you want to go out and speak to them, how did they survive for this long, what were they going through? what was going on? or you'd walk into houses that were covered in a layer of dust and there'd be all these kids' shoes outside. just the constant sound of gunfire, it's nonstop. and then street after street after street of rubble, just like this. we come across some members of the free syrian army who take us around. this is another spot that you can also see the government influence on. >> there was one point with the free syrian army, there was a hole in the wall, and when you pull back from there, there was a kid with backpacks on the side of the bed. and they had just left, you know. it's kind of hard to see, sometimes. you know, whole families just uprooted and disappeared. >> personal belongings are all still inside. >> you do get angry. i know you. you get real mad. >> i do. there's no way to answer their questions of why is this happening to us? why isn't the world helping us? how many more of us have to die? where is our life worth nothing? >> emotions is an important part of storytelling. you are as a viewer is going to emphasize with that. this isn't a manufactured emotion. this is based on, i've been here, i've seen this. >> reporter: for the cnn team, the destruction in the streets was bad enough. but the desperation of the injured would be even more shocking. 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[ male announcer ] it's a network of possibilities -- helping you do what you do... even better. ♪ his team are up against. a 30-year-old man lies on the brink of death after shrapnel hit him in the head. >> reporter: he will die if he doesn't get out. >> dr. muhammad is one of two doctors in the clinic. the other is actually a dentist. >> he's not a front line trained in emergency combat. he's an internal medicine specialist. and now, look at what he's dealing with. the kind of casualties he's dealing with. the way he's had to cope. and the fact that it's day in and day out, it's relentless. >> make sure you join for more of arwa damon's eye-opening tour through syria. 72 hours under fire, tonight at at this point, you can smell the rot coming from the wound. this patient has been lying here like this for four days now. >> arwa interviewed one of the doctors, the few doctors that was taking care of people that were being wounded in this onslaught. and he started to cry. [ speaking foreign language ] >> here's one doctor, one man in there crying out on a daily basis that he needs help, his patients need help. he's seen who knows how many people at this point in time die. because he can't give them what they need. lack of equipment, lack of experience, lack of medicine. and they can't get them out. >> reporter: the clinic is really many clinics spread throughout the city and moving from location to location the perilous. >> this is how they have to move around a short distance from get from one location to the other where they have the patient. six patients were killed in this building after a strike. the shelling is relentless. what they've had to do, because the clinics keep getting targeted, is try to distribute the patients around, so they have a number of houses in the vicinity where they also have these makeshift clinics as well. >> what's it like filming that? >> well, you've got to be respectful. so it's kind of tough filming, because you want to show how bad it actually is, but not intrude too much. so, you know, it is tough. >> reporter: every patient is desperate to tell their story by any means possible. this man, tracing the shape of a tank on the wall. >> this is abad and he's been drawing, trying to explain to us what happened, because he's in so much agony, he can't speak. he is one of the cameraman who goes out, risks his life all the time. it's some of his clips we constantly see posted to youtube and broadcast, and he's been drawing two tanks and explaining how he was moving down the street across from them when they fired at him. >> i've seen injuries, wounds in my career, but i think what really struck me was the fact that they had nothing. few medicines, dressings, and stuff on shelves. other than that, there was nothing. nothing to deal with the kinds of wounds that they were getting. >> aboudi was a 19-year-old man. we found him inside the clinic. he was barely hanging on. there was this young woman who was treating him. she was 27 years old. she also was a volunteer medic. they'd just had two weeks of training, and you could hear the anger, the frustration, the sorrow, the sheer emotion in her voice when she was talking about how this was a young man, just at the beginning of his life. he was actually engaged to be married. and he had volunteered to help the wounded and he found himself in a hospital bed as well. [ speaking foreign language ] >> reporter: just hours after this video was taken, aboudi died. as did the 30-year-old with the severe head wound. >> you get angry that people have the capability to do this to one another. that people are suffering and that there's nothing that one can do to ease their pain. there's no way to fix their situation. >> reporter: but there is some good news. at least two of the men in the cnn team's report are alive. abad, who communicated through drawing, made it to a hospital in lebanon. so, too, did mohammad moore. >> he did, actually, manage to get out, but not in time. the last i heard was that, yes, his leg was going to have to be amputated. >> reporter: what may never be known are the fates of hundreds of other people who were unable or unwilling to flee. >> it was so indiscriminate, it was so widespread. and it's hard to put into words that every single person that you meet there has gone through something so horrific. no other human being would ever want to go through it. oh, sweetheart! can i give you a hand? no, thanks, dad, i got it. okay. i'm going to go fix the lamp in your room. you don't have to be perfect to be a perfect parent. there are thousands of children in foster care who will take you just as you are. when cnn's arwa damon, neil hallsworth, and tim crockett ventured into the streets of homs -- [ gunfire ] >> i hear gunfire. >> reporter: they were met with the sounds of war and scenes of desolation. it's not deserted. there are thousands of people there. >> they are. and a lot of them are staying in doors. the mosques were putting out messages, actually, when the bombardment started, telling people to not live on the upper floors of their buildings. to try to stay away from windows. to try to find protected rooms inside their homes. a lot of families also moved into bunkers. these aren't real bunkers. they're actually just the basements that are only located in a few of the buildings and homes around here. so all the families that haven't been able to escape stay in them. so this is hamad, who has been telling us that there were around 250 people that were staying in this one room. half of them have actually fled in the last 24 hours, because they heard that this particular location was going to get targeted. and those that have stayed are literally the ones that have absolutely nowhere, nowhere at all to go. [ speaking foreign language ] >> they huddle in near darkness. >> and it's cold, because it's cold this time of year. and most of the houses that we went through were either heated by oil-fired, a fire stove in the middle of the room or wood fire. and, obviously, that's one of the resources that's been cut off by the government. they haven't got heating oil being provided into that part of the neighborhood, or into the city. >> they're constantly at the tip of this abyss of fear. that fear that, you know, you go through these of time, they've been living this for month. she's been here since the end of august. another woman, this one right here, has been here for a month and a half. in these makeshift bunkers we were in, almost every single woman who came up to talk to us, and they would pull you in every single direction, because all of them had something they wanted to share. >> reporter: arwa and her team visited another bunker inside a wood-cutting factory, another temporary refuge from the shelling. but in homs, there was no place to hide from sadness and suffering. >> this baby is cradled in her grandmother's arms. the image of innocence, although the world she was just brought into is anything but. in the shelter, we basically met three generations of one family. the baby who had just been born, she was just 24 hours old when we met her. her mother, who was in her late teens, it was her second child, and she had to give birth in the bunker with no painkillers, no nothing. she says her husband left a month ago to get supplies and hasn't been able to get back. he doesn't know he's a father. the baby has two great uncles she will never meet. both returned nearly as corpses. it was a sight you don't want to see. her grandmother's voice trembles as she describes how one of her broth brother's face was broken, his skin peeled off. we've just been given a photograph of her brother and it's absolutely horrific. [ speaking foreign language ] they'd all left husbands, brothers, who knows? at one point, it was like being in a bunker full of widows and orphans. her brother and husband were killed when a round struck their home ten days ago, but she can hardly pause to grief. i was looking at this woman and wondering, how is it that she can form a cohesive sentence, how can she speak logically? how is she not ripping her hair out? because she has to keep it together. she has kids and they're living in a bunker and she has no choice. i've just been given this book who has a list of all of the names of everyone here. there's 315 of them, marked next to each one of them are their age and whether they need basics like diapers and baby's milk, which is in short supply, of course. and this here is a list of the medicines that they need. and a lot of it is very basic. painkillers and things to deal with colds, flu, especially for the children. >> you feel helpless -- you feel like you want to do something? >> yeah. i wanted to go back in there with a team, of medical specialists, with everything that we could carry to try to help support them. >> this woman is in complete fear. she doesn't want to speak. she doesn't want to show her face. another woman was holding her baby, who was just crying, crying, crying. she said, he has a fever, he's sick. feel his face. there's no medicine for him. [ speaking foreign language ] there is nothing that one can do to ease their pain. there's no way to fix their situation. there's no way to answer their question. there's no way to answer their questions, and why is this happening to us? why isn't the world helping us? how many more of us have to die? why is our life worth nothing? >> what did my child do? >> exactly. what's the mother supposed to tell her child about why his father died? >> i think it affects you more, because you obviously speak arabic. i don't think the emotions were pushed on to us as much as they were on to arwa. >> the emotion's an important part of story telling. our team was looking at arwa, who's a great professional, and you could tell that this was really impacting her. but there's no doubt in my mind that she was being shaken by what she had seen there. >> if we cannot have a certain level of compassion that is reasonably translated into our reporting, how can we expect people, thousands of miles, kilometers away, sitting in their living room to even begin to relate to what it is they are seeing on their tv screen? 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what exactly was it that made them leave? are they alive? there's still much still that we don't know and still so much that needs to be told. >> reporter: but hearing and telling those stories requires strategy. how do you move? tim, you're obviously looking around for things that -- >> very carefully. >> yeah. >> we never went out when the bombardment was at its most intense. typically, i would start 7:00, 7:30 in the morning and carry through to anywhere between 12:00 and 11:00. >> reporter: the syrian activists dared to show the world that they were under siege. >> one of the biggest accomplishments for the media team here was getting up a live stream so that they could show the world exactly what was happening in realtime. and they believed that this really aggravated the syrian government. now, this is one of the live cameras that they had set up outside. and they're telling us that it was shot by a sniper's bullet, that went in right there and then came out the other end. this particular group that we were, the baba amr media team, they're young. they're all in their 20s, you know? they all had different lives a year ago, and they're so brave. they're so brave. [ explosion ] they crawl on their bellies to try to get that shot of the tank to prove to the world that there are tanks in a certain location or whatever it is they're trying to prove. they're uploading youtube videos, they're putting messages out on facebook, on twitter. they're making themselves available for reports. >> many of them have family members that, obviously, have been killed as well. so knowing all that and yet keep going out each day with their cameras to get the footage that they are, it's amazing. what they're doing, it's for their children, for their families, all these sort of things that until we ever find ourselves in that circumstances, we can't really relate to. [ speaking foreign language ] >> the syrian army is shelling the city of cold, starving civilians. >> reporter: also getting the message out was veteran war correspondent, marie colvin, reporting for the "sunday times" of london. >> i was so star struck by her, actually, just because of everything that she'd done. her passion, her desire to tell the story. >> marie, you have covered a lot of conflicts over a long time. how does this compare? >> this is the worst, anderson. for many reasons. the last one -- i mean, i think the last time we talked when i was in misrata, there's nowhere to run. you can sort of figure out where snipers are, but you can't figure out where, you know, where a shell is going to land. >> reporter: on the cnn team's third night in baba amr, word spread that a ground offensive by the syrian military was imminent. >> it became clear that it was very difficult to find any place of safety there. safety was a relative term. the risks were building on that assignment. >> reporter: the risks were building. >> go! >> reporter: and time seemed to be running out. imagine if you could always see life [music] in the best light. every time of day. outdoors, or in. transitions® lenses automatically filter just the right amount of light. so you see everything the way it is meant to be seen. maybe even a little better. experience life well lit, ask for transitions adaptive lenses. in here, the landscaping business grows with snow. to keep big winter jobs on track, at&t provided a mobile solution that lets everyone from field workers to accounting, initiate, bill, and track work in real time. you can't live under a dome in minnesota, that's why there's guys like me. 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[announcer:] if you take prolia® (denosumab) you should not take xgeva®. prolia® can cause serious side effects, including low blood calcium levels, serious infections... ...some of which may require hospitalization, and skin inflammation, rash and eczema. tell your doctor if you develop dental problems... ...as severe jawbone problems may happen. what's out there matters to me. so does what's in here. break a leg! thanks ed. ask your doctor if prolia® is right for you. > homs, syria. for months, activists in this media house had risked everything to capture and share with the world the shocking images of what was happening to their city. >> we're asking for help! >> reporter: now the team in the media house, including cnn's arwa damon, neil hallsworth, and tim crockett, have intel that things were about to get even more dangerous. >> we have been in there for almost three days at this point, and there was credible information that something was going to happen that would be very detrimental to our being -- >> yeah. we all sat down. everyone was part of the discussion about, look, talking through all the options that, you know, could, would, may, may not happen. >> reporter: in homs and at cnn headquarters, the teams discussed the deteriorating conditions. >> we're hearing that things were heating up more than they were in those past few days. >> the government knew about this media center. it had been a target. the building had been hit the day before on the third floor. >> as careful as we were, as calculated as every move was, there are some things you cannot safeguard against. a rocket coming out of nowhere, there's nothing you can do. >> and it's a difficult decision, because arwa wanted to stay. she felt she was really doing important journalism. but sometimes you just have to say, it's time to go. >> there's a sniper -- >> reporter: time to go for the cnn team and journalist marie colvin and paul conroy. >> at one point in the route, it's incredibly muddy. it's pouring rain. it's crazy cold. and there's this like part where i just completely -- i face-planted in the mud. and then i was trying to lift myself back up, and my little legs are kind of going like this to get traction, i couldn't, and i finally get up and, bam, i face-plant again. and murray had face-planted again, and we end up sitting together in this truck with a professional gut herder turned i'm going to smuggle you through the farmland guy. and marie and i were just laughing. i mean, nothing about what he had been through was funny, nothing about what we had seen was funny, but we were just laughing. >> when you had left, you were riding around on the back of a motorcycle? >> it could be a truck, could be a taxi, could be the back of a motorcycle. it's, what is available, what is the safest point at that time, or what they feel is the safest thing. it's not one way in and one way out. >> reporter: and getting out of homs would be just as dangerous as getting in. but so often on these stories, when you think you're through the worst of it, there's a nasty surprise. >> it would take two anxious days and then, finally, good news. >> they crossed the border. it was like, whoo! wow. >> but marie, paul, photographer remy, and other western journalists soon reversed course. >> marie went out, but she went back. >> she did. she had actually only been there for 24 hours, and she had this need to go back, to not leave these people behind. to tell even more of their stories than she had the opportunity to tell. i wanted to go back. i don't think we did enough. i don't even think we need nearly a enough. >> i understand that frustration. from my point of view, i have to be more pragmatic. i have to say, i think we've achieved a remarkable amount. >> it's important that we're able to go back and tell the story. and that's why we pull out when we pull out. it's a family. and that's the most important thing. everybody knows how much everybody cares, and that their safety truly iour highest priority. >> we got the sad news early this morning that marie colvin, foreign correspondent for "the sunday times" of lond was killed in homs where the syrian government unleashed an all-out assault on its citizens. an award-winning french war photographer, remi ochlik was also killed. he was just 28 years old. >> it's tragic, but, it's also -- unfortunately, it happens. >> does it makes you think about what you were doing there, more? >> did i have second thoughts about having gone there? no. not for a second. if journalism were governed by that sort of fear, we journalists would never be anywhere. and things would happen in complete and total black holes. >> the last thing that those front line troops want is that when a tragedy happens, it makes us less willing to do this kind of storytelling us. it makes us less willing to go to where the story is. >> it takes a special type of person to do this type of thing. what kind of person is that? it's a person that's passionate about telling the truth. >> i think the worry of arwa and others is that the story of homs will be forgotten, that the suffering will be forgotten. but we are committed to this story. and we will find ways to bring this story to people. it's really important. >> the one thing that we absolutely can not do is walk away from this story, no matter how long it takes. it is fundamentally unfair that we live in a world where we can go film this, report on it, and leave. knowing that the people we've left behind, suffering is going to continue. feeling as if we should have done more, we could have done more. maybe there was a better way to tell the story, that would have had more impact, that would have brought them the help that they need. you're always constantly second-guessing how you've done things and whether or not you could have accomplished more with what you've done. and yes, that does play out in your mind. and it should. and you should tell the stories of the people that you've met. because you've witnessed it, and that's your responsibility, to keep telling their story.