BEIRUT (AP) - NBC's chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel said
Tuesday he and members of his network crew escaped unharmed after five
days of captivity in Syria, where more than a dozen pro-regime gunmen
dragged them from their car, killed one of their rebel escorts and
subjected them to mock executions.
Appearing on NBC's "Today" show, an unshaven Engel
said he and his team escaped during a firefight Monday night between
their captors and rebels at a checkpoint. They crossed into Turkey on
Tuesday.
NBC did not say how many people were kidnapped with
Engel, although two other men, producer Ghazi Balkiz and photographer
John Kooistra, appeared with him on the "Today" show. It was not
immediately clear whether everyone was accounted for.
Engel said he believes the kidnappers were a Shiite
militia group loyal to the Syrian government, which has lost control
over swaths of the country's north and is increasingly on the defensive
in a civil war that has killed 40,000 people since March 2011.
"They kept us blindfolded, bound," said the
39-year-old Engel, who speaks and reads Arabic. "We weren't physically
beaten or tortured. A lot of psychological torture, threats of being
killed. They made us choose which one of us would be shot first and when
we refused, there were mock shootings," he added.
"They were talking openly about their loyalty to
the government," Engel said. He said the captors were trained by the
Iranian Revolutionary Guard and allied with Hezbollah, the Lebanese
Shiite militant group, but he did not elaborate.
There was no mention of the kidnapping by Syria's state-run news agency.
Both Iran and Hezbollah are close allies of the
embattled Syrian government of President Bashar Assad, who used military
force to crush mostly peaceful protests against his regime. The
crackdown on protests led many in Syria to take up arms against the
government, and the conflict has become a civil war.
Engel said he was told the kidnappers wanted to
exchange him and his crew for four Iranian and two Lebanese prisoners
being held by the rebels.
"They captured us in order to carry out this exchange," he said.
Engel and his crew entered Syria on Thursday and
were driving through what they thought was rebel-controlled territory
when "a group of gunmen just literally jumped out of the trees and
bushes on the side of the road."
"There were probably 15 gunmen. They were wearing ski masks. They were heavily armed. They dragged us out of the car," he said.
He said the gunmen shot and killed at least one of
their rebel escorts on the spot and took the hostages into a waiting
truck nearby.
Around 11 p.m. Monday, Engel said he and the others were being moved to another location in northern Idlib province.
"And as we were moving along the road, the
kidnappers came across a rebel checkpoint, something they hadn't
expected. We were in the back of what you would think of as a minivan,"
he said. "The kidnappers saw this checkpoint and started a gunfight with
it. Two of the kidnappers were killed. We climbed out of the vehicle
and the rebels took us. We spent the night with them."
Engel and his crew crossed back into neighboring Turkey on Tuesday.
The network said there was no claim of
responsibility, no contact with the captors and no request for ransom
during the time the crew was missing.
NBC sought to keep the disappearance of Engel and
the crew secret for several days while it investigated what happened to
them. Major media organizations, including The Associated Press, adhered
to a request from the network to refrain from reporting on the issue
out of concern it could make the dangers to the captives worse. News of
the disappearance did begin to leak out in Turkish media and on some
websites on Monday.
Syria has become a danger zone for reporters since the conflict began.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists,
Syria is by far the deadliest country for the press in 2012, with 28
journalists killed in combat or targeted for murder by government or
opposition forces.
Among the journalists killed while covering Syria
are award-winning French TV reporter Gilles Jacquier, photographer Remi
Ochlik and Britain's Sunday Times correspondent Marie Colvin. Also,
Anthony Shadid, a correspondent for The New York Times, died after an
apparent asthma attack while on assignment in Syria.
The Syrian government has barred most foreign media
coverage of the civil war in Syria. Those journalists whom the regime
has allowed in are tightly controlled in their movements by Information
Ministry minders. Many foreign journalists sneak into Syria illegally
with the help of smugglers and travel with rebel escorts or drivers.
Engel joined NBC in 2003 and was named chief
foreign correspondent in 2008. He previously worked as a freelance
journalist for ABC News, including during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He
has lived in the Middle East since graduating from Stanford University
in 1996.
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