In December 2012, Richard Engel and five crew members were abducted by gunmen in Syria.
A group of about 15 armed men were fanning out around us. Three or four of them stood in the middle of the road blocking our vehicles. The others went for the doors. They wore black jackets, black boots, and black ski masks. They were professionals and used hand signals to communicate. A balled fist meant stop. A pointed finger meant advance. Each man carried an AK-47. Several of the gunmen began hitting the windows of our car and minivan with the stocks of their weapons. When they got the doors open, they leveled their guns at our chests.
The Hostage, Richard Engel, Vanity Fair
The bodyguard of a paramilitary commander they were traveling with was killed.
Engel later reported that his captors were Shabiha paramilitaries, a group supporting Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war.
Engel described the rhetoric of his captors as coming across as a bit made up.
“You say you’re journalists,” he said. “You come here to write that we kill children and that there is no bread and that people are suffering? This is our country. Yes, we use cluster bombs and kill their children”—he was referring to the Sunnis in revolt against the government.
“Yes, we kill their women. We will kill all their women so they won’t give birth to more dogs. We will destroy their villages. We will leave nothing. We will burn this country.”
I had heard shabiha rhetoric like this on Internet videos, but it had never seemed quite real—more like campy bad-guy dialogue from the movies. It sounded like he was playing it up for an audience, but nobody was watching except the kidnappers and us.
The Hostage, Richard Engel, Vanity Fair
A blogger, As'ad AbuKhalil, looking at a video released by the captors, and graffiti painted on a wall, was outright derisive of the captors being identified as Shabiha.
I looked at the video and it is so clearly a set up and the slogans are so clearly fake and they intend to show that they were clearly Shi`ites and that they are savages. If this one is believable, I am posing as a dentist.
On the captors of Richard Engel: the plot thickens, As'ad AbuKhalil, The Angry Arab News Service
Michael Calderone, at Huffington Post, now reports that Richard Engel will be re-reporting details about the identity of his captors.
NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel is re-reporting a key detail of his December 2012 kidnapping in Syria after new information surfaced suggesting he may have been misled about the identities of his captors, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Engel is conducting the re-reporting along with his team, and the effort has been ongoing for several weeks. Originally, Engel identified his captors as the shabiha, a shadowy Shia militia acting on behalf of Syrian President Bashar Assad. He is now investigating whether the men were actually Sunni, and if so, whether they were motivated by money or posing as Shia militiamen as part of an anti-Assad propaganda ploy.
NBC's Richard Engel Re-Reporting His Kidnapping In Syria Following Questions Over Captors' Identity, Michael Calderone, Huffington Post
I have, at this point, zero ability to make informed judgments about the truth of the story.
But this problem, this continual and repeated problem we have got, of reporting on shadowy wars being impossible to verify, with much of it later turning out not to be true, continues to be severe.
Wed Apr 15, 2015 at 6:13 PM PT: Richard Engel's "re-reported" version in now out. See comment.