NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent conceded this week that he was not kidnapped in Syria in 2012 by forces loyal to the Assad regime, admitting that he was likely duped by Sunni militants opposed to the Syrian government.
Richard Engel reported in a 2012 story that he and his crew were captured by militants aligned with Syrian President Bashar Assad, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah. He now claims, however, that the men who held him and his colleagues captive for five days were likely enemies of the Syrian president.
The kidnappers reportedly subjected the NBC employees to “psychological torture.”
Engel now says that his kidnappers were part of a Sunni group associated with the Free Syrian Army — a group that at the time was actively courting American supporters including Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
After Engel and his team were released in 2012 by their supposed kidnappers, he said of his captors, “This was a group known as the Shabiha, this was the government militia, these are people who are loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.”
At the time, opponents of Assad were seeking support from the United States and other western nations, and the Obama administration in 2013 considered intervening in the Syrian conflict — which pits Assad’s minority Alawite government, with support from Iran, Russia and the Shiite Hezbollah militia, against a pan-Sunni rising that includes Syrian and foreign fighters aligned with al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
NBC also reported at the time that Ahrar al-Sham, which is aligned with the anti-Assad Nusra Front group, rescued Engel and his crew.
However, several questions regarding Engel’s version of events were raised when the New York Times reported recently that it had “uncovered information that suggested the kidnappers were not who they said they were and that the Syrian rebels who rescued [the NBC staffers] had a relationship with the kidnappers.”
The Times now reports that Engel’s captors were almost certainly associated with the Free Syrian Army and that the supposed escape “was staged after consultation with rebel leaders when it became clear that holding them might imperil the rebel efforts to court Western support.”
Engel initially stood by his original account, saying that he was positive that he had identified his kidnappers correctly. He also noted that U.S. officials never called into question his initial assessment.
Following the Times’ report on Engel’s account of the 2012 kidnapping, NBC opened its own investigation.
As part of that investigation, NBC had a member of Engel’s original crew travel back to the Turkey-Syria border to interview one of the men who supposedly acted as a guard in 2012 when they were held captive.
What NBC found in his investigation of the 2012 kidnapping story prompted Engel to amend his original report, including his original claim that he saw one of his so-called captor killed during a firefight with anti-Assad rebels, so that it now highlight the following changes:
• The group that kidnapped us was Sunni, not Shia.
• The group that kidnapped us put on an elaborate ruse to convince us they were Shiite Shabiha militiamen.
• The group that kidnapped us was a criminal gang with shifting allegiances.
• The group that freed us also had ties to the kidnappers.
Admitting that he got it wrong, Engel said this week that he and his colleagues have not “been able to get a definitive account of what happened that night.”
“The kidnappers told us they were Shiite militiamen, members of the notorious Shabiha militia loyal to the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. They spoke in a particular accent, playing Shiite chants on their cellphones, smoking cigarettes, even serving us coffee in cups decorated with Shiite symbols,” he said. “I, along with two other Arabic speaking members of our six-member team, believed they were from the Shabiha.”
He also conceded that the kidnapping was likely nothing but an “elaborate ruse.”
“[B]ased on all of our reporting, it is clear that we were kidnapped by a criminal gang for money and released for propaganda purposes,” he said. “We still cannot determine whether we were set up to be kidnapped from the start, and we have found no evidence that the Iranian and Lebanese prisoners whom we were headed to see existed.”
The revisions to Engel’s original reporting appeared just a few months after NBC News’ Brian Williams came under fire after it was revealed he had a habit of embellishing and fabricating anecdotes regarding his work at the Peacock Network.
A spokesperson for NBC News did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
