After the fall of the Syrian regime in December 2024, CNN reporter Clarissa Ward was led deep into a Syrian prison where the Assad regime imprisoned, tortured, and killed thousands of people. This particular prison held men condemned to death, usually for reasons they knew nothing about.
Ward and her guides came upon one locked cell with what looked like a pile of blankets against the wall. When the soldier carefully poked at it, a man emerged, frightened, hands in the air.
“You’re ok. You’re ok.” Ward tells him over and over as he grips her arm tightly with both hands. They start to walk outside.
The soldier says, “Thank God you are safe. You are free.” The man says he’d been in this, his third prison, for three months. His captors had fled four days before, leaving him without food or water.
Then they lead him outside. The reporter says, “After three months in a windowless cell he can finally see the sky.” “O God, the light,” he says, “O God, there is light! O God, there is light!”
A rebel fighter says, “There’s no more army, no more prisons, no more checkpoints.” The astonished man says, “Are you serious?” A paramedic came and another man who says, “You are safe. Everything you are afraid of is gone!
And that is what God has done for us! From slavery and bondage far worse. From condemnation to death and hell. He delivered us. He set us free. “Thanks be to God who delivers us through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
