Name: "Like Looking Through A Keyhole" - Clarissa Ward On Reporting Amid A Communications Blackout In Iran
Uploaded: 2026-03-12T17:08:20.000Z
Duration: 7 min 4 s
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My first guest tonight is a Peabody Award winning journalist and CNN's chief international correspondent.

Please welcome back to THE LATE SHOW, Clarissa Ward.

Now, you're not here with us right now because you're abroad covering the war in Iran.

I am in the lovely city of Erbil in northern Iraq in Iraqi Kurdistan, about 60 miles from the border with Iran.

Secretary Hegseth has told us that the attack on Iran is continuing and growing.

Every day there where you are, do you see sorties of American flights and missiles going in right now?

It's not clear whose jets those would be.

Presumably the US Although possibly is Israel as well.

What we hear more here, in fact, we heard them just a little while before coming on the show.

Drone attacks, some missile attacks, too, and

those are targeting US Bases, sometimes hotels, sometimes Iranian, Kurdish opposition groups sometimes.

But they are coming in pretty regularly and certainly pretty much every single night.

Well, Secretary Hegseth has said that this, this war is just at the beginning.

There's been a sort of vagueness and definition of what victory or an exit strategy is or what the goals are from where you are and what you're hearing.

Do you have any greater sense of what the purpose or the end game might be here?

You know, Stephen, my good friend journalist Holligrani today quoted Machiavelli who wrote, wars will begin when you will, but

So I think this war is particularly disconcerting in the sense that it is so difficult to prognosticate or predict when it will end, how far it will unravel, how far the repercussions will reach.

We're talking about 13 or 14 countries have now become embroiled in one way or another with this conflict.

I'm not sure that that was part of the calculus going into this.

And most importantly, let's just talk for a second about the Iranian people, because for all the declarations from the US From President Trump, from Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about Iranians, take to the street, take your country back.

The Iranians, the few Iranians that we've been able to get in touch with because obviously there has been an Internet blackout since, since this war began, are mostly hiding.

They're hiding from relentless bombardment.

They're hiding from a brutal regime that has made very clear that they will shoot to kill if anyone dares to take to the streets.

And for those ordinary Iranian people, I can only imagine how horrifying it is right now to have just so little sense of where this is going and what the metric is from victory for the United States.

Do you have some sense of how this is being received by the countries that are affected by this, the ones who have been attacked in response to the United States and Israel's bombing of Iran?

I think for all of these countries that have come under fire now, retaliatory fire from Iran, whether it's the Gulf countries, whether it's Iraqi Kurdistan, where I am, there is a sense of dread like, oh, my God, not this again.

Are we seriously going to get dragged into some protracted regional conflagration which has the potential to escalate in so many different ways?

You know, when you think back to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and

everybody kind of laughed at then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when he talked about the known knowns and then the unknown unknowns, and

I think for the people who live here, it's the fear of the unknown unknowns and the fear that maybe no one in the White House right now is really trying to get to grips with what those unknowns might be in order to potentially mitigate this getting even bloodier and even uglier.

As you said, that there's, there's a news blackout in Iran.

What are the stories that were possibly missing here in the region because there isn't a way to actually convey the reality on the ground.

Well, first of all, I really want to give a big shout out to my colleague Fred Plaikin, who was just inside Iran for a week and working under inclusion, incredibly stressful and dangerous conditions and doing really important reporting.

But I think he would be the first to admit that you are very challenged, even when you are lucky enough to actually be on the ground in Iran to really talk to people because they are so frightened.

And so what we are missing right now so clearly is the humanity of this.

We're not seeing the mothers of those 168 children who were killed, almost certainly by a U.S. tomahawk.

We're not seeing the people hiding in their bathrooms, clutching their children as the ceiling comes down.

We're not seeing people who were cheering when the Ayatollah, when the supreme Leader was killed, but

who have now been told that if there are more reports coming from that apartment block that anyone's cheering or booing that they will be raided, and

the fear that they live with, the trauma that they went through in January, more than 7,000 people massacred for taking to the streets and demanding freedom and a better future.

We are not getting that texture, that layer of complexity and humanity, which, frankly, as a war correspondent, to be trying to cover this, it feels like you are looking through a keyhole.

And it's incredibly frustrating and humbling.

But it is what it is, and we continue to try to do the best that we can.

We'll be right back with more Clarissa Ward, everybody.