His employer NBC said Engel and other unnamed employees went missing shortly after crossing into Syria from Turkey on Thursday, and that it had not been able to contact them until it learned they had been freed on Monday. The network said there was no claim of responsibility, no contact with the captors and no ransom paid.
The kidnappers hustled Engel and his crew into the back of a truck and took them to an unknown location believed to be near the town of Ma'arrat Misrin, NBC said. They were blindfolded and bound but otherwise unharmed, it said. In his first interview after being released, Engel said his captors were members of the pro-government shabiha militia, a fearsome group of plainclothes enforcers accused of committing several massacres during the uprising.
Engel said he and fellow reporters were not physically mistreated, but suffered "a lot of psychological torture" at the hands of their masked abductors, who threatened to kill them. "They made us choose which one of us would be shot first. When we refused, there were mock shootings... They fired the gun up in the air. It can be a very traumatic experience."
Engel said he was told his captors were trained by Iran and allied with the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, adding that they wanted to exchange him and his crew for four Iranian agents, two Lebanese individuals and others captured by Syrian rebels, without providing further details. "They were going to bring us to a Hezbollah stronghold inside Syria... We were on our way there when we ran into this rebel checkpoint." A shootout ensued in which rebels shot dead two of his captors. Engel and his crew were freed unharmed shortly thereafter and made their way back across the border into Turkey, where they arrived in good health.
The Assad regime is a close ally of both Iran and Hezbollah, and Syrian rebels have accused both of aiding the government's brutal crackdown. The Ahrar Al-Sham brigades said in a statement that they had freed five foreign journalists who were "held by an armed gang connected to the regime." The statement named Engel and four others, a Turk, a British Jordanian, another American, and a German Syrian. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said there had been "an exchange of fire" between Ahrar Al-Sham fighters manning a checkpoint to the west of Ma'arrat Misrin and a group of armed men.