The Most Dangerous War in The History of Journalism
Three times more journalists have been killed in Iraq than in both world wars – many deliberately targeted by militias. Kim Sengupta reports on a forgotten death toll that is still rising
There were a number of “landmarks” in Iraq in the past few months: the Petraeus report into the US army’s “surge”; the withdrawal of British forces from their last base inside Basra city; the decision to bring security companies under the law following the incident involving guards from Blackwater.
But one landmark which passed virtually unnoticed was that the Iraq conflict has become the deadliest by far for the media trying to cover it, with more than 200 journalists killed to date. To put this in perspective, two were killed in the First World War, 68 in the Second, 77 in Vietnam and 36 in the Balkans. And the toll in Iraq shows no sign of declining. It is, if anything, rising. Five journalists were killed in separate attacks in just one day last month. “Covering Iraq,” says Chris Cramer, the president of CNN International, ” is the single most dangerous assignment in the history of journalism.”
Some famous journalists have lost their lives reporting conflicts - Robert Capa in the first Indochina war; Ernie Pyle on the island of Okinawa in the Second World War; Larry Burrows in Vietnam. But what makes Iraq more dangerous than the others is that the deaths are not accidental collateral damage from stray shells or from reporters being caught up in the fighting. Instead, many have been specifically targeted because of what they had reported or because they came from the wrong side of the sectarian divide. They are killed in drive-by shootings or abducted and executed, often after being tortured. There are little or no investigations into the attacks, creating impunity for the killers from the Shia or Sunni militant groups or government run death squads. The deaths have not come just from those quarters, about 15 reporters have been killed by US troops, six from Reuters alone.
There is a feeling among Iraqi journalists that the reason their plight receives so little attention is because the majority of those affected are not members of the Western media. On the occasions when the victims were, in fact, foreigners, the scope of coverage was glaringly different.
It would be unfair to suggest that the few foreign journalists left working in Iraq have anything less than great empathy for the Iraqi journalists working with them. Photographs of those who have fallen in the conflict are displayed on walls of the bureaux of The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters and other news organisations. Their families receive generous financial settlements and have, at times, been helped with resettlement abroad. It is undoubtedly the case that the media organisations have behaved towards their staff much more honourably than, for instance, the British Government has towards the translators employed by the military in Basra.
There is always the question of whether some of these journalists may have remained alive had they not been involved with the foreign media. It is something that is difficult to judge in a society experiencing extreme violence. John F Burns, until recently the Baghdad bureau chief of The New York Times, wrote, after the death of Khalid W Hassan, an Iraqi of Palestinian extraction, that “the murderous turmoil in Baghdad has reached a point where many families never know the killers of their loved ones, or their motives. Sunni insurgents? Shia militias? Killers who mimic one or the other while pursuing more private motives of greed, spite or revenge? Or, in Mr Hassan’s case, the nature of his employment, which placed him doubly at risk: as an Iraqi journalist, and as an Iraqi working for Americans?”
Nour al-Khal, a very brave female journalist I worked with in Basra, was abducted by armed men in Iraqi police uniforms. She was with an American reporter, Steven Vincent. Both were shot. Vincent was killed and al-Khal dumped by the roadside, left for dead. Vincent had been writing about how the police in Basra, who were heavily infiltrated by Shia militias, had been acting like gangsters, and that may have sealed their fate. What happened showed that the gunmen feared no repercussions from kidnapping and killing an American, let alone an Iraqi, in the middle of Iraq’s second city, then supposedly under British control.
Similarly, when our hotel in Baghdad, the Hamra, got blown up by suicide bombers, there were claims that the attack had been ordered by a senior member of the government who had got fed up with foreign journalists writing about the death squads he ran. “He tried to blow us up just because he didn’t like some stories we are writing,” a colleague said in wonder. “Even Alastair Campbell at his worst wouldn’t have done that.”
Last Wednesday evening at London’s Frontline Club, this year’s Kurt Schork award, in the memory of the journalist killed while covering events in Sierra Leone, was given posthumously to an Iraqi reporter. Sahar Hussein al-Haideri, 44, was gunned down in Mosul, in the north of the country, five months ago. Her killers are thought to be from the Islamist group, Ansar al-Sunna.
In such a place where life remains so cheap and death is meted out brutally and casually, the media will remain exposed to danger and it is the Iraqi journalists who will continue to pay the ultimate price.
“We should not be in this position, we are not parties in this conflict, we are just trying to tell the people what is happening”, says Hakim Ibrahim, a journalist in Baghdad. “But I have told my wife to be prepared for the worst. Anything can happen. This is Iraq.”
© 2007 The Independent
Aljazeera seems to feel that they were unfairly targeted by the US military so it is not just the insurgents who don’t want the facts getting out. Though they are not the only news media to lose members.
In Iraq alone, 93 Journalists and 37 Media support workers have been murdered/collateral damaged in Iraq.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/iraq/casualties.html
Great article, rich with detailed examples, and allegations connecting these unnamed death squads. Eluding that the police have been overrun or are connected to different mysterious groups often described by a religious connections. But there is no specifics, no concrete evidence. Just allegations. The pattern in the reports are of men in police uniforms, or men in uniforms, or simply, men with guns. A group of unknown men with guns abduct, kidnap, rape, torture, kill.
These groups of unknown gunmen remind me of the stories from the proxy wars of Central America (1960s-1990s). I wonder why these wars, such as the dirty war of Guatemala, didn’t make mention in this article. The author eludes to death squads running people down in Iraq, why not mention a very similar campaign strategy to silence dissent -and the dissemination of news- in Central America? There’s an article worth reading. Doyle, Kate. “The Atrocity Files”, Harpers(December 2007): 52-62.It reports about 2005 accidental discovery of the archives of Guatemala’s dirty war and the current effort to record the names of victims. It is an excellent supplement to Sengupta’s superb work.
Sengupta statement, “In such a place where life remains so cheap….” is a statement I first heard from military officers “explaining” the violence. I’m not used to hearing it from journalists. I refuse to accept the place, or the people of the place (Iraq), see life as cheap. Put the blame where it belongs– use first person. This is an gutsy, emotional article. If the journalist is going to offer an editorial/ interject an opinion, then the article can handle the journalist being even more direct and say something like, the unknown men with guns, the directors who arm and train these hit squads, the strategist who see assassinations as acceptable, see life as cheap and disposable –how else could anyone explain how humans could be so callous, so murderous, so destructive?
Who are the men who arm and train and finance and run and occupy these hit squads? Even today, a decade after the dirty wars of Guatemala, the answers are still as “vague” as they are in Iraq.
The real shame is that the real journalists are the ones dying. The fake journalists are at home, getting paid high salaries to either act as stenographers or as human teleprompters.
What a shame we can’t send Katie Couric or Tim Russert or Cokie Roberts out to the desert to dodge bullets.
If we connect the dots, we begin to see a pattern of fear carried out by the powerful. By killing storytellers, we smother the spread of the details of events that would cause great numbers of people to question and resist haunting pursuits. In a sense, it is the darkest of “blackout” campaigns that resides in the same family as blacklisting and blackballing. You see, rights of expression are really rights to storytelling — and since story directly relays an experience — it influences people. By killing storytellers and doing away with independent presses — we distance people from the events that actually shape their lives. We then have power to control perceptions and create false notions. War is indeed horribly dramatic, but the pen is mightier than the sword. Power knows this — and knows the benefits of killing off the potential of us coming to know — and act.
Aljazeera and La Jornada are two examples of news organizations that value and follow true Journalistic principles. That is the press needs to be free to tell the public the truth.
There is always a chance that a reporter might get some truth out. Bu$h the inferior’s regime likes the corporate lapdogs that accept press releases as investigative journalism. Killing any reporters ambitious enough to go to dangerous places is just good thinking when everyone is out to get you.
It seems to be forgotten that a couple of our Journalists were tapped by our snipers. If memory serves, they were trying to actually report Fallujah. That was something that the government definitely didn’t want reported, except by the embedded.
libertas, more than a couple.
U.S. military set to charge photographer in Iraq
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/11/20/iraq-reporter.html
U.S. military plans case against AP photographer
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20071120/AP_photographer_071120/20071120?hub=World
Mr. David Christopherson (Hamilton Centre, NDP): Mr. Speaker, last Monday in downtown Hamilton’s Mahal Restaurant, I had the honour to meet Afghan journalist Farida Nekzad, 2007 winner of the International Press Freedom Award and the founder of a coalition of over 200 women journalists in Afghanistan.
Every day Farida is threatened with violence and death simply because she is a woman and a journalist who challenges the status quo. One of Farida’s best friends, another woman journalist in Afghanistan, was gunned down in her own bed last June. Farida was told that she is next. Farida has said she will not give up her fight, “Even if I escape tomorrow, they will just target another woman”.
Thanks to the organization Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, Farida’s courage, determination and incredible work have been recognized.
At the same event, I spoke with Hamilton Spectator managing editor Jim Poling, who founded the internationally trained journalists project, which helps foreign trained journalists who now live in Canada get work experience here. This year 34 people will graduate from this influential program.
Thanks to people like Farida Nekzad and Jim Poling, the right of freedom of expression everywhere is being promoted here in Canada.
http://www2.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?Language=E&Mode=1&Parl=39&Ses=2&DocId=3112830
As seems always to happen, the best, the brightest, the most dedicated, are the ones who are martyred. May God be with her.