Nir Rosen’s voice is quiet, almost gentle, and at first it’s a little difficult to hear him when I call him at his hotel in Manhattan. He’s been back in the States for about a week, just returned from his latest foray into the killing fields of Iraq — a place he’s set to revisit to in about a month’s time.
As a freelance journalist, Rosen has been shuttling back and forth to Iraq since April 2003, when as a 27-year-old with few journalistic credits to his name he convinced Time magazine to send him there as a stringer. Since then he’s written for a bevy of big publications: the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Salon, Mother Jones, Boston Review and the Asia Times, and in early May published his first book, In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq. Not bad for a guy who says that “I wasn’t really a journalist until I got to Iraq. I’d written about five articles probably over a couple of years.” Before that, he had worked as a nightclub bouncer and “an investigator for the Najavo Indians, for their law firm.”
These days, Rosen, who was born in New York City, lives with his wife in Istanbul, Turkey, although he says his residency there is tenuous since “I’m never there,” as the last three years have seen him reporting extensively from Iraq and Pakistan, with plans to go to Afghanistan.
His book comes amid a fusillade of other works by journalists trying to give voice to the chaos of their time in Iraq, but Rosen — who speaks Iraqi Arabic and who was the only Western journalist to get inside the network of insurgents in Fallujah just before the massive American assault there in the spring of 2004 — paints a more nuanced, intimate portrait than many others are able to. Like the Washington Post‘s Anthony Shadid (who is American, but of Lebanese descent), Rosen is both able to talk to Iraqis and blend in with them, since his father is Iranian, so “I have dark skin, so I look like everybody else.”
This ability, and his willingness to work alone, is what has distinguished Rosen’s work from the beginning. While in Iraq, he makes it a point to stay away from other Western journalists, and his book shows the fruits of this determination.
I asked him about the perspective he is able to bring to the emotions and politics behind the insurgency, especially the amount of time that he spent listening to sermons in mosques, which gives an important fly-on-the-wall view to his account of the formation of the unrest in mid- 2003 and early 2004. In effect, it’s just like anywhere else, as “in Iraq, it’s all about having the right friends,” he explains. “People from various tribes who are in some way friends or neighbors or relatives of people who you want to meet that are hard to get to. I just got lucky and managed to make the right friends. I found people are generally pretty receptive once they feel comfortable that I was a journalist and not a spy.”
But as we’ve noted before, things are different now, and the days when reporters could get around on their own, in 2003 and early 2004, are long since over. “By the spring of 2004 people were more and more tense, and afraid of strangers coming in to their neighborhoods. By that time, the sectarian trajectory was pretty apparent, and now I believe it’s a full scale civil war.” Rosen says that now he can’t move with the same freedom he had in 2003, but that in retrospect, back in the early days, “I did a lot of stupid things that could have ended up much worse than it did — it was mostly just luck that it didn’t.” He says that none of his Iraqi friends are willing to go and do the kinds of stories they used to, because it’s just to dangerous to go into many Baghdad neighborhoods.
While the opportunities for Western reporters to go out in the streets is limited, Rosen knows that even posing as an Iraqi only provides him with so much protection. Life is cheap in Iraq, and being a journalist provides you with no special security. Just this past February, Atwar Bahjat, a popular Iraqi TV host for the Al-Arabiya network, was killed near Samarra along with cameraman Khaled Mahmoud al-Falahi and engineer Adnan Khairallah.
Rosen is obviously well aware of the danger, and of the battle in the United States over the “hotel journalism” canard, which holds that American reporters never leave their hotel compounds. “I’m critical of the American media in general for many things,” he says, “but not for their failure to get around. At this point getting around is suicidal. The fact that I often do it is only because my wife doesn’t know how dangerous it is. [Other reporters] just can’t, especially if you don’t look local. It’s impossible. People will kidnap you and not necessarily for political reasons, but for financial reasons. And your [Iraqi] staff probably won’t be able to take you anywhere either, because they have those same fears.”
That isn’t to say that he isn’t critical of the media in Iraq on certain points. As his book and many of his previous articles make clear, he’s been convinced for a long, long time that Iraq is heading for civil war, and says, “If I were critical of the media [it would be] for not focusing on the right trends from the beginning, and not paying sufficient attention to the events outside the Green Zone because they thought that the politicians in the Green Zone actually mattered in 2003 and 2004. They were too slow to realize the importance of the insurgency, and they were far too slow to realize the importance of the sectarian fighting. And I think they’re still blind to the intensity of the civil war, although people are finally catching up.”
And here, again, he sees his Arabic language skills as giving him an edge over other reporters. “I don’t think you’d see journalists in other parts of the world not know the local language, but for some reason in Iraq this was OK. I think it caused an over-reliance on translators, and translators have their own agendas — both with the military and with journalists.
“Having that sort of dependence on someone else’s point of view I think is dangerous, plus just literally not being able to read the writing on the wall — the graffiti — paying attention to these kinds of details, it’s the same sort of thing that plagued the American intelligence establishment.”
While that may not be the kindest of comparisons, it is the sad reality of life on the ground in Iraq. But Rosen is headed back to Iraq in June for another round of reporting, where he will continue to operate outside the safety net (such as it is) of up-armored news bureau compounds, bringing the muffled voices of Iraqis back home to the States.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.