VOICES
Ways to Die in Iraq
Ilearned about the dangers of covering Iraq firsthand in late October while responding to a suicide bombing at a police station in Baghdad with Joao Silva, a New York Times photographer, and Dexter Filkins, a Times reporter. An eerie silence blanketed a crowd of hundreds as we got out of our car and made our way toward the bomb site. Suddenly, a man sprinted from the crowd and began shoving and punching us, shouting, "Kill them, kill them all!" The crowd joined in, closing around us, and then a hail of rocks and concrete rained down upon us as we ran for our car. In seconds, passive onlookers had been transformed into a frenzied mob trying to hold our car back. Our driver gunned the engine, nearly running down several people. In the backseat, Joao held a T-shirt to my head to stop the bleeding from an ugly gash.
There are countless ways now for journalists in Iraq to die: you can be rocketed in your hotel room, blown up by roadside bombs as you patrol with the U.S. troops, shot by those same troops in cases of mistaken identity as you film them on the streets, or simply killed in one of the myriad car crashes that litter the roads now that all traffic regulation has broken down.
And now, to the list of dangers, comes the terrifying shift by the Iraqi resistance fighters toward killing civilians, in an attempt to turn this country into something resembling Somalia. In a seventy-two-hour span in late November, seven Spanish intelligence officers in civilian clothes were killed, followed by two Japanese diplomats, and then three contractors, two South Korean and one Colombian. All were ambushed on major highways regularly traveled by journalists. On December 2, Ashley Gilbertson, a freelance photographer, was driving through Samarra, a hotbed of resistance activity, when gunmen in a BMW opened fire with an AK-47. He and his driver escaped unharmed but the message was clear: journalists are now fair game. Iraq is becoming a country where there is little refuge and where situations are increasingly volatile, impossible to predict.
All this is changing the way we work. Many journalists are refusing to travel in anything but armored "hard cars." (Security officers note, however, that the Spaniards were attacked with RPGs and the Koreans were in a hard car that the attackers blasted through with a heavy machine gun.) Other journalists favor small sedans and camouflage themselves with kaffiyehs as they drive the streets. Nearly all news organizations employ guards or security consultants at their bureaus. Some journalists are now riding to assignments with armed guards in the car. At least two journalists that I've spoken to are contemplating carrying guns themselves. "It's just a question of time before a journalist gets murdered here," one writer, who has been in Iraq for more than six months, told me.
This is the seventh war I've covered. I've had close calls in all of them, but two months in Iraq has created more bad memories than any other place I've worked.
There's the one where we're riding through a resistance town, the man in the front seat is a guerrilla fighter and has a hand grenade, the man behind him has a nine millimeter pistol. The hammer's back, the safety off, and if we bump into an American patrol there would be a bloodbath. In another memory we're skidding out of control on the highway at fifty miles an hour, heading into oncoming traffic after a bus is sideswiped and careens toward us. In a third, I am running with my hands in the air down a street toward the site where American troops have been ambushed next to a school. Children are screaming hysterically, the gunfire just yards away. An American soldier whirls in the turret of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, pins me in the sights of his M16, then holds fire at the last moment as I yell, "American! American!"
He calls back, "I almost killed you."
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
