DUBAI, 4 April 2003 — Four journalists have died in Iraq since the beginning of the war and two more are missing — grim reminders of the hazards facing reporters on the battlefield. The risks from land mines and suicide bombings have added to the already significant dangers of modern warfare, and many correspondents have reported hair-raising episodes in which they barely escaped with their lives.

But none of the casualties has come from the ranks of several hundred journalists “embedded” with US and British troops attacking Iraq since March 20.

Kaveh Golestan, a Pulitzer-prize winning photographer from Iran, became the latest victim when he stepped out of his car and on to a land mine in Kifri, in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, on Wednesday.

Golestan, 52, had been working as a cameraman for the BBC and was part of a four-person team including producer Stuart Hughes, who was injured in the blast. The other two were unhurt.

Australian cameraman Paul Moran, who was on assignment for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, was killed last month by a suicide bombing in the northern Iraqi town of Khurmal, also under Kurdish control.

The 39-year-old died instantly when a taxi raced up beside him and detonated a massive bomb.

Meanwhile, two reporters for the British television network ITN have died, while two others are missing. Gaby Rado, 48, fell from the roof of the Abu Sanaa Hotel in Sulaymaniya, a major town in a Kurdish-controlled area. The circumstances of his death are not known.

ITN correspondent Terry Lloyd is believed to have been killed by US coalition fire near the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Lloyd’s French cameraman Fred Nerac and Lebanese interpreter Hussein Osman are still missing. After Golestan’s death, the BBC’s news director Richard Sambrook said: “This once again underlines the dangers faced by news teams covering the war in Iraq.”

The Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF, or Reporters Without Borders), which defends press freedom around the world, says more than 2,000 members of the international media have flocked to the Gulf to cover the conflict. Some have been witness to brutal battles and others have faced different dangers — including a reporter and a photographer from US daily Newsday imprisoned for a week by Iraqi authorities in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, the wife of Nerac accused the US government yesterday of withholding the facts of the incident that also left a veteran ITN reporter dead. “I believe you may know the answer to so many of our questions, yet you will not tell us anything,” Fabienne Nerac wrote in a letter to US President George W. Bush. “I am writing to beg you, and to appeal to your humanity, to break your silence and tell me what happened that day,” she said in the letter, excerpts of which were released by ITN in London.