BAGHDAD, 27 September 2005 — I had been dreading this moment for weeks, but I knew it would come inevitably. The night before leaving for Baghdad; preparing for yet another trip to that doomed city to report on yet more violence.
For weeks at a time, I had lived in denial. I had told myself, no, it’s not happening; no, I am not going back there. I have had enough, I am not going back to Iraq. But then I gave in, I started assuring my worried friends that I would be safe there — after all, it’s not that dangerous.
Last Monday night (Sept. 19) I sat, sheepishly, in my bedroom, packing my bags. I was drowning in depression — a mixture of fear and anxiety smoldering in my guts. I wanted to distract myself, so I started going through my favorite bedtime routine: checking the wires for the latest pictures from Iraq. What atrocity had I missed that day by hiding in London?
I soon came across an out-of-focus image of a policeman lifting a cover to show a dead body lying in a hospital morgue. It was the sort of photograph I had seen a hundred times before. Then I read the caption: “A policeman lifts... the body of Fakher Haidar Al-Tamimi...”
My heart stopped and my eyes started watering. It can’t be Fakher, I told myself, and started to frantically search the web for more details. Seeing his byline on a New York Times story from the day before, I was briefly reassured. But then I read the story of his death on the same website.
“An Iraqi journalist and photographer working for the New York Times in Basra was found dead early Monday after being abducted from his home by a group of armed men wearing masks and claiming to be police officers,” read the report.
“The journalist, Fakher Haidar, 38, was found with his hands bound and a bag over his head in a deserted area on the outskirts of Basra, in southern Iraq, hours after being taken from his house in that city. A relative who viewed his body in the city morgue said he had at least one bullet-hole in his head and bruises on his back as if he had been beaten.”
I finished the article and started to search again. I soon found another picture of him on the web: Fakher, standing next to a cameraman in Basra with his most distinctive feature — his big smile — on full display. Fakher always smiled and always shook your hand firmly, a small notebook in his other hand. He was the sole authority on anything that happened in Basra. Journalists from all over the world would seek Fakher’s help and insider’s knowledge on the south of the country. He knew everybody and everything.
Because of his big smile, shadowed by a huge, bushy moustache wildly out of proportion with his gaunt face, Basra always felt safe to me when I was with him. I saw him for the last time two months ago. We were in Baghdad, in a dark street outside the fortified castles of one of the western newspapers. He looked wary, but still forced a thin smile.
One of the things that made him such a good journalist was his near obsession with details. I once called him to ask about some rumors that were circulating of clashes between rival tribes in Basra. He told me the story, the numbers of people fighting, the weapons, the time. I had to remind him, apologetically, that I was interested in writing a few hundred words about the battle, not a book.
Fakher is one of 56 journalists to be killed in Iraq since the war started. He is also the 36th Iraqi journalist to be killed, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
Last Wednesday Ahlam Youssef became number 37. An engineer working for the Iraqi TV network, she was gunned down in Mosul with her husband. “With the foreign press unable to move around freely for fear of attack, Iraqis have become the eyes and ears of the world in this conflict,” reads a statement by CPJ Executive Ann Cooper on their website. “The recent violence is threatening to cut off this critical source of information.”
As reporting from Iraq is becoming almost impossible, new ground rules have been set for most of the foreign media. Apart from a handful of journalists, everyone goes out in armed convoys, if they go out at all. If you are six feet tall, fair-haired and stupid enough to come to Baghdad, then you might as well stick to the hotel swimming pool or your agency fortress, and the occasional trip embedded with the US Army. Instead you can count on your Iraqi employees to go out and get you the story.
A mixture of guilt, responsibility and ambition keeps driving Iraqi journalists to push the limits a bit further every time. The intoxication you get from reporting the truths after so many decades of lies is indescribable. You feel you can tell the world what is really happening, but you also feel that you are safe because of the way you look, because of your scruffy beard or your moustache. But far from being immune, the Iraqis are the ones getting killed.
Iraqi journalists, like local journalists all over the world, don’t have the luxury of leaving the country every few weeks at the end of their stint. The few who do get to leave the country end up like refugees, drinking heavily in London pubs before being dragged back into the inferno.
The idea of independent Iraqi journalism is being killed only two years after it was born, a little of it dying with each of these brave 37 people. Iraqi journalists are being killed by the Americans, the insurgents, the militias and the police. They are often intimidated and threatened by anyone who doesn’t like their coverage.
There are no ground rules for them; they won’t be allowed the luxuries of the fast car and the bodyguard, and they often have houses and families in the local area. They can be located easily, which is why they are often in the firing line.
News agencies are dependent on native journalists covering events in their local towns, where even Iraqis from another city cannot go.
Those people are left there to fend for themselves, vulnerable in the midst of the insurgents. Americans often consider them to be cooperating with the insurgency or insurgents themselves, especially if they work for an Arab news channel. If they are not shot dead in fighting, they can end up in American custody.
This is not a phenomenon unique to Iraq. Local journalists are killed all over the world, from Colombia and the Philippines to the Lebanon. The difference is that “the Iraq war” is the biggest story in the world right now, and Iraqi photographers, cameramen and reporters are all under pressure from their bosses — not to mention themselves — to deliver something that is becoming increasingly impossible to deliver.
How can you establish a free media in such fear and anarchy? How can you expect thugs with Kalashnikovs to respect the media?
When, in August, the American journalist Steven Vincent was killed in Basra, his death was widely reported, and newspapers around the world used the occasion to discuss the horrible militia killings in the south.
When Fakher was murdered, apart from the New York Times story, his death barely merited a mention.
