The tragic kidnapping and killing of ABC News employees Alaa Uldeen Aziz and Saif Laith Yousuf last week brought the number of journalists killed in Iraq since 2003 to 104. While I was at the Coalition Press Information Center in the International Zone yesterday, I sat down for dinner with a couple of courageous Iraqi journalists. They provided me with some context of the situation that journalists face here, and it isn’t a pretty picture.
Both men feel that they face a grave and persistent threat. They believe that the situation for journalists in Iraq began to deteriorate in 2006 after some prominent kidnappings of foreign journalists. (These kidnappings frequently resulted in killings, but sometimes the journalists were released in exchange for large sums of money.) After a number of such incidents with foreign reporters, militant groups began to target the Iraqi press. The two men I spoke with said that al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Mahdi Army have been the two most dangerous groups in this regard.
One of the men I ate with — an older Iraqi whose remaining hair grayed long ago — spoke with a sense of great urgency. “Aside from the Kurdish areas, nowhere in this country is safe for journalists,” he said. “Anytime I am in my car, I check all my mirrors constantly. I never know when I will be targeted.” The situation is so dire that they don’t even feel safe in the IZ: both men believe that the groups targeting reporters are on the lookout for journalists in the IZ, and will follow them after they leave its relatively safe confines. Although it didn’t make the same kind of headlines that the slaughtered ABC News employees did, they noted that one of their friends — Ali Khaleel of the Al-Zaman newspaper — was killed on May 20. Khaleel’s killing seems to follow the pattern that they described: according to the two men, he was followed from the IZ, then shot and killed while in his car.
The two men said that another major problem for journalists’ safety is militias’ infiltration of the Iraqi police force. Even having identification papers checked on the way to the embassy can be dangerous: if the security officer checking papers is in league with the militias, it can put the journalist on the terrorists’ radar screen. I spoke independently with an Arabic-language translator who corroborated the problem with the Iraqi police force. He described one incident where an Iraqi soldier who was particularly vigilant about battling the militias got beaten and then shot several times by militia members who were working as policemen. (Militias’ infiltration of the Iraqi police has also been described in a number of mainstream media reports.)
Just as the mortar targeting of the IZ seems clearly part of the militants’ propaganda war, so too is the targeting of journalists. (Another reason for the targeting of the press that came up during my dinner discussion is that some militants believe reporters are in actuality spies.) If journalists believe the country is falling apart, and feel that their profession places them in constant danger, that pessimism will be reflected in their writing. And just as Iraqi translators who work with U.S. troops need to be disguised while in the field, it has reached the point where Iraqi reporters with strong American sources need to be disguised too.
Understanding the significance of the targeting of journalists goes far beyond the casualty count. The terrorists have succeeded in making journalism a dangerous profession in Iraq, one with a low life expectancy. Their tentacles have a far reach, as they are apparently monitoring the IZ and have members of the Iraqi police serving as their malevolent eyes and ears. The Iraqi journalists I spoke with are bravely soldiering on, saying that they want to “bring the truth” in their reporting. But the panic and sense of resignation in their voices told me all I needed to know about the big picture.
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