The Journalist

Steve Farrell: Well, it certainly was a handful. It waas similar to being in a dark tunnel with no end to it; you never know what is going to happen next or how you will get out of it – dead or alive. 

 

SF: I was reporting for the Times at that time and was travelling with an American freelance journalist in an armoured car between Ramadi and Falluja when we were attacked by bandits, or “Ali Babas” locally, who began firing at us. They were armed with guns, knives and rocket-propelled grenades and were shooting at the car before eventually hitting one of its tyres. We were then squeezed into a taxi and driven into an area around the Sunni triangle town of Fallujah. The area was a no-go for Iraqi police or even coalition troops, unless heavily armoured

 

NOX: how come you didn’t end up on a Jihadi video?

SF: We only just managed to talk our way out of it. We were asked a series of questions including who we were, why were we in Iraq, what were we doing there… I was even given paper and told to draw a map of US positions I’d seen. The questioning continued for eight hours by different people, who asked the same questions over and over. We were offered meals, which were followed by more rounds of questions, which was clearly their way to put us off guard. 


 

SF: It was clear form the very beginning that lying was not an option. They were going to search everything we owned and we would be found out eventually. Another thing was that we had a story, ready to be told. Ours was the fact that we both covered the siege of Jenin in April 2002, which made a useful comparison to draw with Fallujah. We kept comparing Fallujah to Jenin, which, to Arabs, was considered as a massacre. Even with the subject turned to religion we proceeded with caution, comparing Catholic-Protestant divides to Sunni and Shia, trying to find a bond in that sense. 

 

SF: We’d take risks. A few colleagues and I stayed unembedded in Najaf throughout the August 2004 siege of Moqtada al-Sadr’s forces. But this became harder and harder for western journalists. By 2006, everyone was terrified of fake checkpoints all over Baghdad, when you couldn't be sure if the masked men with guns standing in the street were police, soldiers, insurgents or militias. The American surge of 2007 quickly rid Baghdad of the rogue checkpoints, because there were so many real ones. That meant we could get out more, and get to more areas of the capital to report ourselves. We now mix unembedded and embedded reporting to get to as many districts as we can. But it still meant that I had to work twenty times as hard to do a twentieth of the reporting I can do anywhere else. It is so frustrating. 

 

SF: In Gaza, you can be in the wrong place at the wrong time; a stray Palestinian bullet, an Israeli missile or a gunfight erupts in the street. The Israeli checkpoints are also wearisome, although foreign journalists can, usually, pass through them with far more ease than Palestinians. But Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters are much more used to having journalists around, and both societies are news-obsessed. The American and Iraqi military are a very different matter, with both unaccustomed to the phenomenon of journalists visiting an Iraqi town without being shown around. Many parts of Iraq have become virtual no-go zones for journalists, and the risks are very real, and have by no means gone away. 

 

SF: I strongly believe that Iraq matters, and that as a news journalist I won't be left wondering in 20 years time “What was the point?”

 

For the full version of this article, see NOX20.