Chris Allbritton: Here be Dragons... (Young reporters stay away from Iraq)

[Barrett808]

BAGHDAD — Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of email from aspiring foreign correspondents who want to cut their teeth in Baghdad. I understand the sentiment, I really do. But at this time, I think it’s an unwise course of action and I’d like to take a little space to outline why.

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When I returned for the third time in May 2004, however, things were different. I had raised money again, this time as seed money for a more traditional freelancing career. I figured the donations and my savings would see me through a couple of months. However, TIME Magazine snapped me up immediately and I’ve been working with them ever since. So much for the two months I thought it would take to find a steady gig. And it’s a good thing, too, as by May 2004, the situation had become very bad, with an insurgency we all thought would not get worse but most assuredly did (and still is.) But even in those days, I remember just hiring a couple of guys to drive and translate and run around the city at all hours of the day and night. One of my best memories was a drunken evening at Dragon Bay, the Chinese restaurant outside the Green Zone that had a karaoke machine. My colleagues and I warbled away until 1 a.m. or so and then made my poor driver — who didn’t much like Chinese food — take us home. Along the way, we saw John Simpson, of the BBC, doing a standup report in the darkness of the city. Drunken with cheap red wine and the thrill of the forbidden, one of my friends yelled out “John Simpson sucks!” Sorry, John. Professionalism did not rule the night. Hope the standup went OK.

Such stunts are unimaginable now. I don’t know any Western colleagues who go outside our compound at night. Our social life has been reduced to dinner parties and pool parties. But the work is what’s even worse. Every day we venture out with eyes peeled for kidnappers (who like soft targets such as journalists), IEDs, American patrols and trigger-happy Iraqi troops. The ambient threat has risen far past Condition Red. the Committee to Protect Journalist has listed Iraq, for the second year in a row, as the most dangerous place in the world to work as a journalist. Sixty-seven journalists have been killed here since March 2003, according to Reporters without Borders. That’s more than the 20 years of the Vietnam War (1955-1975). Many have been killed by American negligence and error. Others were murdered by terrorist thugs. Five of my friends have been kidnapped, but thankfully all were released. One kidnapped journalist, Italy’s Enzo Baldoni, was killed. I didn’t know him.

My point is that this is no longer a freelancer’s war. I’m lucky. I have the entire security apparatus of TIME Magazine to back me up. I am protected by guards, have access to cars, the entire secure compound, you name it. I have an editor who would miss me if I didn’t show up. (All of the kidnapped journalists have been freelancers who didn’t check in regularly and people often didn’t know there were missing at first.)

All of these protections cost money, something most freelancers are short of. It is simply no longer advisable to hire a driver and translator and go running around the city like I did last summer. I’ve been getting a number of emails from young journalists asking to do just this, and I tell them not to come and do this unless they have the backing of a major media organization’s security infrastructure. Steve Vincent ended up dead because he cowboyed around Basra — and that’s one of the safe cities, we’re told.

(more)

http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2005/09/here_be_dragons.php