Reporters in the Cross Hairs
Enders, David
Reporters in the Cross Hairs By David Enders with additional reporting by Hiba Dawood in Baghdad Illustration by Tomasz Walenta Baghdad has become a very dangerous place to be an Arab with a...
...I wanted once to cover a graduation ceremony for the Police Academy," said Abdul Kareem Al-Hashemi, a freelance writer for Al-Adala newspaper (the newspaper belonging to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the two major Shiite political parties in the country) and Kul Al-Iraq (All of Iraq) newspaper...
...Tareq Ayyoub was the first Al Jazeera journalist killed in Iraq...
...One Iraqi cameraman and friend of mine has been arrested three times...
...The Iraqi police arrested Ahmed Abed Ali while he was filming the Iraqi police cooperating with officials of a fuel station during the fuel shortage with the intent to sell gangsters fuel," Saraj says...
...This is the third time they arrested my brother for just being a journalist...
...Saraj says a journalist was arrested for working on one of the country's toughest stories: the allegation that widespread corruption, just as much as guerrilla attacks on the infrastructure, has contributed to Iraq's fuel shortage...
...This country will have to act with a certain level of ruthlessness in order to deal effectively with the insurgency," the official says...
...The security situation has become an excuse for the Americans and the Iraqi police to disturb journalists...
...The Iraq police commandos are arresting Iraqi journalists for doing their work," says Ibraheem Al-Saraj, head of the Association for Defending Iraqi Journalists' Rights...
...In this raid, the U.S...
...Sadr's men, for their part, have been accused of retaliating against journalists who they felt portrayed them in an unflattering light...
...In the last year, the cases of harassment by police have increased...
...It is a business, and good news doesn't always sell...
...Toward the end of that year, about a dozen Al Jazeera journalists were arrested in a four-month period...
...AU.S...
...My footage was when they opened fire and killed some people inside the mosque...
...custody: "One of the men who beat me said, 'We don't care if you are journalist or not.'" "I think you're hearing the frustration of the soldiers," explains Lieutenant Colonel Steven Boylan, who is in charge of the U.S...
...They made him a criminal for transferring reality...
...embassy official in Baghdad puts it a little more diplomatically: "These freedoms are freedoms we take for granted because we've had them our entire lives...
...Journalists with Al Jazeera have complained of harassment and detention since their first unembedded encounters with U.S...
...I was told by one of the officers, without hesitation, that my friend had been picked up with other men at the home of a "known resistance fighter...
...Some Iraqi journalists fear reversion to the repressive modes of the past...
...I think the Al Jazeera attacks are on purpose," says Jim Naureckas, who has monitored U.S...
...Ayad Al-Tamimi, the editor-inchief of Sada Wasit (the Wasit Echo) newspaper, was arrested and is now in jail for two months because he wrote an article about corruption in Wasit," Saraj says...
...Though Pentagon spokesmen say it has investigated all of the deaths and concluded that they were unintentional, many are unsatisfied, especially in the case of journalists working for Al Jazeera, the Qatari-based news channel...
...Rumsfeld reiterated the claims at a conference in Singapore in June of this year...
...We are, to be honest, concerned about their actions...
...We were four male journalists with a female journalist...
...At leastfifty-two journalists and twenty-one support staff-such as camerapersons, drivers, and translators-have been killedinIraq since March 2003, and thirty have been abducted...
...coverage of Iraq and edits Extra!, the newsletter of the New York-based Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting...
...When you have U.S...
...Everything has been a false promise...
...It is going to take strength for when they read something in a newspaper to not suppress dissent...
...Iraqi staff working for Reuters have also suffered similar arrests and have been held in Abu Ghraib, as well...
...He was arrested a third time during a Friday prayer service last November at the Abu Hanifa mosque in western Baghdad...
...Reporters in the Cross Hairs By David Enders with additional reporting by Hiba Dawood in Baghdad Illustration by Tomasz Walenta Baghdad has become a very dangerous place to be an Arab with a camera...
...Ministry of Interior Spokesman Brigadier General Abdul Kareem Al-Kinani defends the government's policy...
...All our colleagues who had been arrested, and they count more than twenty-one in total, have all been ultimately released...
...I couldn't believe it...
...Intimidation comes not only from the United States...
...The unit also claimed he had filmed resistance attacks and that they had found tapes in his house, but they offered no evidence to back up that claim...
...His first book, "Baghdad Bulletin," which includes an account of the English-language paper he edited in Iraq following the invasion, was recently published...
...In August 2004, when journalists in Najaf were trying to cover the fighting between the U.S...
...military officials and government officials making very aggressive statements against Al Jazeera, I think it sends a very worrying message to U.S...
...Democracy has become a phantasm...
...The leading cause of death is insurgent attacks and retributive killings, which have claimed at least twenty-nine lives...
...It's one of the most deadly conflicts in recent history for the press," says Campagna, who compares it to Algeria in the early to mid '90s...
...Some Iraqi police officers seem to be encouraged to harass journalists...
...Look at last spring, when the Administration was making some very vitriolic statements about Al Jazeera and to a lesser extent, Al Arabiya...
...military saw it," he says...
...His wife told me he had been arrested in his own living room, so I pushed the matter...
...The second time he was taken, in February 2004, I contacted the unit that had made the arrest...
...aerial bombardment of Al Jazeera's Baghdad office during the invasion in 2003...
...He died after a U.S...
...Like Rumsfeld, Iraqi police blame the media for promoting the insurgency...
...This is going to be a transition...
...Ahmed was taken to the Ministry of Oil security section and from there to the Major Crimes Unit...
...military and Moqtada Al-Sadr's militia, police removed them from their hotels and took them at gunpoint to the local police station, where the police commander harangued them for encouraging the uprising...
...I hid it under the carpet...
...Will mistakes be made...
...Beneath that there's a whole slew of supposedly accidental attacks-I would put those in the category of intentional...
...I have visited him once, and he told me he will stop working when he comes out...
...military has been responsible for the deaths of ten journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists...
...Al Jazeera has always called on the U.S...
...This is not the first time they took my footage-it has happened three or four times in different places...
...military, operating jointly with Iraqi forces, killed five civilians...
...Ihave the right to arrest you, investigate, and then decide if you couldbereleasedornot...
...A U.S...
...The hostile attitude toward the media starts at the top...
...Saraj said two Iraqi journalists are currently in prison for having criticized the government of Wasit province...
...For the same reason, Ahmed Mutar-the director for the same newspaper-has been put in jail for four months...
...They arrested me when I was filming but one of the Iraqi soldiers gave me the camera back and asked me to hide it before the U.S...
...The military has offered conflicting rationales for the engagement, stating that the intent was to destroy the armored personnel carrier to prevent looters from stripping it and also that the helicopters received fire from the vicinity of the damaged vehicle...
...helicopters fired into the crowd that had surrounded the vehicle, killing Tomaisi and wounding other journalists and a number of civilians...
...Hiba Dawood is the pseudonym for an Iraqi journalist living in Baghdad...
...Certainly...
...Al Arabiya reporter Mazen Tomaisi was killed while reporting near a U.S...
...My brother has spent two months in jail and he still has two months more...
...They told us we were free at least to express our opinion on things," says Nuha Mutar, the sister of the director of Sada Wasit...
...He [Rumsfeld] had the military repeating the mantra that Al Jazeera repeatedly had advanced knowledge and is working in coordination with insurgents...
...David Enders is a New York-based freelance journalist who has spent more than fifteen months reporting from Iraq...
...These are very serious but unsubstantiated allegations...
...No one in the media can tell me they are telling a full and balanced story...
...When we arrest journalists, we would, mostofthe time, release them in a few hours," he says...
...troops on the ground," says Joel Campagna of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists...
...soldier found the camera and took the tape...
...Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has criticized Al Jazeera on multiple occasions, famously last year for being "Johnny-on-the-spot a little too often for my taste...
...military's Combined Press Information Center...
...Yet the police and the Americans are arresting and beating journalists...
...military to Iraqi police...
...Thankfully, we have no one incarcerated currently in Iraq," says Al Jazeera's Ballout...
...Some of them spent time in Abu Ghraib prison, where they were subjected to hooding, forced to stand naked, and abused with water...
...While we were filming them and taking photographs, the police pulled out their guns and said, 'We are going to kill you.'" The situation has prompted some Iraqi journalists to give up...
...authority to launch an open and transparent investigation into the circumstances that led to its fighter jets bombing our offices and killing Tareq Ayyoub," says Jihad Ballout, a spokesman for the network...
...We've had a number of abuses from all sides," Campagna says...
...My friend, who has also been threatened by guerrillas for filming near the mosque, says he has been beaten and tortured while in U.S...
...After three days of my repeated phone calls to the unit, demanding to know what had really happened, as well as pressure by other journalists on the ground in Baghdad who visited the base, he was released...
...The U.S.-appointed Iraqi government banned Al Jazeera along with its Dubai-based competitor Al Arabiya later last year...
...Reporters have complained of harassment from insurgents to the U.S...
...There have been a large number of attacks on journalists that may have been individually accidental, but essentially unembedded journalists are fair game...
...The U.S...
...armored personnel carrier that had been attacked and disabled last year in Baghdad...
...troops in the spring of 2003...
...Yes, we are a free country now but that doesn't mean thatifyou abuse me, I would shut up...
Vol. 69 • September 2005 • No. 9
