Reporters in the Cross Hairs

September 2005 Issue

Baghdad has become a very dangerous place to be an Arab with a camera. One Iraqi cameraman and friend of mine has been arrested three times. The second time he was taken, in February 2004, I contacted the unit that had made the arrest. 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.” His wife told me he had been arrested in his own living room, so I pushed the matter. 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. 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.

He was arrested a third time during a Friday prayer service last November at the Abu Hanifa mosque in western Baghdad. In this raid, the U.S. military, operating jointly with Iraqi forces, killed five civilians.

“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. military saw it,” he says. “I hid it under the carpet. A U.S. soldier found the camera and took the tape. My footage was when they opened fire and killed some people inside the mosque. This is not the first time they took my footage—it has happened three or four times in different places.”

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. 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. military’s Combined Press Information Center. “No one in the media can tell me they are telling a full and balanced story. It is a business, and good news doesn’t always sell.”

The hostile attitude toward the media starts at the top. 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.” Rumsfeld reiterated the claims at a conference in Singapore in June of this year.

“When you have 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. troops on the ground,” says Joel Campagna of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. “Look at last spring, when the Administration was making some very vitriolic statements about Al Jazeera and to a lesser extent, Al Arabiya. He [Rumsfeld] had the military repeating the mantra that Al Jazeera repeatedly had advanced knowledge and is working in coordination with insurgents. These are very serious but unsubstantiated allegations.”

Intimidation comes not only from the United States.

Like Rumsfeld, Iraqi police blame the media for promoting the insurgency. In August 2004, when journalists in Najaf were trying to cover the fighting between the U.S. 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. (Sadr’s men, for their part, have been accused of retaliating against journalists who they felt portrayed them in an unflattering light.)

“We’ve had a number of abuses from all sides,” Campagna says. “Reporters have complained of harassment from insurgents to the U.S. military to Iraqi police. In the last year, the cases of harassment by police have increased.”

At least fifty-two journalists and twenty-one support staff—such as camera-persons, drivers, and translators—have been killed in Iraq since March 2003, and thirty have been abducted.

“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.

The U.S. military has been responsible for the deaths of ten journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. (The leading cause of death is insurgent attacks and retributive killings, which have claimed at least twenty-nine lives.) 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.

Tareq Ayyoub was the first Al Jazeera journalist killed in Iraq. He died after a U.S. aerial bombardment of Al Jazeera’s Baghdad office during the invasion in 2003. “Al Jazeera has always called on the U.S. 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.

Al Arabiya reporter Mazen Tomaisi was killed while reporting near a U.S. armored personnel carrier that had been attacked and disabled last year in Baghdad. U.S. helicopters fired into the crowd that had surrounded the vehicle, killing Tomaisi and wounding other journalists and a number of civilians. 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.

“I think the Al Jazeera attacks are on purpose,” says Jim Naureckas, who has monitored U.S. coverage of Iraq and edits Extra!, the newsletter of the New York-based Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. “Beneath that there’s a whole slew of supposedly accidental attacks—I would put those in the category of intentional. There have been a large number of attacks on journalists that may have been individually accidental, but essentially unembedded journalists are fair game.”

Journalists with Al Jazeera have complained of harassment and detention since their first unembedded encounters with U.S. troops in the spring of 2003. Toward the end of that year, about a dozen Al Jazeera journalists were arrested in a four-month period. Some of them spent time in Abu Ghraib prison, where they were subjected to hooding, forced to stand naked, and abused with water. Iraqi staff working for Reuters have also suffered similar arrests and have been held in Abu Ghraib, as well.

“Thankfully, we have no one incarcerated currently in Iraq,” says Al Jazeera’s Ballout. “All our colleagues who had been arrested, and they count more than twenty-one in total, have all been ultimately released.” The U.S.-appointed Iraqi government banned Al Jazeera along with its Dubai-based competitor Al Arabiya later last year.

Some Iraqi journalists fear reversion to the repressive modes of the past.

“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.

Saraj said two Iraqi journalists are currently in prison for having criticized the government of Wasit province.

“Ayad Al-Tamimi, the editor-in-chief 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. “For the same reason, Ahmed Mutar—the director for the same newspaper—has been put in jail for four months.”

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.

“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. “Ahmed was taken to the Ministry of Oil security section and from there to the Major Crimes Unit. I couldn’t believe it. They made him a criminal for transferring reality. The security situation has become an excuse for the Americans and the Iraqi police to disturb journalists.”

Some Iraqi police officers seem to be encouraged to harass journalists.

“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. “We were four male journalists with a female journalist. 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.

“Everything has been a false promise. 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. “Yet the police and the Americans are arresting and beating journalists. This is the third time they arrested my brother for just being a journalist. Democracy has become a phantasm. My brother has spent two months in jail and he still has two months more. I have visited him once, and he told me he will stop working when he comes out.”

Ministry of Interior Spokesman Brigadier General Abdul Kareem Al-Kinani defends the government’s policy. “When we arrest journalists, we would, most of the time, release them in a few hours,” he says. “We are, to be honest, concerned about their actions. Yes, we are a free country now but that doesn’t mean that if you abuse me, I would shut up. I have the right to arrest you, investigate, and then decide if you could be released or not.”

A U.S. 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. This is going to be a transition. Will mistakes be made? Certainly. This country will have to act with a certain level of ruthlessness in order to deal effectively with the insurgency,” the official says. “It is going to take strength for when they read something in a newspaper to not suppress dissent.”