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Bunkered New York Times reporter Edward Wong asks: How do you accurately cover a war from inside a fortified compound? Near the end of my first tour in Iraq, I found myself in the dusty, arid Shiite heartland of the south. I had been in the country for three months, and I had decided to make a trip down to the city of Basra, stopping en route to do a story on the Marsh Arabs whom Saddam Hussein had persecuted so harshly. On my last day near the fertile marshes, outside the town of Nasiriya, I decided on a whim to visit the ruins of Ur, the ancient city-state founded nearly 5,000 years ago by the Sumerians. When I arrived, I found that the entire area had been sealed off by the United States Air Force. Sometime during the invasion of Iraq, the military had decided to use the area as a forward operating base. I persuaded two Air Force officers to let me in, and they accompanied me as we drove up to the massive pyramidal ziggurat that marked the first flourishing of human civilization, here in the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The name of Ur first entered my consciousness back in primary school, when I learned about the epic of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian warrior who undertook a futile quest for immortality. That was one narrative of bloodshed, and now, several millennia later, I was documenting another, in which armies mustered and clashed and left their dead strewn across this desert. As I climbed up the ziggurat and stared out at the palm groves scattered across the landscape, I wondered whether this war, the second American invasion of Iraq, would make a lasting impact on the scholars of history, and whether, thousands of years from now, it would be remembered alongside stories such as that of Gilgamesh. What began unfolding March 2003, with all the destruction unleashed, the lives lost, may go down as merely a blip in the long march of the civilizations here in Mesopotamia. Yet, for those of us covering the war, there is a sense we are witnessing a historical moment that, even if its consequences do not outlast our generation, will have a profound effect on America and the Middle East in the next several years, if not decades. It has not been easy to report the story. That trip south, in February 2004, took place during the unraveling of any sense of freedom that journalists had had in Iraq. Driving down to Basra, I took with me two cars and a pair of armed guards, Iraqi men whom the British security adviser to the Baghdad bureau of the New York Times had hired after careful vetting. That winter, a growing number of foreign civilians had been ambushed and killed by insurgents along the highways of Iraq, and reports of banditry in the south were common. On the way back from Basra, we pulled over to get gas, and the guards quickly surrounded me as soon as I stepped from the car. They eyed the other Iraqis at the gas station suspiciously. They carried handguns in holsters on their belts, and I wondered whether they would start shooting if they really thought we were in danger, and what my own reaction would be if that were to happen. Our level of caution then was mild compared to what it is now, more than a year later. The very fact that I could drive out of Baghdad seems almost quaint. These days, the highways from the capital are largely controlled by insurgents, and any trip along them is considered by almost every foreigner in the country to be no less suicidal than taking part in a game of Russian roulette. In the early days of the occupation, we would hop in a car as soon as we heard about a bombing or firefight, racing through the capital or out of it, to cities such as Falluja and Karbala and Erbil. The road to Basra and the Shiite holy cities of the south wound through a valley of the Euphrates that has, in the last year, come to be called the "Triangle of Death," because of the frequency with which Sunni insurgents and bandits kill foreigners and Shiite pilgrims there. To compensate for the relative difficulties of travel now, the major news organizations have set up extensive stringer networks across the country. We rely on Iraqis in far-flung places to be our eyes and ears, and we try to ensure that they give us as accurate a report as possible from their regions. Even in the capital, on routine bombing stories that take place in a neighborhood known to be hostile to foreigners, we often send out Iraqi reporters to collect quotes and descriptions from witnesses.
When we do drive around Baghdad, it is almost always with two cars. Now the guards carry Kalashnikov rifles rather than just handguns. We rarely linger anywhere for more than a couple hours, whether it is in a mosque or a politician’s home, and we certainly do not eat in restaur-ants or stroll along the streets to go shopping, as we once did. The situation is far from ideal, and it is as good a barometer as any of how the occupation has gone. Besides journalists, other foreigners find themselves equally frustrated, as they sulk inside compounds surrounded by concrete blast walls rather than going out and taking part in the aid or reconstruction work they had come here to do. Officials from the U.S. State Department live inside the four-square-mile fortified area known as the Green Zone, and they cannot go anywhere without riding in convoys of Humvees or armored sport utility vehicles. There have been times in recent months, though, when it seemed as if the security situation would improve, and with it our ability to do our jobs. Last January, right before the elections for a constitutional assembly, the American embassy arranged Black Hawk helicopters to fly a group of reporters down to the Shiite holy city of Najaf so that we could report from the south without having to risk driving there. The road from Baghdad to Najaf runs through the Triangle of Death; it is the same one I took down to Ur and the marshes. Our fixers in Najaf had told us they thought it would be safe to report in the city, and so we checked into a hotel, the first time I had done so in Iraq in nearly a year. On election day, we walked through the city interviewing voters inside polling centers, mosques, and the labyrinthine alleyways of the Old City. We never felt threatened, and no car bombs went off. Instead, the voters walked defiantly to the polling stations, despite threats by insurgents, and proudly held up index fingers stained purple, to show us that they had voted. For the next several days, we went through Najaf speaking with clerics, shopkeepers, and pilgrims, getting a feel once again for the life of an Iraqi city. It was as if we ourselves were working in defiance of all the violence that had accumulated since the invasion, the violence that had kept us cooped up for so long. We could actually write, once again, dispatches with texture and a semblance of insight. It was the best any reporter trying to document history could hope for, and it ignited a spark of optimism in all of us, if only for a moment. —Edward Wong is a reporter in the Baghdad bureau of the New York Times. He graduated from UC Berkeley with a M.J. in 1998 and
a M.I.A.S. in 1999. |
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Battle for Hill 881, 1967. Photographer Catherine Leroy was wounded and captured by North Vietnamese troops during the war there. She recently exhibited her photographs at Northgate Hall, and collected them, with those of other prominent war photographers in Under Fire: Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam, with an introduction by John McCain.
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