Words From the Front

At 8 a.m. on Oct. 27, 2003, the walls of The New York Times complex in Baghdad shook from the force of one of the first major suicide attacks of the conflict.

Dexter Filkins, a New York Times Iraq correspondent and now a fellow at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, was one of the first on the scene. Standing amid the wreckage of bodies and debris, he could hear the explosive sounds of four other attacks being carried out simultaneously around the city.

Today, he looks back on these days as the “good old days” when Baghdad was relatively safe. Since then, he said, things have changed and the increase in violence has affected the ability of journalists to travel freely within the country to report on the war.

On the first day of the Iraq invasion, Filkins rented a car in Kuwait and drove a distance of about 350 miles to reach Baghdad.

“I mean I wouldn’t do it again,” he said. “It was nuts.”

By October, the signs of widespread distrust towards Westerners were already present amid the escalating violence.

In a nearby town, Filkins and a small team of media support workers were attacked by a crowd of angry Iraqis in the aftermath of yet another suicide bomb.

“They almost did kill us. I mean they beat the hell out of us,” Filkins said. “They were blaming us for the suicide bombs.”

In Iraq, convoys, armed guards, armored vehicles, and security details are commonplace.

Despite these precautions, the death toll for journalists is higher in this war than in any other conflict, according to the non-partisan press foundation, Freedom Forum.

In the five years since the war began, 127 journalists have been killed in Iraq. That number is estimated to be nearly two times as high as the number of journalists killed during the Vietnam War according to the foundation.

“We’ve been kidnapped, held at gunpoint, held at knife point—you name it,” said Filkins, who has reported on conflicts from Sri Lanka to Afghanistan. “The insurgents have made it a priority to target reporters.”

A FORTRESS IN THE MIDST OF CHAOS

Its 7 p.m. in Baghdad and Amit R. Paley ’04, a Washington Post Iraq correspondent, can be heard clearly from his satellite phone over the background of a bustling newsroom.

It is one of the few times when communication is possible at all in the city. Land lines are few and far between, and satellite service is repeatedly jammed by the U.S. military.

Paley is one of hundreds of reporters who, like the soldiers they follow daily, are on “rotation” in Iraq. This is his second rotation since his first arrival in the summer of 2006, in the midst of what was largely considered to be the most dangerous period in the post-invasion conflict.

Paley, a former Crimson president, sits in what he called “a fortress within a fortress”.

The Washington Post and other major news agencies have resorted to spending millions of dollars to protect their staff and maintain a presence among a dwindling press corps.

The practice of “embedding” journalists within military units has emerged as one of the safest but also controversial practices in this war.

“For a long time there were portions of the country that you could not go to at all unless you were embedded with the U.S. military,” Paley said. “Not because the military is purposefully restricting access. It’s just much safer.”

Critics argue that while reporters may place themselves in less danger when they embed, they sacrifice a level of objectivity that is necessary to fairly represent the conditions on the ground.

Matthew A. Baum, a visiting professor in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, said that embedding restricts the reporter’s vision to the battlefield, creating news coverage that is unintentionally censored.

“They can’t really see the broader context from sitting inside a tank or a Humvee on the front line,” Baum said. “It makes it less likely that they are going to write things that are harshly critical of those units.”

In the aftermath of the invasion, a heavily guarded and internationally controlled Green Zone was cordoned off from the rest of Baghdad to protect foreign diplomats and Iraqi politicians from the frequent suicide bombs and heavy violence plaguing the city.

Many have said that the Green Zone isolates these officials and that the journalists, who remain within the confines of the guarded area, risk detaching themselves from the rest of Baghdad.

“A lot of people have the conception that all the journalists are within the Green Zone, and that’s not necessarily true,” Paley said.

SILENT VOICES

In the summer of 2004, the Hamra Hotel, fully equipped with a pool for Baghdad’s sweltering summer days, was a hub of western journalist activity.

Bay Fang ’95, a U.S. News and World Report journalist at the time, said she remembers spending part of her day attending pool parties and barbecues at the hotel.

When reporting, she and other female journalists would wear a traditional abaya and enter the streets of Baghdad.

“You were trying to blend in and interview people and do your job,” Fang said. “A lot of people thought I was an Afghan pilgrim.”

Fang said that there was a time when she could travel freely around Baghdad, take Arabic lessons at the home of an Iraqi woman, and talk to civilians under protection of her abaya.

But by the end of 2004, as the violence escalated, communication between Westerners and Iraqis put both journalists and their sources at risk, said Fang, who is now the diplomatic correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.

“In 2005-2006 when the violence was spiraling out of control, people were reporting from their hotel rooms,” she said. “The risk-to-reward ratio was completely turned on its head.”

The reward of “really trying to delve into people’s lives” became harder and harder to attain, according to Fang.

For Filkins, reporting about “human drama” has become another casualty of the war. Journalists, isolated from everyone but the U.S. military, miss the perspectives of Iraqi civilians and insurgents in the reports that reach the American public.

But, Filkins said, even the military perspective is limited.

“When you are with a bunch of 19 year olds, just by virtue of being with a private or a corporal in the army, they don’t know anything because their commanders don’t tell them anything,” Filkins said. “Yes, it’s a problem.”

APATHY AND DISTANCE

Paley, who is 26 years old, is one of the youngest reporters in Iraq and unlike many of his colleagues, he said, he can relate to the soldiers, sometimes as young as 18 who are fighting on the front lines.

The Unites States’ all-volunteer army is composed of young men and women from small, largely unheard of towns across America, Filkins said.

This fact, as well as Iraq’s distance from the mainland United States, makes the war an “abstraction” for the American public, he adds.

“It’s a lot easier to see headlines that say 30 soldiers killed in Iraq and say ‘well they’re not my kids,’” he said.

Paley also said that while the war is an ever present story in the news, Americans are suffering from war fatigue.

“We have lots of readers who read every single word that we write and who wish there was more coverage,” he said. “At the same time, there are people tuning out.”

Baum, the public policy professor, said that fatigue came at exactly the wrong time.

“As the bad news went down, the news went down,” he said. “Because the media tend to cover war and conflict better than they cover peace and harmony.”

Baum warned, however, that what the future holds for Iraq is entirely uncertain.

“All of this is a snap shot,” he said. “If it blows up...if the calm of today is replaced by a storm of renewed suicide bombings and civil war in the next six months it will be a big, big story.”

Paley said that the challenge that he faces in writing about this war is reporting the nuances, not just the good news and the bad.

“There’s is a lot of fluctuation between moments of sorrow and despair and moments of optimism,” he said. “The more time you spend here the more you realize how little you know about the situation.”

—Staff writer Abby D. Phillip can be reached at adphill@fas.harvard.edu.

For comprehensive coverage of the Iraq War's impact at Harvard five years later, check out The Crimson's Iraq Supplement.