by Anne Garrels
While waiting to do a two-way for Morning Edition, my editor, Doug Roberts, keeps me up to date. He tells me that a correspondent from Al Jazeera has just been wounded. Then he tells me the man has died. He was caught in the morning’s battle while broadcasting from the roof of their office building. As I get off the phone, there’s a huge blast that literally throws me from my chair. The hotel shudders. I think another bomb has landed close by and continue typing. The hotel phone rings. It’s Amer. I assume he wants to tell me about an upcoming press conference and I start to mutter that I’m about to go on the air when he interrupts with the words “Get out now. Hotel hit.” I am struck by a rush of adrenaline and a surreal calm all at once. I have been anticipating something like this for too many days. I go straight for the sat phone. If the hotel is going up in flames I figure I’d better take the phone with me. I struggle to unplug and disentangle all the cables, and in my rush I trip over an extension cord, yanking my laptop off the desk. There’s a sickening crash as it hits the floor. “So I’ll have to write my scripts by hand from now on,” I think as I dash out the door. I stuff the various parts of the sat phone into a backpack—hiding the sat phone is now instinct—and hurtle down the eleven flights of stairs along with lots of other panicked reporters.
The lobby is full of people. I can’t find Amer. It turns out he had run up another staircase to make sure I had gotten out. He finally appears, out of breath. First there’s relief that there doesn’t seem to be much damage. There’s no sign of any fire. Someone points to a chipped balcony on the 15th floor, four floors above my room. It doesn’t look very bad. But then the casualties appear. Someone wrapped in a bloody sheet is carried out. Then another body. Everyone is desperately asking one another who’s been hurt. The photographers and camera crews crowd around, making it difficult to get the injured into waiting cars. We aren’t even thoughtful about our own.
Most of us immediately assumed an Iraqi irregular, angered by Iraqi setbacks in the war and knowing the hotel housed foreign journalists, had taken a potshot at the building with a shoulder-launched, rocket-propelled grenade. However, a television camera had recorded the turn of a U.S. tank turret, its aim at the hotel, and the subsequent blast. News comes from the hospital: two cameramen have died. Three others remain in the hospital with wounds.
The shell glanced off the balcony, spraying those standing in room 1502 with concrete and metal. There’s a pool of blood, and an overturned camera still lying on the floor where one of the cameramen fell. Colleagues stand around, shaken. Some are weeping. Seamus Conlan, a photographer for World Picture News, says, “I don’t know how many people you know personally who have been killed in this work, but I know a lot.”
And it could easily have been he who was killed today. Just a few hours earlier, at dawn, he had been fired on by American troops while he was taking pictures from the roof of the hotel. Conlan said he first saw a tracer bullet flash over his head and then immediately afterward heard the whistling of several other bullets close by. He slid down the roof and hid behind a ledge for cover.
At an early briefing at Central Command HQ in Qatar, Brigadier General Vincent Brooks initially says the hotel was targeted after soldiers were fired on from the lobby, which would have been a physical impossibility. Later he tells reporters, “I may have misspoken.” U.S. military officials then say a tank from the 3rd Infantry had fired on the hotel, after reporting that “significant” enemy fire had come from a position in front of the eighteen-story hotel. The Commander of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade, which deployed the tank, eventually reports that the crew aimed at the Palestine after seeing enemy “binoculars.” This was the dozens of lenses of TV and still cameras that were trained on the battle. I have to go on the air, but first I call Vint to let him know I am not one of the victims.
I can barely contain my anger, and the explanations coming out of Central Command in Doha do nothing to improve the situation. No one at the hotel saw or heard any outgoing fire. A spokesman says the soldiers didn’t know the building they were aiming at was the Palestine, despite its distinctive architecture, and the well-known fact that just about every journalist in town is living and working here. For nearly three weeks, foreign reporters have operated with the gnawing fear that a so-called smart bomb or missile might inadvertently slam into our temporary home. It really didn’t occur to anyone that the hotel in central Baghdad would be deliberately targeted by U.S. ground forces.
And I am furious with Al Jazeera for putting its people in unnecessary danger. While most of us have had to live and work at the Palestine under the scrutiny of the Information Ministry, Qatar-based Al Jazeera was permitted to have its own headquarters and its own exclusive camera position. Its building, just across the river, was near the Republican Palace and Information Ministry. When the bombing started Al Jazeera had informed U.S. forces about its precise location, but the staff continued to work there even when the area was surrounded by Republican Guard and Fedayeen and was clearly going to be right smack in the middle of the battle zone. To say, as one al Jazeera staffer did, that this was just a residential area is rubbish. This particular tragedy was avoidable.
The toll on Iraqis also appears to be severe. Amer and I go around to hospitals, where the wounded are pouring in by ambulance, taxi, private car, even on foot. Many of the hospitals won’t let us in, presumably because they are overwhelmed with military casualties. At the al-Kindi hospital, the emergency room is covered in blood. Many of the wounded are men in uniform, though the head doctor, clearly under orders, insists they are civilians. Asked how many people have been treated, the staff says they have long since stopped counting.
There are also many injured civilians. Many have been caught in the crossfire. Some were in their cars when the tanks appeared and they were fired at, their vehicles turned to toast. While I was there a father carried in his four-year-old son. He was pronounced dead on arrival. His twelve-year-old daughter was also killed when the modest carpentry shop the family called home was hit. His wife lay on a gurney. Her beige sundress was soaked in blood from the waist down. A doctor said she too would die and left to treat someone else. The hospital is understaffed as doctors and nurses can’t make it to work because of the fighting. In the hospital morgue there are already fifteen corpses dumped in a walk-in refrigerator, among them the body of the Al Jazeera correspondent, still wearing his flak jacket.
The death toll for journalists in this short war has been high, and as always it comes in ways you don’t or can’t anticipate. At the Palestine we survived the worst of the bombing to be hit by an American tank shell in broad daylight. Others, traveling with U.S. troops, have been killed in car accidents or by friendly fire. A British correspondent fell off a roof. A total of nine have died during the first three weeks, falling victim to Iraqi or U.S. fire, land mines, or suicide bombings. Four others have died in accidents or through illness.
I remember talking to Kurt Schork, a veteran Reuters reporter, in Kosovo a few years ago. We both said it was time to start winding down this war business. We chatted about what we would do next. He was subsequently killed in Sierra Leone, an assignment I turned down. I know I don’t understand Africa and have no instinct about how to survive there. Is my luck running out?
While Baghdad has been the highest-profile assignment I’ve had, it has not been the scariest, despite all the concerns of friends, family, and NPR listeners. As I think back, the days after reporter Danny Pearl was abducted and subsequently executed in Pakistan may have been the worst. There wasn’t a war, but the threats from unknown people against all the other American journalists remaining in Pakistan were haunting.
Like Danny Pearl, I had been trying to follow up on the fate of the radical Islamic groups that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had finally banned at the urging of the United States. I wanted to find out how they were responding to the new restrictions after years of being supported and nurtured by the Pakistani security services. While Danny was follow
ing up on specific leads to specific people, I was on a fishing expedition. I just “dropped in” on those I could find, who had gone underground. They had no time to prepare the elaborate kidnapping that was Danny’s fate.
The day he disappeared I was back, alone, in the house NPR had rented in Islamabad. My boss Loren Jenkins called to say that The New York Times and others were moving their reporters into the Marriott hotel for security reasons. I understood their thinking. These were high-profile organizations at risk, but I also had misgivings about going to the high-profile hotel, where reporters could be easily found and identified. My misgivings were quickly confirmed when a Pakistani newspaper published an article that viciously went after a broadcast by CBS for reporting that Osama bin Laden had been in a Rawalpindi hospital shortly before the attack on the World Trade Center. It proceeded to list the room numbers of the CBS staffers in the Marriott, which was little more than an invitation to murder. I felt comfortable in our modest house, where I could just hunker down in anonymity. That night, though, the wind picked up, rattling the shutters. Then the phone started ringing. When I answered it, there was no one at the other end. This happened several times over several hours. What I felt that night was terror, raw terror.
E-mails from listeners often raise the question of why I do what I do. “It is infinitely fascinating” is the crude answer, but I am really not very interested in the strictly military part of war. Rather I am fascinated by how people survive, and how the process of war affects the attitudes of all sides involved, and how they pull out of it.
By nightfall, the areas held by the Americans have fallen silent, suggesting that much of the Iraqi resistance has died away. It is strange to think my NPR colleague Eric Westervelt, who is embedded with an army unit, is just a couple of miles from here. It is still too dangerous for us to try to meet. So close, but still a world away.
BRENDA BULLETIN: APRIL 8, 2003
I hope those of you who have harbored doubts about our Batty Babe’s grasp of military nomenclature heard her report this morning, peppered with an impressive array of technological military jargon. Brenda described in detail the seven-hour battle that took place literally before her as she watched from the balcony of her 11th-floor room at the Palestine Hotel. True, she had some help from a former Rhodesian soldier manning a TV camera next door. Tim gave her a primer on the identification of ordnance songs. Some of us do warblers, others do howitzers. It is unsettling to hear this most unmilitary of human beings go into considerable depth on the capabilities of the Gatling cannon in the nose of a Warthog. These aircraft don’t actually hover, but they can fly extremely slowly and when they let loose, she said, it sounds like something primordial in heat. She had a mezzanine seat throughout. Smartly, she and Tim had decided that the last place they wanted to be was on the 18th-floor roof, where others journalists raced and goggled for a better view. What happened next is still unclear.
In any case, some poor sod manning a tank cannon in the American column looked across the river and saw all the cavorting journos peering at them through binoculars and fired off a round. Five were hit—one Ukrainian fellow and a Spanish cameraman later died. The wounded had to be carried down fifteen floors to waiting vans. The feeding frenzy was such among the surviving journalists clustered about the vehicles documenting the fate of their fallen colleagues that the doors of the vans could not be opened. Annie, donning her EMT hat, waded in throwing people aside—to get the vans loaded and off.
If you get the impression that her view of her profession can at times be jaundiced, you are right. The story about her Al Jazeera colleagues illustrates the point. They had maintained a work station in a building very close to the Ministry of Information and various other intelligence installations on the other side of the river. From that vantage point they had far superior camera angles than those at the Palestine. Despite the fact that they were clearly in harm’s way and, it’s rumored, had asked permission to leave, the working stiffs were prohibited from moving by higher-ups anxious to maintain their pretty pictures. The one reporter that is known to have been killed had worked with NPR in the past.
On a more personal level, Amer’s family (wife and three kids) have returned to Baghdad from a village where they had been staying with relatives. Apparently, accommodations were too tight. His neighborhood is still dangerous, so he put everyone in an apartment across the street from the Palestine. Since he would be leaving the hotel to join them, he asked Annie if he had to pay the bill, noting that “the Americans are going to own this place anyway in a couple of days.” They decided to play this out straight and the bill was paid. But she has drawn the line here, saying that she will not pony up to the Ministry of Information if they try to exact another fee just for the pleasure of being in Saddam’s Iraq.
However, today’s nearby battle has terrified Amer’s wife and young kids, and he has moved them again to stay with another relative, somewhere, he hopes, that will be quieter. Amer, as you may have gathered, is very special man who, for Annie’s sake, has been the right person in the right place and at the right time. Besides providing a vital ear into the regime, he continues to magically provide her one good hot meal a day.
The Palestine basically is nothing more than a shell at this point. The staff, for the most part, has fled. The food, when you can get it, is inedible. The water is cold and dark brown. But our resourceful correspondent has displayed mind-boggling electrical genius. She stripped the wire of the overhead bulb and hotwired the panel to it. Now when the generator runs, she can run her laptop, talk on the sat phone, AND once again heat up water for coffee. She is trying to figure out a way to use her helmet as a wok. Now, that is what I call living.
The other thing that you need to know, and this warms the very cockles of my heart, is that at this point virtually everything she has—laptop, satellite phone, clothing, luggage, and God-knows-what-else—is held together by duct tape.
Lastly, I am sad to report that the recently arrived network bimbette has already lost her digital camera. There is a big sign in the lobby to this effect. If any of you knows where it is, please do tell.
V
APRIL 9, 2003
Silence is much noisier than the boom, boom of bombs. And that’s what woke me today. The security guy in the hallway was gone. I walked downstairs into the lobby at about 7. It was empty, completely empty. All the people we have feared for so long have gone, evaporated. The Information Ministry office is locked up.
But it turns out that Uday al-Tae did what Saddam’s agents have done so well—using his last shreds of power, he went around extorting money late last night. He never seemed to focus on me, which didn’t help when I was trying to wheedle a visa out of him but maybe helped in the end. I still have my cash.
Uday has since disappeared. Qadm has also disappeared. Now I realize why he wouldn’t tell me where he lived. Amer confirms that he was in fact an intelligence officer, but as Amer puts it, he was a decent man nonetheless. As intelligence agents go, he was pretty straight. I am sure that he used his charm to get information, but he helped us more than others and he could be disarmingly honest at moments—or was he just very clever? In recent weeks he distanced himself from me, saying one day that he had to be careful as he was perceived to be too pro-American. Heather Abbott from CBC and I had asked how we could contact him if and when chaos broke out and the phones went down. Since addresses are less than useless in Baghdad, I asked him to draw a map of where he lived. He declined. I wonder if we will ever see him again and what he will do. Perhaps he got a cut of the fees we all paid and is living happily in Syria.
One of his underlings—Mr. Mohsen—dared to appear this morning. Greed overcame good sense. His sights were set on the property of a group of Italian journalists who had driven into southern Iraq after the war began. They were captured and subsequently held under guard in the Palestine Hotel along with the French TV crew. Mohsen kept the keys to their vehicles. Early this morning, with marines just a couple of mile
s from the hotel, Mohsen was caught trying to drive off in the confiscated Mitsubishi. An Italian journalist managed to slash the tires before he could escape. Mohsen begged for mercy and one of the Iraqi drivers finally gave him a lift home. Amer says he was last seen tearing up his Ministry ID card, tossing the fragments out the window.
If there is to be a last-ditch fight by the Republican Guard, Saddam’s vaunted troops, or by fanatical irregular forces, they are nowhere to be seen today. In neighborhood after neighborhood the Baath Party members, steely-eyed security, and police have vanished. Iraqi troops have fled their sandbagged trenches. Under a bridge I saw surface-to-air missiles left unmanned. An army jacket and a pair of military boots lay strewn across an intersection. No one knew the fate of Saddam, but suddenly it didn’t matter.
Reporters looking for U.S. troops tripped on them in the eastern suburbs, where they found themselves face to face with Abrams tanks. Marines moved quickly into abandoned Iraqi bunkers. Told there were no Iraqi military units anywhere between them and the city center, the Marine company commander reportedly chortled, “Love it, love it.”