Baghdad. Friday, 16 October 2004.
Almost as soon as my vehicle left the front gates of the compound, I realised something was wrong. There was a black car behind us that seemed to be following. As we turned the first corner, not more than 500 metres from the guarded hotel entrance, another black car that had been parked on the curb moved into the centre of the road to block our path. That car suddenly stopped and two men leapt out, pulling handguns from under their shirts and running towards us.

I screamed at the driver to reverse. My translator, Hussein, was in the front passenger seat, yelling. The car behind us had also stopped and there were more people getting out. My driver seemed to be in shock and didn’t react, and then the two men from the front car were at the door.

They were yelling and waving their pistols. I shouted at the driver to reverse, as the two men tried to wrench my door open from the outside while I held the armrest to keep it closed. The armrest broke off in my hand and the door flew open. The two men jumped into the back seat. With both hands, I grabbed the gun pointed at me by the first man and, with all my might, turned the barrel to face into his crotch. I tried to get my finger inside the trigger guard to shoot him.

Everybody working in Iraq was aware of what had been happening to hostages. We journalists had seen the beheading videos and we often discussed them. In September and October 2004, there had been a series of high-profile kidnappings that ended with the victims’ very violent and public death. Some of us, me included, had said it would be better to die as they tried to take you than allow them to film your grisly death later as a statement.

That was what I was thinking. This is it. I have to fight and maybe die right now or it will be too late.

But I lost my grip on the gun and it was over. They began driving towards the highway that leads to western Baghdad and Fallujah.
•
It was my third trip to Iraq that year. The space within which western journalists could work independently had shrunk dramatically each time I returned. At the start of the year, I had driven several times to Fallujah and through Ramadi, and also travelled by road to Karbala and north to Kirkuk, Sulaymaniyah and Arbil. I’d travelled south to Basra and back to Baghdad by rail.

By the time I returned in June and July, the situation had deteriorated immensely. Travel by road through the west to Jordan was out of the question, as the whole area from the western outskirts of Baghdad through Fallujah to Ramadi was outside the control of the occupying forces. On that trip, I remember driving out to Abu Ghraib jail to follow a story and film some interviews. I was greeted by an incredulous US army military reserve captain who couldn’t believe I had simply gone there in a local taxi. The soldiers were under attack every night and had begun receiving supplies by helicopter even though they were only thirty kilometres from Baghdad.

I returned for a third stint in September and October to find substantial parts of the capital itself no longer safe, including the sprawling Sadr City slum that had risen up in the Shia revolt led by Muqtada al-Sadr and was still firmly controlled by the militiamen of Muqtada’s Mahdi Army.

Journalists had been reduced to operating in fortified and guarded hotel complexes, the Green Zone, and wherever in the city our drivers and translators felt safe enough to take us on any given day.

The only other option was an embed with US military units. That meant that, as a reporter, you would never speak to an Iraqi who wasn’t getting a gun pointed at them or who wasn’t a direct employee of the US military.

It was a frustrating time because, as the general deterioration of security in Baghdad and across the country became the story, our ability to effectively report was diminished by the restrictions that we placed on ourselves, as well as those imposed by our organisations and the US military. The line between getting the story and getting killed was very fine.
•
We pulled up in a side street. They ordered us out of the car and walked, brazenly carrying their weapons, into a two-storey building that was being used as a soft drink bottle depot, with crates of empty bottles stacked everywhere. They took us to a small room upstairs. There were bars on the windows and a grubby mattress on the floor. I noticed immediately there was a length of chain on the floor but I tried not to think about that. A few moments later they pushed Saif, our driver, into the room. He looked pale and shaken. They told us all to sit on the mattress on one side of the room while they came and went from the other side, one of them remaining with a gun at all times.

We were told we were to be interrogated by their leader, the ‘emir’. That word terrified me because I knew only the very religious groups used it for their leaders. His questions, directed to me through my translator Hussein, were in Arabic and began simply – who was I and why had I come to Iraq? I answered as straightforwardly as possible. Hussein stressed my role as an independent journalist who had nothing to do with the coalition. I tried to come up with anything I could think of to make them understand that.

The leader said that if I was lying I would be killed, that if I worked for the coalition I would be killed, as would my driver and translator, that if there were any evidence against me I would be killed…

Read the full article on Overland HERE:

First published: 2011-09-05 04:36 AM