It is a quarter to one in the morning around the al-Hamra pool and the
evening's bacchanalia is just unfolding. Another bottle of Lebanese red is
popped open as a notorious Italian photographer tests out his charms on a
bikini-clad reporter in the pool. At a rickety plastic table, another
reporter is spinning a hair-raising tale of his journey across the Western
desert into Baghdad, pursued by armed bandits. By the end of the evening,
four of the party will end up fully clothed in the pool.
Five years since that riotous early summer of 2003, less than a handful of
that evening's revellers remain in Baghdad. At least six have been kidnapped
and held hostage by insurgents. Several have been wounded; several have
retired from covering conflict zones, at least for now, too troubled by what
they saw there. More than half have sought professional psychological help,
or been compelled to by family or employers. Some have gone on to great
professional success, or just gone on. At least two never got out alive,
swelling the death toll that has made Iraq the deadliest war for journalists
in history.
“I don't know anyone who came out unscathed,” Caroline Hawley, the BBC's
one-time woman in Baghdad reflects, meeting for a coffee in London as the
fifth anniversary loomed. It is not the physical wounds she is talking of.
The role of journalists in the Iraq war has been hotly debated at every
turn, from the gullibility of reporters covering the prewar intelligence
build-up to the wisdoms of embedding, the misplaced accusations of “hotel
journalism” or the perpetual barrage of abuse from Washington over our
failure to cover the “good news”. But the personal toll that the Iraq war
took on the journalists who covered it is less well known, outside of those
single dramatic events such as a kidnapping, an ambush or a bomb, which
hungry editors descended on. It was the battle we didn't report.
Those thrilling early weeks in Baghdad were the kind of story every journalist
lives for. Hawley, who had covered Baghdad under Saddam's regime of terror,
was seduced by the outpourings from Iraqis who could finally speak their
minds. “It was fascinating, you felt you were watching history unfold and
you really didn't know how it was going to go,” she recalls. But quickly
things started to happen that indicated it was not going to go well; the
looting, the disbanding of the Army and the shootings of civilians by
American forces in Fallujah.
Journalists who cover conflict generally have strong stomachs. But Iraq's
violence was not the regular battlefield kind, if there was ever such a
thing. Suicide bombs do appalling things to the human body and every day
there was a new and gruesome twist, from the trees decorated in leaf-like
scraps of bloodied flesh to the male genitalia that landed intact in front
of a bombed-out hotel. “You can tell he's a Muslim,” quipped a colleague.
Life got grimmer still when the kidnappings and beheadings of foreigners began
in spring 2004. That, more than any perhaps, was the moment Iraq became a
war like none before. Suddenly the risk was no longer of simply being caught
in the crossfire, as anyone in the city could be. Journalists were now the
hunted. Georges Malbrunot, a journalist with Le Figaro, remained convinced
his French passport excluded him from such a fate. That national talisman
counted for little when he and his colleague Christian Chesnot were met by
Sunni gunmen on the road to Najaf.
At the same time, a British aid worker, Margaret Hassan, was also abducted.
Hawley remembers watching footage of an old interview that she'd done with
Hassan and seeing Malbrunot walk through the shot. “I thought that's two
people I know who've been kidnapped. And I thought this is close, it's not a
distant threat, it could happen to anyone.” Hassan's execution shattered the
last shred of belief that there was a line that the kidnappers wouldn't
cross.
Throughout Georges's detention, I whispered an atheist's prayer every night
that somehow he would make it out alive. When he spoke to me on the phone a
month or so after his release, he went crazy when I confessed I was going
back to Baghdad. “Don't think they won't kill you, because they will,” he
warned me. But I went back anyway and two weeks after I came back out again,
Marla Ruzicka - humanitarian, Baghdad press corps mascot and my best friend
- was killed by a suicide bomber on the airport road.
“Her death was a turning point for so many of us who knew her,” Lulu
Garcia-Navarro, the Baghdad correspondent for National Public Radio and
fiancée of The Times's James Hider recalls. “We knew that things were bad in
Iraq. We'd reported on it. But all of a sudden, it became bad for us too.
She was supposed to throw a party that night, no? And then she was dead. I
think the war at that point, at least for me, stopped being just about the
others: the Iraqis and the soldiers, the people we kept our journalistic
detachment from. It became about all of us.”
Marla's funeral in California was like a reconvening of the Baghdad press
corps - all those fortunate enough to be out of the city. Back there, they
held a memorial. I'd written a eulogy and sent it, to be read by an American
freelancer, Jill Carroll. Eight months later, she was kidnapped too. It was
after Marla's funeral that many of the old “tribe” began to leave Baghdad or
cease their regular visits.
Journalistic life there had become not only threatening but circumscribed;
every journey had to be minutely planned, every security measure obsessed
over. Anywhere you went, you knew you had just 15 minutes to stay before
someone got on their mobile phone and called in the men with guns. Desperate
to reclaim the city I'd come to love, I persuaded my translator Ali to walk
me down a main street disguised in full abaya. Others did not have that
option. Garcia-Navarro forced her fiancé to dye his reddish hair and
eyebrows black; the dye “Zarqawi black” came out blue instead, leaving Hider
“looking like Papa Smurf”.
Garcia-Navarro realised earlier than many the toll Iraq was taking on her,
during the Ashura bombings in Najaf in 2003. “I was in the crowd with James
and it was just terrifying. People running everywhere and, because there
were millions of pilgrims pressed in, the bombs had the effect of meat
grinders, making little circles of death.”
Having covered conflict for some years, it was not unfamiliar territory. “But
when I got back to Baghdad I became very depressed. The kind of depression
that I couldn't shake. It lasted three days. Over the next few years, it
became harder and harder to shake that depression; it lasted longer and
longer until I couldn't get out of it at all. I finally decided I needed a
break after an American journalist I had spent time with only days before in
Basra was kidnapped and killed.”
Hawley was now suffering from recurring nightmares about kidnap. In them, she
was hiding in her closet as the kidnappers broke through the doors with a
chainsaw, severing the tips of her fingers and sending out arcs of spattered
blood. In another she was released, only to find herself walking down the
middle of the road in a miniskirt - “an invitation to have God knows what
done to you”.
At the same time, she was becoming frustrated by the security constraints.
“You go to a place like Iraq and you are meant to bear witness,” she says.
“You're meant to go out there and see what's happening and describe it and
convey it. There came a time where I thought it was incredibly important to
stay there but we were not bearing witness in a way we should have been.”
The constant criticisms from couch commentators made many journalists
question themselves. For a time, it felt we could do no right. Still our
failure to talk or write about the stresses and mechanics of our everyday
lives - often out of security concerns - meant the misinformation persisted;
that we cowered in the Green Zone, that we never went out, that we believed
everything the military told us.
When Hawley's breaking point came, she didn't recognise it. She was in the
Hyatt in Amman, Jordan, when the hotel was bombed. Amman is a journalist's
last stop when they go into Baghdad and the first stop when they come out,
so her guard was down.
I had flown in on the same flight to Amman and was in a different hotel when
the bombs went off. A few days later I flew into Baghdad; Hawley came a few
days after that. A week later, I awoke to suicide trucks ramming the hotel,
bringing down buildings around us, destroying half the hotel and killing
eight of our friends and neighbours. I stayed for two more weeks in my
half-trashed hotel room with a homeless photographer for company.
The phantom explosions began for me the night I left Baghdad, first in my
airport hotel room in Dubai, then in Delhi the next night as I saw the whole
window explode in on my living room. Back in London, I became withdrawn,
jumpy and unable to sleep. A month later I was told I had post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD).
In March, Hawley returned to Amman, where she was making a documentary about
the bombings. As she walked into the Hyatt, she felt a strange tingle in her
left leg. It was the first trigger of what was later diagnosed, in
Jerusalem, as PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Garcia-Navarro was told
she had PTSD in Mexico, where she moved with James after Baghdad, seeking a
little beauty and rest. For all the madness of Baghdad, we had been among
the only other people who had understood it.
When Daniel Demoustier, the ITN cameraman, lost his best friend and two other
colleagues, including Terry Lloyd, in a hail of American fire that nearly
killed him too, it was Baghdad he came back to, to be among those who had
lost their friends too. “It was the best therapy for me,” he says.
Hawley took the wrenching decision to leave her new post in Jerusalem after
being told that she would not recover if she stayed in a conflict zone. I
left Delhi to be treated in London, where Hawley came too. After six months
off, she returned to work for BBC News 24 in London. For the woman hailed as
the BBC's hottest rising star, it was a tricky transition. “I meet people
who recognise me and they say what are you doing now and it's like, oh,
that's quite a change,” she says. “I think they are trying to politely say
that must be a bit of a come-down.”
Garcia-Navarro describes recovering from PTSD as “emerging from the proverbial
tunnel”. She recovered the ability to connect once again with the outside
world. “Last year an old friend said to me: ‘Lulu, you are back. I thought
we'd lost you to the wars.'” Yet in January she returned full-time to
Baghdad, after a brief trial run. Malbrunot has never been back; one of the
last things his kidnappers told him was never to do so. His brief celebrity,
he feels, helped him through his experiences because his trauma was widely
acknowledged. The psychological toll among journalists remains unknown; many
who need help have not sought it and few will discuss it openly. The average
time lapse for PTSD onset - seven years - harbingers troubles yet to come.
Shame and a sense of inadequacy have stopped many journalists talking publicly
of their inner battles. After all, when you have witnessed such suffering,
your own anguish seems woefully small. “I feel embarrassed to be talking
about this when you set it against the monumental collective suffering of
Iraqis,” Hawley says. “I do feel guilty.”
Hawley is now weighing her return for a brief stint in Baghdad. The improved
security situation has many who left there, including myself, thinking it
could be time to return to the story that gave us, and cost us, so much.
Deborah Haynes, The Times's current Baghdad correspondent, warns that, while
security has improved, it remains “an accident waiting to happen”: “People
are pushing the boundaries more and more. And suddenly somebody's going to
get swiped.” Even now, a British journalist is being held hostage in Basra,
more than a month after he was snatched.
“I came back because some stories become more than something you cover, they
become about you too,” Garcia-Navarro tells me. Although Hawley jokes that
“the thing I really miss about working in Iraq is the sheer joy of getting
out”, she too hankers to return. “My heart is still in that. My heart
somehow is still in the difficult place where you want to tell the stories
of people going through difficult things. That's what I find even now: I'm
frustrated because the will is there.”
The morning I left Baghdad, I sent an e-mail to a friend still there. I had a
presentiment I would not return soon. “It's 5am and the first bomb has just
gone off,” I wrote. “One day maybe I'll understand the things Baghdad taught
me. But right now it just feels too much like loss.” Two years later, as I
felt Baghdad's draw start to tug at me again, I wrote to Lulu to ask about
her return. She doesn't go to the poolside at the al-Hamra any more,
deserted as it is. “The ghost of Marla and her parties haunts it and me,”
she wrote. “I've lost friends here. I've seen the whole trajectory from the
beginning and it's not over yet. And so, even though I sometimes wish it
would be, Iraq is not over for me either. Iraq and I aren't done with each
other yet, I guess.”
