On February 4, 2005, the Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena left the relative safety of her Baghdad hotel and traveled to a mosque near Baghdad University. Refugees from Fallujah—where the U.S. Marines had waged a brutal campaign to oust al-Qaeda-aligned militants—had taken shelter there, and Sgrena wanted to document their experience. But the Fallujah refugees were having none of it. “We don’t want anybody,” one of their leaders told Sgrena. “Why don’t you stay at home? What can this interview do for us?”
Not getting the story was a bitter disappointment for the fifty-six-year-old veteran from the leftist Il Manifesto, who had covered conflicts around the world. But it was just the beginning of what would turn out to be a terrible ordeal. As Sgrena was leaving the interview, several men in a minibus cut her off and abducted her and her driver. Sgrena managed to dial out on her cell phone while she was being taken away, and a colleague in Rome said he heard “pistol shots and people running, but I did not hear her speak.”
Two weeks later, Sgrena appeared on one of the most wrenching hostage videos to emerge from the Iraq war. Looking frail and bereft, she pressed her hands together while beseeching the Italian government to save her life by withdrawing its forces from Iraq, as her captors had demanded. “I beg you to help me,” she said between sobs. “I beg my family to help me and those who stood with me to oppose the war and the occupation.” A banner identified her captors as a previously unknown group, “Mujahedeen Without Borders.”
Moved by Sgrena’s ordeal—and angered by Italy’s involvement in a deeply unpopular war—tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Rome to demand her release. Banners with her photo were hung from Rome’s city hall. Under tremendous pressure to resolve the hostage crisis, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi dispatched to Baghdad his personal friend Nicola Calipari, a veteran Italian security agent and hostage negotiator.
On March 4, exactly a month after she was first abducted, Sgrena’s captors put her in a car, covered her eyes with cotton and dark sunglasses, and drove her through the streets of Baghdad. Then they got out, leaving her alone. Ten minutes later, she heard a friendly voice. “Giuliana, Giuliana, I am Nicola. Relax, You’re free.” There were widespread reports that the Italian government had paid a ransom of between $6 and $8 million to secure Sgrena’s release.
Sgrena’s relief was short lived. Less than a mile from the safety of Baghdad International Airport, her car came under fire from U.S. soldiers manning an improvised checkpoint. Calipari threw himself on top of Sgrena and tried to protect her from the hail of bullets. He died after being shot through the head. Sgrena was injured by shrapnel in the shoulder. She was transported to a hospital in Baghdad, then flown home to Italy to recover.1
U.S. forces claimed that Sgrena’s car had approached the checkpoint at a high rate of speed and had not responded to the flashing lights and warning shots. Sgrena denied it all; the car was not speeding, and no warning of any kind was issued. An internal investigation carried out by the U.S. military faulted Calipari for “not coordinating with U.S. personnel,” noting that this was “a conscious decision on the part of the Italians as they considered the hostage recovery an Intelligence mission and a national issue.”2 A separate investigation, carried out by the Italian government, noted that the Italians had alerted U.S. authorities to the Sgrena rescue operation but saw no reason to keep them informed about its movements inside Iraq since the rescue team was on the road prior to the 11 p.m. curfew.3
Sgrena’s ordeal encapsulated the challenges reporters faced in Iraq, squeezed between militants who targeted them and U.S. forces who either viewed them with extreme suspicion or failed to implement policies to mitigate risk. The deadly consequence of this twin threat was an unprecedented media death toll in Iraq, with more than two hundred journalists and media workers killed over the course of the war.4 But the violence emanating from Iraq was part of a larger global trend, which saw journalists’ killings spike worldwide. Between 2002 and 2012, 506 journalists were killed, according to CPJ data, compared to 390 in the previous decade.5 One factor contributing to the increase was that during this period journalists became regular victims of terrorist violence, including murders and kidnappings.
The tactics employed by terror groups—including the proliferation of suicide attacks—inevitably fueled aggressive antiterror tactics, which further jeopardized the safety of journalists. In fact, journalists working in Baghdad at the time of Sgrena’s abduction described checkpoints as exceedingly perilous, and many reported being menaced and having warning shots fired at them. Two journalists from the Saudi-backed Pan-Arab network al-Arabiya were killed in March 2004 by U.S. forces, and in January 2005 the NPR correspondent Anne Garrels came under fire from Iraqi soldiers helping man a U.S. checkpoint. In the aftermath of the Sgrena shooting, CPJ and Human Rights Watch sent a joint letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld calling for improved procedures.6 Military forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan also viewed the press with increased hostility because someone walking around the battlefield with a camera might not be a journalist at all but rather a propagandist for the insurgents. Iraqi and Afghan reporters—including those working for established international news agencies—were regularly detained, abused, or interrogated based on this suspicion.
The terror threat has transformed the way large media organizations operate around the world. Journalists, wary of kidnappings and bombings, sometimes had to report from fortified bunkers and were more reluctant to meet with sensitive sources for fear they might be set up for abduction. Military forces honed their communications strategies as well, often providing full support and access to embedded reporters and treating independent journalists with disdain. As a result, critical stories have gone largely unreported. Journalists working in Iraq at the height of the conflict struggled to report effectively on the opinions of average Iraqis or to provide a coherent picture of the insurgency or its political demands. The lack of information hindered policy makers and undermined global understanding. Similar dynamics have played out wherever al-Qaeda exerts influence, from Afghanistan, to Yemen, to Mali and Syria.
The Pearl Killing
The new wave of terror attacks on the media began with the murder of the Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl, killed in Pakistan in February 2002. Pearl was not the first high-profile Western journalist to be kidnapped. Among the many journalists who have suffered such a fate were the AP correspondent Terry Anderson, kidnapped in Lebanon in 1985, and Charles Glass of ABC News, kidnapped there in 1987. The CBS News correspondent Bob Simon and NPR reporter Neal Conan were both held by Revolutionary Guards in Iraq in 1991. But these journalists were eventually released (Glass escaped his captors), often after intensive international campaigns. The motive for the kidnappings was also clear. In most cases, journalists were kidnapped either to influence coverage or to extract a political advantage.
What was particularly unsettling about the Pearl abduction was not only the terrible way it ended. It was also the murkiness of the motive. Why precisely had Pearl been kidnapped, and what advantage did his abductors seek to extract? The question has never been adequately answered, perhaps because Pearl’s kidnappers and executioners never fully considered the reasons for their actions. While the Pearl abduction is widely perceived as the culmination of an elaborate plot, it was much more of crime of opportunity.7
The events that would lead to Pearl’s kidnapping and murder were set in motion on September 11, 2001. The next day, Pearl, the Journal’s South Asian bureau chief, traveled from his base in Mumbai, India, to Karachi, Pakistan, to investigate the 9/11 attacks, then stayed on reporting from Pakistan. He was working in Islamabad on a story about Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, after his December 22, 2001, attempted attack. Pearl believed that Reid had links to a reclusive radical cleric named Sheik Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani. As word spread in Islamist circles that Pearl was looking to interview Gilani, a British Pakistani militant named Omar Sheikh saw an opportunity to lure the reporter into a trap.
Sheikh, who grew up in Britain and attended the London School of Economics, had an ease and sophistication that made him seem familiar and trustworthy to Westerners. Yet Sheikh, only twenty-eight years old, was a committed Islamic militant who had organized the kidnapping of Western tourists in India in 1994. He was arrested for that crime but freed in 1999 in exchange for passengers on an Indian Airlines flight hijacked by Pakistani militants.
Sheikh was able to convince Pearl that he could arrange a meeting with Gilani in Karachi, the lawless port city where Islamic militants have a strong presence. (As it turned out, Gilani, who was not involved with Richard Reid, was laying low in Lahore.) Immediately following his meeting with Pearl near Islamabad, Sheikh flew to Karachi to assemble the kidnapping team. The entire operation was thrown together in two days, and many of the planning meetings were held in restaurants and other public places, including a McDonald’s.
On January 22, 2002, Pearl and his pregnant wife Mariane flew to Karachi, where the Wall Street Journal reporter expected to meet with Gilani. The next evening, at around 7 p.m., a taxi driver dropped Pearl at the popular Village Restaurant, from where Pearl left voluntarily, climbing into a red Suzuki Alto that he expected would take him to the Gilani interview. Instead, he was driven to a safe house provided by a local businessman and militant leader that was located in an isolated neighborhood on the outskirts of the city and surrounded by a high wall. Later, Pearl was stripped of his clothes, given a tracksuit, and chained to a car engine in a cinderblock outbuilding.
At the time of the kidnapping, Omar Sheikh had already left Karachi in an apparent attempt to create deniability. But he continued to communicate with the kidnappers, whom he instructed to send photos to the media accompanied by demands for the release of prisoners held by the U.S. military in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Sheikh did not plan to kill Pearl when he kidnapped him and in fact did not participate in his execution.
Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaeda operations chief who had planned the September 11 attacks, had fled Afghanistan after the U.S.-led invasion and settled in Karachi. Mohammed initially learned of Pearl’s kidnapping through newspaper accounts.
Mohammed—who is referred to by U.S. officials as KSM—only become involved in the Pearl operation after receiving a call from another senior al-Qaeda official. Money may have changed hands, or Mohammed may have simply muscled his way in on the kidnapping operation. In late January or early February, Mohammed showed up at the safe house where Pearl was being held with two men, possibly his cousins, and a shopping bag holding knives and a video camera.
The decision by Mohammed to murder Pearl was apparently based on several factors, none of which appear to have been considered carefully. First, Pearl’s murder was a way of demonstrating ruthlessness and resolve in the face of the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan that had toppled the Taliban government, devastated al-Qaeda’s terrorist infrastructure, and taken a considerable toll on the organization’s leadership. Mohammed later told interrogators at Guantánamo, where he is now being held after being captured in Pakistan in March 1, 2003, that Pearl’s Jewishness was “convenient” but was not the motive for his abduction or murder.
Based on the gruesome video made of Pearl’s killing—which was actually a reenactment because the video camera failed on the first take—Mohammed clearly saw the murder as a recruiting tool that he hoped would inspire al-Qaeda followers. It certainly sent a message of contempt for Western public opinion and to the journalists who helped shape it.
But there were deep divisions within al-Qaeda about whether the Pearl killing advanced the organization’s interests, according to Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo Bay military commissions. Morris claimed that “Osama bin Laden was angry that KSM had slaughtered Pearl so publicly and brutally, arguing that the murder brought unnecessary attention on the network,” according to a report from the Pearl Project, a team of journalists that investigated the journalist’s killing.8
Bin Laden himself was obsessed with his image and had a sophisticated understanding of the international media. He granted interviews to a number of Western journalists prior to the 9/11 attacks. Peter Bergen, who produced a 1997 CNN interview of bin Laden with Peter Arnett, noted that as a journalist “once you came into bin Laden’s inner circle you never felt threatened. He did fairly active outreach with media and threatening journalists would have been counterproductive.”9 Indeed, bin Laden used the 1997 interview with Arnett to reiterate his declaration of jihad against the United States, and when asked about his future plans noted, “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media, God willing.” In May 26, 1998, bin Laden arranged for a large group of Pakistani journalists to interview him, and two days after that he sat down with John Miller from ABC News. “Publicity was the currency that bin Laden was spending, replacing his wealth with fame, and it repaid him with recruits and donations,” wrote Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower, his history of al-Qaeda.10
Indeed, one of the most disturbing aspects of the Pearl murder was the role that the international media played in amplifying the message of terror. After he was kidnapped, Pearl’s family and colleagues came to the conclusion that the best way to win his release was to create the most sympathetic possible rendering in the global media. This was in accordance with the prevailing thinking at the time, which held that humanizing a kidnapping victim like Pearl and generating global sympathy and support would raise the political cost of killing him. It was a strategy that had worked reasonably well in previous high-profile kidnappings of journalists, such as Terry Anderson, who was released at the end of a seven-year campaign.
At CPJ—where all of us were deeply moved by his ordeal and where some of our staff knew Pearl personally—we shared this view and did all we could to generate additional awareness and sympathy, particularly in Pakistan, where we had good contacts in the media. We were in regular touch with the Wall Street Journal to coordinate strategy and tried to take some of the burden off of editors at the paper by responding to the relentless demand for media interviews, particularly from cable news stations. We organized an open letter from leading journalists in the Arab world demanding Pearl’s release, and we provided moment-by-moment updates on our website. Publicly, we made the argument that journalists covering conflict have always made when they get in a jam, calling on the kidnappers to release Pearl so that he could “tell their story.”
Pearl’s pregnant wife, Mariane, while initially reluctant to do media interviews, was eventually persuaded that this was the best hope for saving her husband’s life. With her French and Cuban background, she presented a worldly, optimistic, and compassionate outlook and was a compelling figure. Prominent Muslims—from the boxer Muhammad Ali to the singer Youssef Islam, formerly Cat Stevens—urged the kidnappers to release Pearl in the name of Islam.
While no one could have known it at the time, this strategy played into KSM’s hands, allowing him to maximize the emotional pain inflicted through Pearl’s murder. Through intensive media coverage many people developed such a close identification with the reporter that when he was killed they reacted as if they had lost a friend.
For al-Qaeda’s followers Pearl’s murder sent a different message: International journalists were legitimate targets of terror operations, and the goal should be to maximize media attention of such abductions. The fact that the Pearl murder may have stemmed from the impulsive actions of KSM rather than official al-Qaeda policy no longer mattered. Targeted attacks on the media carried out by militants either linked to or inspired by al-Qaeda multiplied, and this in turn had a profound effect on the ability of journalists to report the news from parts of the world where the group maintains a presence. In many instances, the implied sanction conferred by Pearl’s murder provided a modicum of a religious justification for what was essentially a criminal enterprise, kidnapping for ransom. Meanwhile, the snuff video became such an effective tool for generating media coverage that it was eventually adapted and put to entirely different purposes by criminal organizations in Mexico.
Pearl’s murder deeply unsettled the relatively tight community of international correspondents and had a significant effect on the way media organizations went about their business. From Cuban revolutionaries to PLO fighters, militant and revolutionary groups had historically sought to cultivate journalists because they offered the sole conduit to communicate with the broad global public. Historically, journalists had found that their inherent usefulness was their best insurance policy. But the Pearl killing “changed the rules of the road,” according to Peter Bergen, who said prior to the murder he would “not have given a second thought to wandering around Karachi or wandering around Afghanistan.”
Al-Qaeda’s rise as a militant network resulted in good measure from the organization’s ability to exploit inexpensive and ubiquitous Internet technology to coordinate terrorist actions, including the 9/11 attacks. They also relied on the Internet to communicate with their following and with the global public, “obviating the need to talk to journalists,” according to Bergen. It is of course ironic that the same information technologies that have allowed people around the world to become more connected and more informed have increased the risk to professional journalists working in conflict zones. The proliferation of new forms of communications has undermined the single most important factor that kept journalists safe—the de facto information monopoly that made them useful to all sides.
While the al-Qaeda leadership may not have made an active decision to murder Pearl, his killing did send a clear message that in the Internet era there were other ways to communicate and that traditional journalists were dispensable, useful primarily as hostages and props in elaborately staged videos designed to convey a message of terror to the world.
Terror in Iraq
The threat to the media implied by the Pearl murder became the reality in Iraq where journalists in large numbers became victims of terrorist violence. The Iraq war was the most deadly conflict for the press in history, but most journalists were not killed in combat situations. Murder was far and away the leading cause of death, comprising 62 percent of those killed. International journalists faced extraordinary risk, like all foreigners operating in Iraq at the time. But the vast majority of the journalists killed—83 percent—were Iraqis.11 They were singled out for a variety of reasons—in reprisal for their coverage, because of the affiliation with Western news organizations, and as a means of undermining the formation of Iraqi civil society. It is important to note that the strategy was largely successful. While the postinvasion period saw a brief flourishing of indigenous media, independent voices were quickly snuffed out as the civil conflict intensified. By late 2004, Iraqi media outlets had split along sectarian lines, and those seeking to report in some semblance of neutrality were routinely targeted.
Perhaps the low-water mark was the 2006 murder of the television reporter Atwar Bhajat, who began her journalism career as an on-air correspondent for an Iraqi national network before joining al-Jazeera and, shortly before her death, al-Arabiya.12 Born to a Shiite mother and Sunni father, Bhajat was arguably the country’s best-known journalist, recognized for her fearless coverage of the conflict and her efforts to use her reporting to overcome the emerging sectarian divide. She refused to identify Iraqis in her reports as Sunni and Shiites—telling her editors that such identification only fueled divisions—and wore a gold pendant in the shape of her splintering country. Bhajat, only thirty years old, was murdered along with her two-person crew when she rushed to cover the fighting in her hometown of Samarra, which erupted in violence after Sunni militants blew up a Shiite shrine. A witness later reported that men driving a white van were searching for Bhajat, demanding to know the whereabouts of the “correspondent.” Their precise motives have never been determined, although one of the kidnappers of the Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll boasted that he had killed Bhajat because “she said the Mujahedeen are bad.”13
Kidnapping journalists also became a favored strategy of militant groups, and the tactic was used both to generate ransom and apply political pressure. Between 2004 and 2009, fifty-seven journalists were kidnapped in Iraq.14 Seven of them were Americans, nineteen were Europeans, twenty-three were Iraqis, and eight more came from other countries. Many of the kidnapped Iraqis were employees of international news organizations, and seventeen of these fifty-seven journalists were murdered in captivity.
The first documented kidnappings of journalists in Iraq took place in early 2004, during a period of intensifying sectarian violence. These initial cases appear to have been motivated by the desire of the emerging militias to assert authority over physical territory. The ostensible justification for the detention and interrogation was to verify the journalists’ credentials and determine if they were spies. The kidnapped journalists were generally released after a few hours. Among those detained were Stephen Farrell, then with the Times (London); John Burns from the New York Times; and journalists from Japan, the Czech Republic, and France. In at least some instances the kidnappers simply Googled the reporters’ articles to confirm that they were in fact members of the press.
The stakes changed dramatically as al-Qaeda began to increase its presence in Iraq throughout 2005 and to integrate its operations with the emerging Sunni militias. Al-Qaeda’s media strategy in Iraq was never fully articulated and reflected the networked nature of the organization. But there was no question that in the aftermath of the Daniel Pearl killing al-Qaeda-aligned and -inspired groups both inside and outside Iraq considered journalists, particularly Western journalists, legitimate targets.
Many of the foreign fighters who poured into Iraq to support the insurgency had trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, and some had fought in the wars in Bosnia or Chechnya. The most prominent among the foreign militants—thanks in part to the U.S. government media campaign to paint him as the face of Islamic terrorism in Iraq—was a Jordanian who went by the name Abu Musa’b al-Zarqawi.15 In May 2004, Zarqawi’s group earned global attention with a grizzly execution video of an American businessman named Nicolas Berg. The video showed Berg sitting in an orange jumpsuit—a reference to Guantánamo prisoners—surrounded by five heavily armed men clad in black military attire with their faces covered. After reading a proclamation, the executioner, reputed to be Zarqawi himself, grabs Berg by his hair and uses a knife to sever his head from his body.16 The execution borrows heavily from the iconography of the Pearl video. A month later—and for good measure—Zarqawi’s group decapitated a South Korean contractor also clad in an orange jumpsuit. On August 19, another al-Qaeda-linked militant group managed to get its hands on a journalist, the Italian freelancer Enzo Baldoni. After releasing a video threatening to kill Baldoni if Italian forces did not withdraw from Iraq within forty-eight hours, the kidnappers carried out their threat.
The same militant group that kidnapped Baldoni also nabbed two French journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, along with their Syrian driver.17 The fate of the two French journalists inspired protests in Paris and a massive media campaign. While there is no evidence this had any effect on the kidnappers, it undoubtedly put additional pressure on the French government to resolve the case. The Times (London) reported that the French government paid $15 million dollars for the release of the two journalists. The French government maintains it did not pay ransom. On January 5, 2005, another French reporter, Florence Aubenas, a correspondent for Libération, was abducted outside her Baghdad hotel along with her Iraqi translator, Hussein al-Saadi. The French government reportedly paid $10 million for her release.
The payment of ransom was a hugely complex and emotional issue for international journalists covering Iraq.18 The U.S. government did not pay ransom but sometimes would stand aside and let families or employers make their own arrangements. The U.S. military was also more likely to launch a military rescue operation, making it more difficult and expensive for the kidnappers to keep American hostages for long periods. European governments, including the French and Italians, were widely reported to pay significant ransoms but officially always denied it. “We all believed that ransom was being paid in the European cases,” noted Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who served as Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post between 2003 and 2004. “Privately I sure hoped that if I were picked up someone would pay a ransom for me. I do wonder if some of the militant groups would pick up the Americans for the propaganda value and pick up the Europeans to pay the bills.”19
At the time that Western journalists were becoming an increasing target, al-Qaeda was expanding its media operations, intended both to inform and inspire its followers. “Jihad Media,” as it was termed, ranged from al-Qaeda’s official website, As Sahab, to the informal, unaffiliated bloggers and social media users who supported the cause.20 Jihadi chat rooms were active forums to exchange information, debate tactics, and discuss matters of ideology and doctrine. Video was the primary form of communication for militant groups, and insurgent groups in Iraq, notably Zarqawi’s forces, often incorporated videographers to record their operations. Their videos were sent out of the country to pro-al-Qaeda media production houses that turned them into minidocumentaries, often slickly produced, and then pushed them out to sympathetic websites. Media operations were compartmentalized, with al-Qaeda militants involved in military and terrorist operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Morocco, and Gaza using their own video production teams to document their activities.
Videos and other messages from the al-Qaeda leadership were often sent to al-Jazeera, and those deemed newsworthy were aired regularly on the network, a controversial practice harshly criticized by the U.S. government but also by journalists who covered the Iraqi conflict. The station defended the practice, noting that videos provided by the U.S. military were routinely aired on American networks.
These videos were both popular and effective, although numbers are hard to come by. However, it should be noted that kidnapped journalists who were held for extended periods in Iraq and Afghanistan describe their captors watching the videos for hours, cheering successful attacks on the U.S. military and engrossed by the beheadings. Al-Qaeda also began to develop media operations, specifically targeting Western audiences, including Muslims in the United States. They dressed up their propaganda in journalistic idioms with the English-language al-Qaeda magazine Inspire, famously featuring a how-to article entitled “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” that reportedly served as the recipe for the pressure cooker explosives used by the Boston Marathon bombers. The founder of Inspire, the al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awaki, and his cousin Samir Khan, who edited the magazine, were killed in a September 30, 2011, drone strike in Yemen. Both were targeted despite the fact that they were American citizens.21
The al-Qaeda strategy of developing its own communications system while targeting independent and international media operating in Iraq transformed the media landscape in Iraq at the height of the conflict. From late 2004 until 2007, international reporters took their lives into their hands every time they left their fortified compounds, and armed security advisors, many of them ex-military, were integrated into newsgathering operations. The astronomical security costs ate up a huge percentage of the shrinking international news budgets, forcing news operations to cut back on coverage of other parts of the world and accelerating a process of consolidation that was already underway. The risks forced many international news organizations to rely on local stringers to do street reporting. These local journalists were less visible but more vulnerable. Militants particularly targeted Iraqi journalists working for the “Americans.” Iraqi employees of the New York Times, AP Television News, and the American network ABC were all murdered.
The terror tactics also thwarted the development of an independent Iraqi media; this was part of a deliberate strategy to undermine civil society and institutions of the functioning state. While Iraqi media proliferated—with the establishment of dozens of broadcasters, newspapers, and websites—these outlets, like the rest of the society, became increasingly partisan and shrill. Rather than helping forge a common experience, media amplified the grievances of the different factions and groups, heightening the sense of victimhood and betrayal and fueling the divisions that sustained the civil war.
“We Don’t Target Journalists”
On April 8, 2003, as U.S forces pushed into the heart of Baghdad, a unit assigned to Army’s Third Infantry Division came under sustained enemy fire. A tank commander scanning the rooftops located on the upper floor of a tall building a person he believed to be an Iraqi spotter observing troop movements through binoculars and possibly calling in mortar strikes. He requested and received permission to engage the target and fired a single incendiary round into what turned out to be the Palestine Hotel, the center of international media operations in Baghdad. Two journalists, Taras Protsyuk from Reuters and José Couso from the Spanish broadcaster Telecinco, were killed in the attack, and several other journalists were injured. Earlier that same morning, amid an intense street battle, a U.S. missile struck a generator on the roof of the al-Jazeera bureau in Baghdad, killing the correspondent Tareq Ayyoub and injuring another staff member. The al-Jazeera office in Kabul had been bombed in November 2001 during the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. No one had been killed in that strike.
A CPJ investigation determined that the shelling of the Palestine Hotel and the deaths of the two journalists were avoidable because senior U.S. military commanders were aware that the hotel was a center for the international media but failed to communicate the information to forces on the ground.22 U.S. officials also failed to respond appropriately to the incident. Senior military officials asserted, falsely, that U.S. forces had come under fire from the Palestine Hotel and offered platitudes like “war is dangerous” and “we don’t target journalists deliberately—not now, not ever.”23 A Pentagon investigation cleared all involved of wrongdoing.
While the U.S. military was open to embedding journalists in its military operations, it was callously indifferent to the presence of independent or “unilateral” journalists. Over the course of the conflict at least sixteen journalists were killed by U.S. forces’ fire.24 The killings were the inevitable consequence of the deployment of overwhelming firepower and the failure to take into account the possible presence of journalists in the combat environment. In August 2003, the Reuters correspondent Mazen Dana was shot and killed while filming outside the Abu Ghraib prison by a U.S. tank gunner who mistook his camera for an RPG. In July 2007, the Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his assistant were killed by U.S. forces firing on suspected militants from a helicopter gunship. Noor-Eldeen’s killing was the focus of the infamous “Collateral Murder” video released by Wikileaks. While far more journalists in Iraq were targeted for murders by militant groups, the killings by the U.S. military helped fuel the perception encapsulated in the Sgrena incident that journalists were caught between the opposing forces. Moreover, they set a global precedent that resonated far beyond Iraq—in conflict and nonconflict zones around the world.
In many ways more troubling than the killings were the large number of journalists detained by U.S. military forces, because these were deliberate acts. Dozens of journalists were held in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, accused of everything from collaborating with militant groups to compromising operation security. Al-Jazeera reporters were a particular target and were detained on numerous occasions while covering operations. Pentagon officials often alleged that they had prior knowledge of the planned attacks. U.S. journalists working for large international media organizations were not immune. The situation was so acute that in November 2004 representatives of thirty U.S. and international media organizations sent a letter to the Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita stating that they had “documented numerous examples of U.S. troops physically harassing journalists and, in some cases, confiscating or ruining equipment, digital camera discs, and videotapes.”
Most detained journalists were questioned and released, but at least fourteen were held in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo for extended periods without due process because of suspicion of involvement with insurgent or militant groups. Some were subjected to horrific abuse. Three Iraqi journalists working for Reuters near Fallujah in January 2004 were held for three days and, according to Reuters, “two of the three said they had been forced to insert a finger into their anus and then lick it, and were forced to put shoes in their mouths.” Reuters also reported that “All three said they were forced to make demeaning gestures as soldiers laughed, taunted them and took photographs.” Soldiers threatened to take them to Guantánamo Bay, “deprived them of sleep, placed bags over their heads, kicked and hit them and forced them to remain in stress positions for long periods.”25 In April 2006, U.S. forces in Iraq detained the AP photographer Bilal Hussein, whose photographs of insurgents firing on U.S. forces during the siege of Fallujah were part of a package awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Bilal was accused of having ties to insurgents but was never charged with a crime. He was held for two years and released in April 2008.26
When I met with officials at the Pentagon in summer of 2009 to discuss the issue of open-ended detentions of journalists, they actively defended their policies, arguing that they were engaged in an information war with al-Qaeda and that militants used journalists to further their propaganda goals. “Just because you are carrying a camera does not make you a journalist,” argued Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson during our meeting. “And how do you know that every journalist is innocent?”
It is understandable that al-Qaeda’s media strategy of using videographers to document attacks fueled suspicion and made it harder for the U.S. military to differentiate between journalists and militant propagandists.27 But the Pentagon’s lack of due process in such cases set an extremely troubling precedent. None of the sixteen killings of journalists was ever adequately investigated, and most were not investigated at all. And none of the journalists detained by the U.S. military—including the al-Jazeera cameraman Sami Al-Haj, who spent six years as a prisoner in Guantánamo Bay—was ever subjected to any meaningful legal process much less convicted of a crime. For most international journalists in Iraq, the nightmare was of being kidnapped by al-Qaeda and imagining your family watching the videotape of your executions. But for Iraqi journalists in particular, the prospect of being mistaken for a militant by the U.S. military and shot while out gathering the news or being detained was also a considerable concern.
Public pressure and negotiations with the U.S. military and other allied forces did lead to some changes in policies. Checkpoint procedures were improved, leading to a decline in incidents involving journalists; the army field manual was revised to include training on the possible presence of journalists on the battlefield; and the U.S. military agreed to undertake prompt, high-level reviews and to notify media organizations within thirty-six hours whenever one of their employees were detained (although this procedure was not always followed). At the same time, the actions taken by the U.S. military in Iraq legitimated the notion that aggressive management and control over information is a key component of counterterrorism operations, and that example reverberated around the world.
During its December 2012 military operation in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces targeted Palestinian media outlets that it designated as terrorist operations, justifying its measures by citing U.S. military attacks on al-Qaeda’s information network. And when French troops carried out operations in Mali in early 2013 to drive out Islamic militants who had taken over the north of the country, they took pains to restrict media access, producing what one veteran reporter described as a “war without images or facts.”
The antiterror rhetoric more broadly framed helped legitimate repressive actions in countries like Turkey, where, as noted in the previous chapter, Prime Minister Erdoğan denounced the PKK’s “terror” media and called on Turkish journalists not to cover the Kurdish conflict, noting (falsely) that the U.S. and British journalists had declined to cover military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Ethiopian government forces overran the positions of the separatist Ogaden National Liberation Front in June 2011, they detained two Swedish journalists who were embedded with the organization. The journalists, Martin Schibbye and Johan Persson, were subjected to mock executions, forced at gunpoint to participate in a crude propaganda video, and publicly condemned by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi as “messenger boys of a terrorist organization.” They were convicted under Ethiopia’s antiterrorism law and held for more than a year before being pardoned and expelled from the country. As troubling as that treatment is, it is not terribly different from the way that U.S. forces treated journalists they suspected of having ties to terrorism, including the two Reuters correspondents subjected to vile abuse by U.S. soldiers and the AP correspondent Bilal Hussein, detained for a year in Iraq without charge.
The terror/antiterror dynamic has played out differently in different conflicts and in different circumstances, but in every single instance it has had a devastating effect on the work of the media, transforming the coverage of war over the last decade. “When I covered the war in Bosnia in the mid-1990s for the Christian Science Monitor, foreign journalists were seen by both sides in the conflict as people to manipulate,” recalled the veteran war correspondent David Rohde, speaking at a UN event on the safety of journalists. “Most local people did not like foreign journalists, but they tolerated us and generally viewed us as civilian observers, not parties to the conflict. Their basic goal was to get journalists to present their side’s narrative of the conflict to the outside world.”
“A decade later, when I covered Afghanistan and Pakistan for the New York Times, foreign journalists were no longer seen as civilian observers,” Rohde continued. “They were seen by insurgents as a vehicle to vast fame among their fellow Taliban and vast wealth. This became clear to me five years ago when I was abducted by the Taliban while reporting in Afghanistan and taken to Pakistan’s tribal areas. My captors’ initial demands for my release were $25 million in cash and the release of fifteen prisoners from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.” After seven months in captivity, Rohde and a colleague escaped, using a rope to climb out a bathroom window and then finding refuge on a Pakistani military base. His case is discussed in greater detail in the next chapter.28
The situation in Syria at the end of 2013 was even more dramatic and volatile. When the conflict first exploded in early 2012, the more secular-minded rebels fighting the Assad regime welcomed the international media and protected journalists traveling with them on the front lines. The primary risk was from proregime forces that deliberately targeted the media, in one notorious incident in February 2012 shelling the improvised media center in Homs and killing the veteran foreign correspondent Marie Colvin and the French photographer Rémi Ochlik.
But as the al-Qaeda-aligned faction of the Syrian rebels gained the upper hand, the risk shifted. Journalists become specific targets of the Islamists, reportedly on the orders of Ayman al-Zawahiri himself, who had replaced bin Laden as the head of al-Qaeda. Once captured, the journalists were simply held. No ransom was demanded. No videos were made. Because of the fear that a media campaign would increase the emotional value of the kidnapped journalists, as had occurred in the case of Daniel Pearl, their friends and colleagues asked that there be no media coverage at all. At the end of 2013, more than thirty journalists, both international and local, were missing in Syria, believed to be held by the rebels. While their friends and families agonized, to the general public most of these journalists were unknown, nameless, and forgotten.