A few weeks ago I posted Farnaz Fassihi's widely circulated email on the conditions in Iraq.
Apparently, Ms. Fassihi kept a journal while she was reporting from Baghdad. If you go to the website of the Columbia Journalism Review, you can read excerpts from her diary. They testify to just how hard it was for her to do her job without being killed.
Here's part of the entry for August 23:
The Najaf crisis is escalating and I want to find a way to go there. My friend Ivan Watson, a reporter with NPR, sent an e-mail from Najaf today saying the road from Baghdad was "terrifying." He lay down in the back seat for the entire three-hour drive, hiding under a sheet and heaps of plastic bags. They passed an aid convoy, including an ambulance that had been ambushed minutes before and was burning. Two photographer friends are stuck in the Imam Ali shrine right now with Moqtada al-Sadr's militia, because they can't walk back through the sniper alleys and into the no-man's land of the old city. A French photographer friend got shot in the leg by a sniper as she ran for cover. And worst of all, Georges Malbrunot, a French reporter for Le Figaro newspaper, has disappeared on the road to Najaf.Babak and I discuss the possibility of a trip to Najaf, but both our Iraqi teams refuse to go. "They'll kidnap you and kill us," my driver Munaf says. He read in the newspaper today that an Italian journalist was kidnapped in Najaf and the dead body of his driver was discovered in his car.
Here's part of the entry for September 12:
More and more, we are all relying on our local staffs to do the street reporting and go to places we can't. This is also true for photographers. There is only a handful of Western shooters left in Baghdad. The freelance crowd is thinning out, too. It's impossible to work here without the infrastructure and backing of a media organization to give you the basics: a secure location, guards, local staff you know and trust, satellite phones, flak jackets, and so on. A reporter can't just parachute into Iraq anymore.
The other entries contain similarly grim anecdotes and facts that speak for themselves.
