Week in Review

A reporter’s risks

Several years ago, when Willis Witter was our correspondent in Tokyo, he called me to say there had just been a massive earthquake in the Japanese city of Kobe, a good 24 hours traveling time away.

I told him to not even bother trying to write a story for the first day from Tokyo; we would use wire agencies for that. We wanted him to set out immediately for Kobe and get there in time to give us a bylined story with a Kobe dateline for the second day.

In the end, Mr. Witter had to buy a bicycle and pedal the last 20 miles because the highway had been destroyed by the earthquake, but he got us our datelined story in time.

Now, Mr. Witter is in Baghdad, but I gave him no similar instruction to rush a mere 30 miles to Fallujah when we learned on Wednesday that four American contractors had been killed and dragged from their cars, their bodies mutilated and desecrated.

There were simple, practical reasons: It was already late in the day when the news broke in Baghdad and photographer Maya Alleruzzo, his partner and logistical wizard, was off on a four-day “embed” with a National Guard unit in another part of Iraq.

But more importantly, Iraq is becoming increasingly dangerous for any Westerner, even for reporters who seem to enjoy a sort of immunity in many conflicts. And Fallujah is almost certainly the most dangerous place in Iraq.

P. Mitchell Prothero, who has spent a lot of time in Fallujah, explained why he decided not to go to the city last week in an article for United Press International.

Prothero’s account

Fallujah is a place “I’m very familiar with,” Mr. Prothero wrote. “I’ve covered it a dozen or more times in the last year, witnessed shootouts between the residents and U.S. troops, met with the men violently opposing the U.S. occupation in Iraq on repeated occasions, accompanied U.S. troops on raids in nearby towns and even flown into it on helicopters and watched soldiers die while being worked on by medics. I’m not scared to go to Fallujah.

“But over the past six weeks, the attitudes toward journalists have changed and Iraq is becoming a very difficult story to cover for all of us, because Iraqis have started shooting at any car containing Westerners and, even more alarmingly, have begun killing translators for working with Western journalists.

“Over the past few months, there has been a serious increase in the number of random attacks on the roads outside Baghdad. The modus operandi is typically that a vehicle with Western-looking passengers gets chased down by a fast luxury car on a local highway and strafed with automatic-weapons fire.

“While such attacks on convoys of civilians working with the American occupation forces might be regrettable, it’s logical. But journalists are supposed to be considered neutral in a place like Iraq, and if you ask any member of the Bush administration, no one can claim my colleagues are not harsh critics of the U.S.-led coalition.

“But these attacks are random, and the perpetrators clearly do not care who’s inside the target vehicle. In January, one such attack killed a CNN producer, Duraid Mohammed, and his driver, Yasser Khatab. It also wounded CNN cameraman Scott McWhinnie… .

“And there have been dozens of barely reported close calls for other organizations, which avoid discussing the incidents in the hopes of not drawing additional negative attention.

“As a result, trips outside Baghdad are carefully considered and precautions — what few are available — are followed religiously: Women wear head scarves at all times in vehicles; men wear Arabic scarves around their necks or heads; windows are tinted. And if other journalists are not available to convoy to the destination, the trip had better be really important or it gets scrapped without a thought.

“Larger organizations stupidly use armored vehicles, which any Iraqi can spot from afar. And many Iraqis instead of being deterred by the armor take it as a challenge: Any rocket-propelled grenade is more than up to the task.”

• David W. Jones is the foreign editor of The Washington Times. His e-mail address is djones@washingtontimes.com.