An Illusion of Safety Shattered

The slender illusion of safety for journalists in the Iraqi capital was shattered Tuesday as a reporter and two cameramen were killed -- all by American fire.

There have been a range of fears for journalists here since the beginning of the war, from U.S. bombs to the wrath of hard-core Iraqi loyalists to the chaos that could erupt in the event of a power vacuum. But the Palestine Hotel, on the east bank of the Tigris River, had been seen by journalists as a sanctuary.

And because of that, the erratic elevators and the absence of hot water and electricity in the rooms -- not to mention the occasional cockroach -- were endured as nuisances in covering the Iraqi side of the war. With its seedy demeanor, it was much like the old Commodore Hotel in Beirut, where journalists flocked in the 1970s and ‘80s because they believed they would be safe there even in the face of civil war and Israeli attacks on the Lebanese capital.

Journalists working in wartime often concoct rationales to persuade themselves they’ll be safe. They make rules such as not going out after dark and always wearing a flak jacket. And they tell themselves the odds are against being hurt, especially if they are in a hotel filled with other reporters.

But Tuesday, an American tank fired a round into the Palestine Hotel, killing a Ukrainian cameraman and a Spanish cameraman, only hours after another U.S. munition claimed the life of a correspondent of the Arab news station Al Jazeera.

The dead were identified as Taras Protsyuk, 35, a Ukrainian cameraman for the Reuters news agency; Jose Couso, 37, a cameraman for Spanish television network Telecinco; and Tariq Ayyoub, a correspondent for Al Jazeera.

Photographer Jerome Delay of Associated Press was on the 17th floor of the Palestine, taking pictures of a U.S. tank on a nearby bridge crossing the Tigris. The tank was being fired on, and its gunner believed that men atop the tall buildings across the river -- including the hotel -- were acting as spotters. The tank commander gave the order to fire.

To Delay’s disbelief, he saw the tank turn its turret toward the hotel and fire. The building shook and Delay raced down the stairs to find that a room occupied by Reuters had been hit.

“People were screaming and crying, out of control,” he said. “The window was shattered.”

Among the wounded, Delay found his longtime friend Protsyuk.

“Taras was lying on the floor on his back, unconscious,” Delay said. “His jaws were locked. We forced open his jaws to get some air into him and got him breathing again.” Delay also saw that his friend had a severe abdominal wound.

He and others put Protsyuk on a blanket to rush him to a hospital. The hotel elevator stopped at every floor on the way down.

Instead of going to a major hospital, their hired driver took them to a small clinic that was unable to handle the serious wounds. It took five more minutes to get to Olympic Hospital in downtown Baghdad. Protsyuk was still alive.

“He was not conscious, but responding. The vital signs were still here. He was groaning,” Delay said. “When I got him on the table in the emergency room, the doctor said, ‘He is dead.’ ”

Later, Delay agonized that his efforts to save Protsyuk had been unsuccessful. “I can’t explain to you what it is to have someone you know just die in your hands,” he said. “It is such a feeling of failure.”

Ayyoub, of Al Jazeera, was the first Arab journalist to die in the war. He was killed when two U.S. missiles hit the network’s office in central Baghdad several hours before the Palestine Hotel was fired on.

This is not the first time the station’s offices have been touched by American firepower: They also were hit in Kabul in the Afghan war and more recently in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.

Besides being on the Arab television channel, Ayyoub was well known in Jordan, where he was a staff reporter for the English-language Jordan Times. He also wrote for the Agence France-Presse news service as well as working occasionally as an assistant for foreign media organizations, including the Los Angeles Times.

Other Al Jazeera correspondents and anchors could hardly contain their emotions on camera after learning of Ayyoub’s death. Mohamed Krishan, introducing a short report about Ayyoub’s life, tried to hold back tears but finally broke down. The channel quickly cut to the film about Ayyoub. The report, shown over the course of the day, opened with the lines, “The planes that call for democracy and human rights and freedom of the press have killed this man.”

“He was one of my stars,” said Jennifer Harmarneh, editor of the Jordan Times. “He was a very determined journalist, and very driven.”

At the Palestine Hotel on Tuesday, many journalists fled to the courtyard in response to the tank hit. When the firing stopped, they honored their colleagues with a candlelight vigil in front of the hotel, which most journalists had picked as a place to stay when the more popular Rashid was deemed unsafe because of its proximity to government ministries.

Melinda Liu, Newsweek’s Beijing bureau chief who is working in Baghdad, said she thought the shelling would make people more fearful -- even as she recalled that U.S. Central Command had warned before the war started that to stay in Baghdad would be very risky. Liu said the cameramen “may have been mistaken for a sniper.”

“It happens a lot,” she said. “From a long distance away, particularly if a person is wearing a helmet or body armor, it could seem like a sniper.

“Until this happened, probably a lot of us were thinking, ‘This is a hotel full of international journalists. Surely, we are not going to be bombed,’ ” she said. “Clearly, it was a false sense of security.”

Meanwhile, the tank commander for the battalion that fired on the hotel said he and his men did not know the location of the Palestine Hotel, or any others on the east bank of the Tigris, for that matter.

“We had no idea where those hotels are,” said Lt. Col. Philip deCamp, commander of the Army’s 4th Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment. He also said that the hotel may have been protected from artillery fire, but that individual units have the right to respond when fired on.

“If there’s direct fire, there’s no protection. We have the right to shoot,” said Maj. Kent Rideout, the battalion’s executive officer. “There was enemy activity from that river bend, there’s no doubt.”

The decision to fire was made by the company’s commander, Capt. Philip Wolford, after a gunner from one of his tanks scanned the hotel and saw someone observing with binoculars. At the time, the company was receiving mortar fire from several unknown points on the hotel’s side of the river and had received intelligence that Iraqi spotters were using tall buildings to track American movements, military sources said.

Wolford said his troops “were hit by four or five points along the river.” He said he also received reports of fighters with rocket-propelled grenades clustered at the foot of the hotel.

Eventually, a reporter traveling with the tank unit was asked to call his colleagues in the Palestine and tell them to hang sheets from their windows to identify the hotel.

At Central Command in Qatar, Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said the U.S. military regretted the deaths of journalists at the Palestine and at the offices of Al Jazeera. But he said the Iraqi regime and the heat of war put journalists at risk.

Except for journalists traveling with U.S. forces, he said, U.S. troops in many cases don’t know where reporters are on the battlefield.

“We certainly know that we don’t target journalists; that’s just not something we do,” he said at a briefing. “We also know that the locations where the regime does its work in many cases will put civilians at risk.”

*

Times staff writers Geoffrey Mohan in Baghdad and Alissa J. Rubin in Jordan contributed to this report.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Killed covering the war

Journalists killed in combat situations in Iraq:

* Terry Lloyd, correspondent for Britain’s Independent Television News, was killed March 22 by gunfire in southern Iraq. Lloyd, 50, had covered Saddam Hussein’s 1988 poison gas attacks on Kurds, the 1991 Persian Gulf War and conflicts in Cambodia, Lebanon and the Balkans.

* Paul Moran, freelance cameraman for the Australian Broadcasting Corp., was killed March 22 by a car bomb in northern Iraq. Moran, 39, based in Paris, had worked extensively in the Middle East.

* Kaveh Golestan, Iranian freelance cameraman for the British Broadcasting Corp., was killed April 2 by a land mine in northern Iraq. Golestan, 52, also had worked for Associated Press and Time magazine.

* Michael Kelly, editor at large of the Atlantic Monthly, was killed Thursday in a vehicle accident near Baghdad. Kelly, 46, also was a columnist for the Washington Post. He had been editor of the New Republic and the National Journal. He covered the 1991 Gulf War as a freelance writer and wrote a book based on his reporting.

* Julio Anguita Parrado, a reporter for Spain’s El Mundo, and Christian Liebig, a journalist for Germany’s Focus weekly, were killed Monday in a missile strike south of Baghdad. Anguita Parrado, 32, had worked out of New York and covered the Sept. 11 attacks. Liebig, 35, had worked for the German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur in Croatia and Associated Press.

* Tariq Ayyoub, a Jordanian journalist for Al Jazeera, was killed Tuesday in an air raid at its office in Baghdad. Ayyoub, 35, joined the cable news network’s team in Baghdad five days before being killed. He also worked for the Jordan Times and had briefly reported for Associated Press in Jordan.

* Jose Couso, cameraman for Spanish television network Telecinco, and Taras Protsyuk, a Ukrainian television cameraman for Reuters, were killed Tuesday in a U.S. Army tank attack at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. Couso, 37, had covered the war in Kosovo. Protsyuk, 35, joined Reuters in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1993 and covered combat in Chechnya, the Balkans, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Source: Associated Press

Los Angeles Times