Covering conflict exacts a price

The Iraq war may be short, but its human costs are mounting.

Thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians are dead or wounded; casualties among the U.S. and British forces, while low by any military measure, continue to grow. And then there are the journalists, who have died and been killed at a historically unprecedented rate since this conflict began.

“The first thing you have to understand is that covering a war always has been dangerous and always will be,” said author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam, who was a combat correspondent in Vietnam and the Congo.

This war, however, appears more dangerous than any other.

In the 21 years between 1954, when the French were defeated in Indo-China, and 1975, when the combat stopped in Vietnam, 63 journalists were killed. During the fighting in the Balkans from the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991 to the pacification of Kosovo in 1999, 61 were killed. Since the U.S. began bombarding Iraq three weeks ago, 12 journalists have been killed or died covering the fighting.

If the conflict in Iraq were to last as long as the war in Southeast Asia -- and current casualty rates remained constant -- 4,368 journalists would die.

Iraqi civilians are in danger through no choice of their own; combatants have been ordered to battle; but journalists are in harm’s way of their own volition.

Some went for the excitement, some for their careers; the overwhelming majority went because they believe the journalist’s highest duty is to bear witness, a duty never more urgent than in time of war.

Tuesday was a particularly dangerous day in Baghdad: Reuters photographer Taras Protsyuk and Jose Couso, a cameraman for Spain’s Telecino network, were killed when U.S. Marines opened fire on suspected snipers in the Palestine Hotel, where many so-called independent correspondents are staying. Three other Reuters journalists were wounded. U.S. military spokesman said the Marines were returning fire. However, a Western news executive -- who asked not to be identified -- said the U.S. forces may have opened up when they mistook photographers working with long lenses from the hotel roof and windows for snipers with glinting telescopic sights.

Ariq Ayoub, an Al-Jazeera reporter, was killed by U.S. bombs elsewhere in the city.

In the days ahead, as control of Baghdad is fiercely contested, as the regime’s authority diminishes and before the occupiers assert their will, the streets of the Iraqi capital will become increasingly perilous for the hundreds of foreign journalists who have elected to remain there.

One of the differences between this war and previous conflicts is the sheer size of the press corps. There are 246 embedded journalists and 185 independents in Iraq. “When I was in Vietnam,” Halberstam pointed out, “there were at most five or six combat correspondents operating at any one time.”

Tuesday, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, spokesman for the Central Command, said that while embedded journalists have “a higher degree of safety,” journalists operating independently in contested areas, like Baghdad, put themselves most at risk.

“Whatever anyone says,” according to Halberstam, “embeddedness is dangerous. Being an independent in Baghdad is dangerous and will become more so as these guys begin house-to-house fighting. This isn’t World War II or even Korea where there were clearly delineated front lines.

“Here, there are more journalists and no clear lines. That was true in the Congo, which I always thought was more dangerous than Vietnam. It was certainly true in Cambodia, where so many reporters and photographers were killed. There was no hostile army to encounter, just the Khmer Rouge, who were a cruel, violent rabble.” (In Cambodia, 27 journalists were killed.)

If Saddam Hussein’s loyalists continue dissolving into “a leaderless rabble,” Halberstam said, “this battlefield will be even more dangerous because, nowadays, the weaponry is so much more powerful. When I was in the Congo, the heaviest thing you saw was an M-1 carbine.

“Now, everyone has an automatic weapon. Recall those photos from Somalia, where even the women and children had AK-47s. There’s simply been a quantum leap in the lethality of weaponry across the battlefield, and journalists, like everyone else, are suffering because of it.”

Beyond the disorganization of many contemporary battlegrounds -- Halberstam cites Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Chechnya -- there is also the issue of the escalating demands modern news organizations are making on their combat reporters and photographers. Today’s television war requires a constant stream of live images directly from the fighting transmitted in real time. The appetite for those pictures and instantaneous narrative accounts has dramatically escalated the peril of combat correspondence.

“In World War II,” Halberstam said, “a lot of big bylines were made by people who hung around the cable head and simply transmitted back the content of briefings and interviews. To a lesser extent it also was true in Vietnam, though not for the photographers, even then. I always had a great love and respect for them, because we reporters could come in a day or two after the fighting and reconstruct what had occurred. They had to be there to get their pictures and they paid a very high price for it. Nowadays, the peer pressure on print reporters to be on the scene of combat is as intense as it is for the photojournalists. Nobody is coming back from this war with a big rep who wasn’t on the front lines themselves.”

One of those who Halberstam recalls with admiration is Associated Press photographer Horst Faas, a two-time Pulitzer winner now working out of AP’s London bureau.

“I think the increased danger from so-called friendly fire is one of the major causes of this high casualty rate,” Faas said Tuesday. “It’s made things very dangerous.”

Another factor, he said, is that “pressure from editors and the home office is much heavier than it’s ever been before in any war, including the Balkans and Afghanistan. When I was a photographer in Vietnam, we didn’t get cell phone calls from London or New York. We were lucky if we got a piece of paper every other week from Saigon. More important, judgment of our work was withheld until we returned from the field.

“Nowadays, our photographers are at the end of a mobile satellite telephone and we hurry them from one place to another without respite.

“We see something on London TV,” Faas said, “we immediately contact the closest photographer on the battlefield and ask them to move over there where the action is. Communications have changed everything -- on the battlefield and at home.”

Faas described what he called “the surreal situation in which I found myself Tuesday, when I was speaking with an AP photographer who was with the Marines shooting up into the Palestine Hotel and, at the same time, on another line with a photographer we had up in the hotel itself. And, suddenly, our Reuters colleague is dead; the Spaniard is dead. It’s always the young ones, the good ones, the ones who are serious about our profession, which is to get good pictures and save lives.” But, said Faas -- looking back over this longest day -- “the photos are wonderful, really definite images of this war. They’re the best we’ve had and we got them on the day when we’ve had the highest casualties.”