By Gina Chon
Last night my colleagues and I heard about the two CBS News employees kidnapped in Basra Sunday. Authorities say a group of armed men forced a British photojournalist and his interpreter, both of whom were staying at the Qasr al-Sultan hotel, into a vehicle.
Since overall violence has been going down over the last several months, foreign journalists have been venturing out more in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq. That has led to debates about the risks and worries about complacency. Some journalists wondered whether it was just a matter of time before another Western journalist would be kidnapped, despite the security improvements.

Of course it’s Iraqi journalists and Iraqi employees of foreign news organizations who face the biggest risks. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, of the 126 journalists killed in Iraq since 2003, 104 were Iraqi. Most were murdered, as opposed to being caught in the crossfire. An additional 50 Iraqis working as support staff for media organizations have also been killed.
After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime, I knew many Iraqi journalists who were thrilled to finally have the chance to really practice their profession. I met lawyers, engineers and professors who left their jobs to become reporters, craving the chance to have a voice in the new Iraq. But they also became the targets of extremists who wanted to silence that voice.
In 2005, while working with an NGO training Iraqi journalists, I got to know Sahar al-Haideri, one of the bravest journalists I’ve ever met. Sahar was constantly filing stories, writing about everything from desperate Iraqis selling their blood for money to women who didn’t want to marry police officers for fear of becoming widows. She was fearless — she wrote about the spread of religious extremism in her hometown of Mosul, the curbing of women’s rights, and the brutality of the insurgency there.
She knew she was taking a risk. After receiving numerous threats, she finally moved her husband and children to Syria. She talked about how her name was the fourth on an insurgent hit list and the fact that the first three people on that list had already been murdered. But she couldn’t stay away from the stories that needed to be told in her native country. She temporarily returned to Iraq to work on stories; she made trips back and forth from Syria to Iraq.
Sahar was gunned down last June, outside her home in Mosul. After word came of her death, one Iraqi friend told me, “I ask myself who will be next and I hate that I’m thinking like that. I only wish we had the power to change something.” She is survived by her husband and four daughters.
How I Knew It Was Time for Me to Leave Iraq
By Sarmad Ali
One Friday afternoon in the summer of 2004, my younger brother burst into my room in our house in Baghdad and shut the door behind him. He said Adil, his friend’s older brother, had seen two young men follow me from the cafe around the corner from our house to my friend’s house in the same neighborhood.
“What? But why would they follow me?” I asked him. “I don’t even work anymore.”
“I don’t know — just be careful,” my brother said. “Adil is going to follow you in the coming days and see who these people are and what they want from you.”
Iraqi journalists or Iraqis working for foreign journalists are vulnerable targets. They rarely have bodyguards or carry guns, and they don’t travel in armored vehicles. They can be easily identified, followed, threatened, kidnapped or killed. Their families can be in danger. Those who work for foreign employers can be held for ransom or used as tools to pressure their employers to leave the country.

When I first heard I was being followed, I was jobless after more than year working for Iraq Today, a Baghdad-based newspaper that had shut down. Iraq Today was the only independent English-language newspaper in post-Saddam Iraq, but because it was printed in English, street rumor had it that it was bankrolled by Israel or the Coalition Provisional Authority. (It was actually funded by an oil investor out of London.) The editor, an Iraqi-American, left the country immediately after the death of an Iraqi friend who worked for Time magazine. He’d been paranoid even before his friend was killed: One day I was crossing a street with him when we saw an old, blind man with a stick on the other side asking for help to cross. My editor warned me not to help, saying the man was faking and had been following him for a while now.
Some of the other reporters at Iraq Today had already received threats. Just a few weeks before we stopped going to the office, a reporter said someone had slipped a piece of paper under her door, warning her against going to work. She immediately quit. A couple other reporters and I started posting stories on the newspaper’s site from Internet cafes. Then the money stopped coming in and we started looking for other work.
I briefly freelanced for Newsweek and for another English-language magazine based in Dubai, but then stopped to finish my master’s thesis in English at Baghdad University. A few months before that, I had gone to Jordan and applied for a U.S. visa to study at Columbia University. I already had my admissions papers and was just waiting for a visa or a rejection letter to come through from the U.S. embassy in Amman.
By then I’d worked as a reporter in Iraq for more than a year after the U.S. invasion, traveling across the country and reporting on bombings and assassination attempts, among other things. But I’d never felt as scared as I did when my brother said I’d been followed by strangers. Not when bombs went off only a few hundred feet away while I was walking home one night after work, destroying an entire hotel. Nor when I found myself in the middle of a crowd of angry, bearded Shiites calling for revenge upon the “Sunni killers” of their Shiite leader in Najaf.
I guess I felt scared because I was hoping to leave Iraq for the first time in my life and live somewhere else — now, knowing that I was being followed made the idea of leaving seem impossible. And of course there was the fact that I could be killed or kidnapped at any minute. My mother tried to calm me down. “What do they want from you?” she asked. “You shouldn’t be worried. You didn’t do anything wrong.” But I knew she feared for my life.
I went to my friend’s house to ask his advice. He wasn’t there, but I couldn’t keep my fears to myself. I confided in his family, worrying about my mom and what my death would mean to her and for my family’s future. My friend’s brother tried to calm me down. He suggested no one could hurt me when he and his brothers were around. He said he would stop going to work for a few days and follow me wherever I went to see who these people were. “We are all here for you, Sarmad,” he said. “Don’t you ever worry.”
I never found out who the men were, or if they’d really been following me. A few days later, I received a call from a mail-service company. I had a package waiting for me. When I went to pick it up, I found that I’d been granted a U.S. visa. I left early the next morning.
Sarmad,
Thank you you for sharing your moving and insightul stories. Hearing of kidnappings and killings on the news is nothing like the personal story of one forced to leave his family and country in fear for his life. I only hope that more Iraqis who have risked their livds in order to report the news or act as interpreters for our troops are able to receive US VISAs
what about your mom and your family? are they still there? you are lucky you got out… welcome.