Reuters Book Tells Untold Tales From Iraq

By: Greg Mitchell In recent months, we've seen many articles and books about journalists' experiences covering the Iraq war, the vast majority of them emerging from the "embed" experience. Now Reuters has provided a more wide-ranging collection of stories, in a new book, "Under Fire: Untold Stories from the Front Line of the Iraq War" (Reuters/Prentice Hall).

Unlike other works, this book offers a first-hand look "not just from the U.S. and British perspectives on the battlefield, but also from the hospital and the streets of Baghdad and throughout the rest of the country," Stephen Jukes, the former Reuters Global Head of News, writes in the foreword. Jukes observes that "few images of dead Iraqis" were shown on U.S. television, but this book helps to fill this, and many other, gaps.

Mike Collet-White, for example, describes the Kurds' celebration of Saddam's downfall -- followed by their vengeful killing of Arabs.

Caroline Drees writes of what it was like to be in a great Arab city, Cairo, during the war: "When American soldiers briefly draped the Stars and Stripes over (Saddam's statue), it left a bad taste in the Arab world that overpowered any joy at the removal of a tyrant. One Arab TV commentator said, 'Everything that happens from now on will have an American smell.'"

During the war, Reuters deployed more than 70 staffers inside Iraq, but less than half of them were embedded with American or British forces. The rest were independent, although some had to cope with Saddam's "minders" in Baghdad.

In "Under Fire," 15 of the correspondents tell their stories. Some overlap previous embed accounts, but most offer fresh images and insights of the war's toll on civilians -- and the journalists themselves.

Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk was killed when a U.S. tank shelled the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. In the book, Samia Nakhoul, who was seriously injured in the same attack, describes the madness of that day and her rush to the hospital.

Nakhoul also observes that in Baghdad during the bombing, "Hospitals filled up ... evidence that precision bombing was not always as precise as the military claimed."

Christine Hauser quotes a hospital director in Najaf on the toll of U.S. bombing: "After the cessation of hostilities, most of the casualties were from cluster bombs. Families said people picked them up and played with them."

In another chapter, Reuters embed Sean Maguire writes of the Marine unit he was with shooting an Iraqi girl, leaving her with various wounds -- and the reporter's frustration as he was forced to move along with the unit. Six weeks later he learned her name and that she had lived but lost an eye.

Andrew Gray, another embed, wrote: "By its very nature, the embedding system was bound to make covering one side of the story much easier than covering the other. Not even its creators could argue it was ideal for reporting on the fate of Iraqi civlilians ... The challenge for journalists now is to report on postwar Iraq and keep track of stories from the conflict ... without the unique scrutiny granted by the wartime embedding program."