The days when journalists could move around Iraq just by keeping a low profile -- traveling in beat-up old cars, growing an Iraqi-style mustache, and dyeing their hair black, or when women reporters could safely shroud themselves in a black abbaya and veil -- are gone. When Jill Carroll of the Christian Science Monitor tried such tactics this January, she was kidnapped while trying to get to an interview with a Sunni politician, Adnan al-Dulaimi.
What journalists have learned to do in this unprecedented situation is to give increasing responsibility to their Iraqi staff -- readers of the Arab press, drivers, fixers, researchers, translators, or stringers whom the larger bureaus have placed around the country or in key government offices.
Farnaz Fassihi has written how at the Wall Street Journal she "began relying heavily on our staff for setting up interviews, conducting street reporting and being my eyes and ears in Baghdad."
Occasionally the Washington Post's local staff "managed to persuade Iraqis to come to our hotel for interviews, giving me a chance to interact personally with sources and subjects," Jackie Spinner, a former Post Baghdad bureau chief, acknowledges in her soon-to-be-published book, "Tell Them I Didn't Cry." She recounts how she "spent the nights writing stories pasted together from reports gathered by our Iraqi staff, my only access to the war outside my window..."
But while Western journalists are relying on surrogates, what I observed at the bureaus I visited in Baghdad was far from a dereliction of duty. If anything, it showed how the old overseas bureau model of independent reporters has been forced to evolve under very extreme pressure to survive. Much of the basic reporting now is done by Iraqis, while most of the writing and analysis is still done by Westerners. Some of the Iraqis I met are impressive in their knowledge and commitment to this new kind of team journalism. But one question being frequently asked is whether these local reporters were getting adequate credit. Omar Fekeiki, a young Iraqi at the Washington Post's Baghdad bureau, was quick to say, "Of course we want a byline! This is practically all we get."
Iraqis who contribute to a story do get mentioned, although often at the end of the article and in somewhat smaller print than the Western correspondent -- an unfortunate inequity. This practice has started to change, especially at the Post. Still, the reality is that because of the dangers of being associated with a Western news bureau, many Iraqis do not want their names published. Out of fear of reprisal, many do not even tell their families and friends where they work.
Few reporters I talked to, whether Western or Iraqi, have any direct contact with the insurgents or with the sectarian militias: it is too difficult and dangerous, they say, to talk with Iraqis who do the fighting and set off the explosives. And thus, the various attacks, suicide bombings, and the pervasive anti-Western sentiment, as well as the sectarian hatred that has erupted during the occupation, continue to be largely unexplored and unexplained from the viewpoint of the Iraqis, whether they are Sunni insurgents, members of the Shia militias, or from the American-supplied Iraqi forces that are attacking them.
Sooner or later, anyone involved with the Americans must go to the so-called Green Zone. Since it is so dangerous and difficult for Westerners to circulate in the everyday world of Baghdad, the Green Zone is one of the very few places to which a journalist can go to actually "report" a story. The alternative is to become embedded in the U.S. military. That Western journalists now find being embedded a kind of liberation from imprisonment in their bureaus is something of an irony, especially in view of the debate three years ago whether embedded reporters were accepting conditions that restricted their freedom to describe the war. Now they readily accept these limitations, because working as a "unilateral" has become practically impossible. At least with the military they see the killing in the streets at first hand.
The Green Zone is a 4.5-square-mile compound in the middle of Baghdad surrounded by an eight-mile-long, Christo-like running fence of blast walls. Someone dubbed it "the largest gated community in the world." The easy way to enter it is to "chopper in" to the zone's helicopter pad -- code-name "Washington" -- from Baghdad International Airport or one of the many other U.S. military bases that now form a growing American archipelago throughout Iraq. Indeed, all day and night choppers carrying military brass, diplomats, security specialists, contractors, and VIP civilians rattle a few hundred feet over Baghdad.
Reporters seeking access to the Green Zone must drive there and then negotiate passage through a heavily fortified access gate. Since these have been magnets for suicide bombers, they are ringed by armored vehicles, guard towers, and squads of heavily armed troops. If a visitor does not have the requisite U.S. military-issued special pass for his vehicle, he or she must get dropped off at a special place outside a gate in a maze of blast walls, rubble, razor wire, and armaments. But cars dare not linger for more than a brief moment, lest soldiers presume that your vehicle is that of a bomber and open fire.
Once disembarked, the visitor walks across a dangerous no man's land to the outermost checkpoint. As cars whiz by and as you thread your way through corridors of blast walls, razor wire, and chessboard-like configurations of metal mesh bins filled with dirt and sand as blast barriers, you feel utterly exposed. There have, in fact, been many attacks on these gates. In December 2004, for example, a car loaded with explosives blew up at Harithiya Gate, killing seven people and wounding 19. A Web-published message purporting to be from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi triumphantly proclaimed: "On this blessed day, one of the lions of the martyrdom-seeking brigade struck a gathering of apostates and Americans in the Green Zone."
At the gate itself, you are greeted by signs in English and Arabic: "Do Not Enter or You Will be Shot," "Stop Here and Wait," or "No Cell Phone Use at Check Point." (The fear, of course, is that an insurgent with a cellphone will detonate a bomb by remote control.)
And then, you must begin navigating numerous checkpoints manned by guards who check IDs again and again, pass you through metal detectors and scanning machines, introduce you to bomb-sniffing dogs, and give you pat-down searches. Their object is to make certain that no terrorist breaches these walls, as happened in October 2004 when suicide bombers blew themselves up inside the Green Zone Cafi, killing several contractors, and reminding everyone that even the seemingly secure barriers dividing the Green Zone from the rest of Baghdad could be breached.
The first few checkpoints are now manned by teams of soldiers from the country of Georgia in full combat gear. The names on their identity badges all end in "-villi," and none of them seems to speak English. Next, one encounters phalanxes of Spanish-speaking guards who, in pidgin English, tell me they are from Peru, Colombia, Honduras, and Chile. Because U.S. troops are both overstretched and expensive, the Pentagon has for some time taken to outsourcing guard duty here at the Green Zone to foreign contract laborers -- in somewhat the same way the news bureaus are outsourcing their work to Iraqis. At first, the U.S. hired the U.K.-based firm Global Strategies Group Ltd., which imported British-trained Sri Lankans, Fijians, and Nepalese Gurkha mercenaries. But in November 2004, after the U.S. reopened bidding for the contract, Triple Canopy Inc., a Virginia-based outfit started in 2003 by a group of veterans from the U.S. Delta Force, won the job. In order to keep costs down, it brought in recruits from Latin America.
These guards joined an already vast force of foreign truck drivers and food and service workers in the Green Zone (and on other U.S. bases) who come from countries as varied as the Philippines, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, and India. The result is a globalized labor force that makes the Green Zone look something like one of the United Arab Emirates, where Asian contract workers often far outnumber actual citizens. These "private warriors" and service workers in Iraq are estimated to make up the equivalent of an extra 30 battalions of military troops.
Knowledge of English does not seem to have been a requirement for Triple Canopy workers in this new Tower of Babel. Since the Latins are cut off from any regular Spanish-language publications or broadcasts, it is hard to imagine what they make of the imbroglio in which they find themselves. When I ask a Peruvian who is standing at a checkpoint under a tent fly in front of a giant stele inscribed in Arabic with a quotation from Saddam Hussein what he thinks of Iraq, he frowns and points one thumb down.
Next page: While the Bush administration spins desperately, the nightmare worsens