Were these deaths mishap, or murder?

Attacks don't reflect well on the U.S.

by ROBERT FISK
9 April 2003

Baghdad—First the Americans killed the correspondent for Al-Jazeera yesterday and wounded his cameraman.

Then, within four hours, they attacked the Reuters Television bureau in Baghdad and killed one of its cameramen, father of an 8-year old son, and wounded three other staff members. Also fatally wounded was a cameraman for the Spanish television network Telecinco.

Was it possible to believe this was an accident? Or was it possible that the right word for these killings — the first with a jet aircraft, the second with an Abrams tank — was murder? These are not, of course, the first journalists to die in the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Terry Lloyd of ITV was shot dead in southern Iraq by American troops who apparently mistook his car for an Iraqi vehicle.

Michael Kelly of the Washington Post tragically drowned in a canal. Two reporters have died in Kurdistan. Two journalists — a German and a Spaniard — were killed Monday night at a U.S. base in Baghdad, along with two U.S. soldiers, when an Iraqi missile exploded among them.

Nor should we forget the Iraqi civilians who are being killed and maimed by the hundreds.

So the facts of yesterday should speak for themselves. Unfortunately for the Americans, they make it look very like murder.

The U.S. jet turned to rocket Al-Jazeera's office on the banks of the Tigris at 7:45 a.m. local time.Their chief correspondent in Baghdad, a Jordanian-Palestinian named Tareq Ayyoub, was on the roof with his second cameraman, an Iraqi called Zuheir, reporting a pitched battle near the bureau between American and Iraqi troops.

As Ayyoub's colleague Maher Abdullah recalled, both men saw the plane fire the rocket as it swooped toward their building, which is close to the Jamahiriya Bridge upon which two U.S. tanks had just appeared.

"The plane was flying so low that those of us downstairs thought it would land on the roof — that's how close it was," Abdullah said. "We actually heard the rocket being launched. It was a direct hit, the missile actually exploded against our electrical generator. Tareq died almost at once. Zuheir was injured.''

Now for America's problems in explaining this little saga.Back in 2001, the U.S. fired a cruise missile at Al-Jazeera's office in Kabul, from which tapes of Osama bin Laden had been broadcast around the world. No explanation was ever given for this extraordinary attack on the night before the city's "liberation." Al-Jazeera's Kabul correspondent, Tasir Alouni, was unhurt. By the strange coincidence of journalism, Alouni was in the Baghdad office yesterday to endure the U.S. Air Force's second attack on Al-Jazeera.

Far more disturbing, however, is the fact that the Al-Jazeera network, the freest Arab television station and one which has incurred the fury of both the Americans and the Iraqi authorities for its live coverage of the war, gave the Pentagon the co-ordinates of its Baghdad office two months ago and received its assurances that the bureau in Iraq would not be attacked.

Then on Monday, the U.S. State Department's spokesman in Doha, an Arab-American called Nabil Khouri, visited Al-Jazeera's offices in the city and, according to a source within the Qatari satellite channel, repeated the Pentagon's assurances.

Within 24 hours, the Americans had fired their missile into the Baghdad office.

The next assault — on Reuters — came just before midday when an Abrams tank on the Jamahiriya Bridge suddenly pointed its gun barrel towards the Palestine Hotel, where more than 200 foreign journalists are staying to cover the war from the Iraqi side.

Sky Television's David Chater noticed the tank turret moving.

The French television channel France 3 had a crew in a neighbouring room and videotaped the tank on the bridge. Their tape shows a bubble of fire emerging from the tank gun's muzzle, the sound of a massive detonation, then pieces of paint-work falling past the camera as it vibrates with the impact.

In the Reuters bureau on the 15th floor, the shell exploded. It mortally wounded their Ukrainian cameraman, Taras Protsyuk, who was also filming the tanks, seriously wounded another members of the staff, Briton Paul Pasquale, and two other journalists, including Reuters' reporter Samia Nakhoul.

On the next floor, Telecinco's cameraman Jose Couso was also badly hurt and later died.

The U.S. responded with what all the evidence proves to be a straightforward lie. Gen. Buford Blount of the 3rd Infantry Division — whose tanks were on the bridge — announced that his vehicles had come under rocket and rifle fire from snipers in the Palestine Hotel, that his tank had fired a single round at the hotel and that the gunfire had then ceased.

The general's statement, however, was untrue.

I was driving on a road between the tanks and the hotel at the moment the shell was fired and heard no shooting. The French videotape of the attack runs for more than four minutes and records absolute silence before the tank fires. And there were no snipers in the building.Indeed, the dozens of journalists and crews living there have watched like hawks to make sure that no armed men use the hotel as an assault point.

For Blount to suggest, as he clearly does, that the Reuters camera crew were in some way involved in shooting at Americans — that hostile fire was coming from the Reuters office — merely turns a meretricious statement into a libellous one.Again, we should remember that three dead and six wounded journalists do not constitute a massacre, let alone the equivalence of the hundreds of civilians being maimed by the invasion force. And it is a truth that needs to be remembered that the Iraqi regime has killed a few journalists of its own.

But something very dangerous appeared to be getting loose yesterday. Is there some message that we reporters are supposed to learn from all this? Is there some element in the American military that has come to hate the press and wants to take out journalists based in Baghdad, to hurt those whom (British) Foreign Secretary David Blunkett has maliciously claimed to be working "behind enemy lines?" Could it be that this claim — that international correspondents are in effect collaborating with Blunkett's enemy — is turning into some kind of a death sentence?

Samia Nakhoul has been a friend and colleague since the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war. Yesterday, she lay covered in blood in a Baghdad hospital. And Blount dared to imply that that this innocent woman and her brave colleagues were snipers. What, I wonder, does this tell us about the war in Iraq?

'The American forces knew exactly what this hotel is'

The Sky News correspondent David Chater was in the Palestine Hotel when the hotel was hit by American tank fire.

This is his account of what happened.

"I was about to go out on to the balcony when there was a huge explosion, then shouts and screams from people along our corridor. They were shouting, 'Somebody's been hit. Can somebody find a doctor?' They were saying they could see blood and bone.

"There were a lot of French journalists screaming, 'Get a doctor, get a doctor'. There was a great sense of panic because these walls are very thin. "We saw the tanks up on the bridge. They started firing across the bank. The shells were landing either side of us at what we thought were military targets. Then we were hit. We are in the middle of a tank battle.

"I don't understand why they were doing that. There was no fire coming out of this hotel – everyone knows it's full of journalists.

"Everybody is putting on flak jackets. Everybody is running for cover. We now feel extremely vulnerable and we are now going to say goodbye to you." The line was cut but minutes later Chater resumed his report, saying journalists had been watching American forces from their balconies and the troops had surely been aware of their presence.

"They knew exactly what this hotel is. They know the press corps is here. I don't know why they are trying to target journalists. There are awful scenes around me. There's a Reuters tent just a few yards away from me where people are in tears. It makes you realise how vulnerable you are. What are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to carry on if American shells are targeting Western journalists?"