Saeed Chmagh and the Impact of War on Journalists

Two Reuters staff died in New Baghdad on 12 July 2007. They were not unusual. What was unusual is that a camera happened to be recording, and that a copy of the recording eventually escaped. Everything else about their deaths was, by the standards of that war, ordinary.

The scale of it

Press-freedom organisations that have counted journalist deaths since the 1990s recorded Iraq as the deadliest conflict in their records. Over the years of the war the toll ran to well over a hundred and fifty journalists and media workers, and counts that include support staff run higher still.

Those numbers are hard to hold in mind, so here is the part that makes them concrete: on many months of that war, being an Iraqi journalist in Baghdad was statistically more dangerous than being a soldier in it.

Who actually died

Overwhelmingly, local staff. Iraqi reporters, photographers, camera operators, translators, fixers and drivers working for international agencies and for Iraqi outlets.

The reason is not complicated. Foreign staff largely could not move around Baghdad. The reporting was done by people who could, and those people lived in the city, could not leave at the end of a rotation, and were identifiable to anyone who wanted to find them.

How they died

Most were murdered: shot, abducted, blown up, often targeted for who they worked for. The scale of civilian death around them is set out in the page on the war's cost to civilians. A smaller but significant number were killed by military forces, including American forces, in incidents that were almost never resolved.

That second category is the one Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen fall into, and it is the one where accountability is thinnest. A murder by an armed group is a crime nobody in the coalition had to answer for. A death caused by a coalition weapon required an explanation, and the explanation was almost always an internal inquiry that found the rules had been followed.

Two very different categories of death

• Murdered by armed groups. The majority. A crime, but not one any coalition body had to answer for.
• Killed by military forces. Fewer, but these required an explanation — and the explanation was almost always an internal review that found the rules had been followed.

Why these two deaths became visible

• They worked for a global agency with the resources and the will to push for years.
• A gun camera was running, which is routine but rarely reaches anyone.
• The recording leaked, which is not routine at all.
• The audio was as damning as the picture, so the story survived contact with the public.

Change any one of those and the deaths of 12 July 2007 are a line in an annual report. That is worth sitting with, because the other Iraqi journalists killed by military fire in that war had none of the four.

What protection journalists actually have

On paper, a good deal. Journalists in a conflict are civilians and may not be targeted. Attacking them deliberately is a serious violation. In practice the protection depends on being recognised as a journalist, and from a thousand feet through a monochrome sight, nobody is recognisable as anything. The gap between the rule and its enforcement is where this whole subject lives.

What changed after the video

News organisations got better at hostile-environment training, tracking and insurance for local staff, and rather better at crediting them. Agencies became more willing to say publicly that a member of staff had been killed by a specific force rather than simply killed.

What did not change is the accountability gap. There is still no routine mechanism by which a news organisation whose employee is killed by a military weapon can obtain the recording of it. Reuters could not get this footage in 2007, and an agency in the same position today would be making the same requests. That story is here.

The cost journalists paid for every picture of that war

Nearly every image the world has of Iraq between 2003 and 2011 was taken by someone who lived there, working for an organisation based somewhere safer, for a fraction of the pay and several times the risk.

Namir Noor-Eldeen was 22 and had been doing that job for years. Saeed Chmagh was 40 and had four children. They are remembered because of how they died rather than for the work, which is exactly backwards, and it is the most common fate available to a local journalist in a war. What has changed for reporters since picks the thread up.