Namir Noor-Eldeen: The Photographer Who Was 22

Almost everything written about Namir Noor-Eldeen is about the thirty seconds in which he died. He had twenty-two years before that, most of them spent doing one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, in the city he was from.

Who he was

Namir Noor-Eldeen was an Iraqi photojournalist. He began working during the war as a teenager and by his early twenties was on contract to Reuters, filing from Baghdad and beyond it. Editors who worked with him described him as fast, brave to the point of worry, and unusually good at getting to a scene while it still mattered.

That is a specific kind of skill, and in Iraq in the mid-2000s it was close to a death sentence. The Iraq war was the deadliest conflict for journalists that press-freedom organisations had ever counted, and the large majority of those killed were Iraqis working for international outlets rather than foreign correspondents.

The work itself

Foreign staff in Baghdad in 2007 could rarely move freely. Agencies relied on Iraqi photographers and reporters who could get to a district, work quickly, and get out. They took the risk that a visiting correspondent could not.

It is worth being blunt about what that arrangement meant. The pictures the world saw of that war were overwhelmingly taken by local staff, and it was local staff who died taking them. Namir was one of a large number of Iraqi journalists killed doing exactly this, and one of the very few whose death was recorded on video.

The morning of 12 July 2007

He went into Al-Amin al-Thaniyah with Saeed Chmagh, a Reuters driver and assistant, to cover fighting in the district. There had been American operations there all week.

He was carrying a camera with a long lens. At one point in the footage a man crouches at the corner of a building and appears to point something around it. On any ordinary reading of a photographer's morning, he was trying to get a shot down the street without stepping into it.

The Apache crew overhead, looking at a grey, magnified image from a long way up, read the same shape as a man with a weapon preparing to fire. They asked for clearance and fired the 30mm cannon. He was killed immediately.

The lens, and why it matters so much

Understanding this is not the same as excusing what happened. It explains how the first engagement began; it says nothing about what happened afterwards, when a van stopped to pick up a wounded man and was fired on with no weapon in sight.

It also raises a question nobody has answered. If the equipment cannot tell a camera from a launcher, what is the standard of certainty supposed to be before firing into a group of people? The rules required identification.

Why the resemblance matters so much

It explains how the first burst began. It explains nothing about what happened next, when a van stopped to collect a wounded man and was fired on with no weapon anywhere in the frame.

What Reuters did next

The agency confirmed the deaths of both men within a day and began asking the US military what had happened. It asked to see the gun camera footage. It went on asking, formally, for close to three years, and it never received it. That refusal has its own page, and it is the reason the world eventually saw the recording through a leak instead.

What tends to get lost about Namir Noor-Eldeen

In most retellings Namir Noor-Eldeen functions as evidence. He is the reason the incident was newsworthy, the reason an international agency pushed, the reason there is a video at all.

He was also a young man who had chosen a job that got him killed, in a country where taking that job was an act of some courage, and who was good enough at it that a global agency relied on him at an age when most photographers are still assisting. The dozen or so other men who died in that street were never named at all, which is a reminder of how little the record would show if he had not been carrying a Reuters accreditation.

That is the uncomfortable shape of it. The presence of a journalist is what made this particular morning visible, and the visibility is the only reason anyone is still arguing about it. What that says about reporting in wartime is worth a page of its own.

• He was good enough that a global agency relied on him at an age when most photographers are still assisting.
• He chose a job that got him killed, in a country where taking it was an act of courage.
• The other men who died beside him were never named at all — which is what the record looks like without a press accreditation.