Saeed Chmagh: The Life and Legacy of a Reuter’s Journalist

One stretch of this recording is the part people remember. A badly wounded man drags himself along a kerb while two men in a helicopter watch and wait for a reason to fire again. That man was Saeed Chmagh. He was 40, he worked for Reuters, and he had four children.

Who he was

Saeed Chmagh was 40 years old and had worked for Reuters for years as a driver and assistant. In the language of news agencies that job title undersells it badly. A driver in Baghdad in 2007 was a fixer, a translator, a negotiator at checkpoints, and often the person who decided whether a street was safe enough to enter.

He was married with four children. He had survived years of a war that killed a great many people doing his job, and had built the kind of local knowledge that a foreign news operation simply cannot function without.

That morning

He went into Al-Amin al-Thaniyah with the photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen to cover fighting in the district. The two were part of a loose group of men standing near a street corner when the first burst of cannon fire came.

Namir was killed at once. Saeed was hit and went down, but he was not killed.

The minutes that follow

What happens next is the centre of the whole case. He is alive on the ground, moving, trying to pull himself along the kerb. He is plainly incapable of fighting anyone. Under the rules the crew were working under, and under the law those rules rest on, a man in that condition is out of the fight and may not be attacked.

Why those minutes are the centre of the case

The crew watch him for several minutes. On the radio they say they want him to pick up a weapon, because that would let them fire again. It is a legally accurate description of their situation and it is extremely hard to listen to.

This is the moment most viewers stop extending the crew any benefit of the doubt. Whether that reaction is fair is genuinely arguable. What is not arguable is that nothing he did in those minutes made him a target.

The van

A plain van comes down the street and stops beside him. Men get out and start lifting him. One of them is Saleh Matasher Tomal, who has his two children in the front seat.

The crew report people collecting bodies and possibly weapons, request clearance, and fire into the vehicle. Saeed Chmagh is killed. Tomal is killed. The two children are badly wounded.

No weapon appears in the footage of that phase. The legal argument has never been tested in court, because there was never a case.

• No weapon appears anywhere in the footage of that phase.
• Three people were killed or wounded in seconds: the driver, the wounded man, and two children hurt.
• No court has ever examined it.

The job that never appears in a byline

Agency credits go to the photographer and the correspondent. The person who got them there rarely appears anywhere at all, and when they are killed the headline usually reads that a journalist and a driver died, as though the second word were a smaller category of person.

What local staff actually did

In Baghdad in 2007 that division made very little sense. Local staff chose the routes, read the checkpoints, knew which street had been fought over the previous night, and were the reason any reporting came out of that city at all. They also carried the risk, because they were the ones who lived there and could not leave when a rotation ended.

What his employer did

Reuters confirmed both deaths and immediately asked to see the gun camera video. It kept asking for nearly three years through freedom-of-information requests and never got it. When WikiLeaks published the footage in 2010, the agency was seeing how its own staff had died at the same time as everyone else. The full story of those requests is its own kind of scandal.

What Saeed Chmagh's death actually changed

Very little officially, and a great deal otherwise. No one was charged. No rule was rewritten. The Army investigation found the engagement fell within the rules on the information the crew had.

What a name does that a number cannot

What his death did do was give the argument about civilian casualties a specific human shape that statistics never manage. A wounded man crawling in a road is not an estimate or a category. Millions of people watched those minutes in April 2010 and came away with a permanent picture of what one line in a casualty report can actually contain.

Of the roughly dozen people killed in the street that morning, two are named in almost every account, and both worked for a news agency. The rest are a number. His legacy, if that word means anything here, is partly that: the reminder that being recorded is not the same as being counted, and that most of the dead of that war were neither. Why journalists died in Iraq at that rate follows from here.