Reporter For Post Is Fatally Shot In Baghdad

He had studied at the Baghdad University College of Languages and shortly after graduating was hired as a correspondent in Tikrit for al-Iraq al-Yawm, or Iraq Today. Saif Aldin joined The Post in January 2004 as a stringer working from Tikrit. He quickly gained a reputation for tenacity and a seeming imperviousness to danger, taking on assignments that frequently put him in harm's way.

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In 2005, he received a note threatening his life if he did not quit journalism and leave Tikrit. He refused. "This is my city, and I'm a journalist," he told colleagues.

In July of that year, he was attacked by two men, who beat him with a metal pipe and the butt of a pistol. He had bruises all over his body and a gash on his head that required eight stitches.

In January 2006, Saif Aldin reported a story accusing Tikriti officials of looting a former palace of Saddam Hussein's. Word circulated of a $50,000 bounty on Saif Aldin's head.

The Post asked him to come to Baghdad. When he refused, Omar Fekeiki, then the newspaper's office manager and a special correspondent, informed him he would be fired if he did not leave, believing it was necessary to keep him alive.

"One day I told him, 'You're gonna get yourself killed,' " Fekeiki recalled. "You know what he answered? This was his exact quote: 'What's life, really, if we don't leave something good behind us?' It was so stupid and so heroic at the same time."

Saif Aldin later moved to Baghdad, where he repeatedly braved the city's most dangerous neighborhoods, often traveling alone. For security reasons, he sometimes wrote under a tribal name, Salih Dehema. But otherwise, he was always off to the next challenge: He met with commanders of the Mahdi Army and leaders of Sunni insurgent groups. He drove south of Baghdad, to what is known as the Triangle of Death, to interview neighbors of a 14-year-old girl who had been raped and killed by American soldiers. Perhaps more than anyone at the newspaper, his work provided a window into the motivations and methods of those responsible for Iraq's violence, in its many complicated guises.

Five days ago, he went to Dora, a southern Baghdad neighborhood that has emerged as one of the fiercest battlegrounds between U.S. soldiers and the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. He walked up to American soldiers with a video camera and started asking questions. He was detained and interrogated by the soldiers, was released later that day and walked back into the office with a beleaguered smile and his plastic handcuffs as a souvenir.

"The American forces arrested me on my way to Dora to report on the military campaign there," he wrote in an e-mail to a friend two days ago. "They took my phone and everything I had in my pockets and they released me around sunset."

In the office, Saif Aldin was proud and polite -- a pensive, sometimes brooding man. But just as often, he was laughing and smiling, his green eyes twinkling. On Sunday afternoon, he was in a rush to leave, eager to complete his assignment and head to Tikrit to visit his daughter. From a closet downstairs, he picked up a notebook and a pen and slung his computer bag over his shoulder.

"There is no god but God," a driver for The Post told him as he was leaving.

"And Muhammad is the prophet of God," Saif Aldin responded in the customary Muslim exchange.

"Be careful," the driver told him. "Be careful."

"God willing," he replied, and walked out of the house.

Correspondents Sudarsan Raghavan and Steve Fainaru and special correspondents Saad al-Izzi and Zaid Sabah contributed to this report.