What I Risked as an Iraqi Journalist

Despite the risks, though, and despite my parents' frequent pleas that I quit my job, I believed in my work as a reporter. We need the world to see and hear about what is happening here, I always told my parents.

But bringing that truth to the world is not an easy task. Whenever I was assigned to cover clashes and fighting in the streets of Baghdad, I would discuss with my bureau chief and other Iraqi reporters how I could do it without getting killed. For me, that meant going to the scene an hour or two after the fighting ended. In the meantime, I would call everyone I knew in the neighborhood to get a clear picture of what was going on.

Some of my colleagues were more willing to cover clashes as they took place. My friend Salih Saif Aldin, one of The Post's most fearless reporters, was one. He first reported for the paper in 2004, covering a string of incidents in his home town of Tikrit, north of Baghdad. I recall talking to him on the phone as he passed me information from a street battle. I could hear the shooting as though it were right in front of me.

I always told Salih to be careful, but he was confident and determined. "We are The Washington Post. We should always be on top of the news," he would retort, repeating a sentence we teach every new reporter in the Baghdad bureau.

Brave and aggressive, Salih chased hidden stories. Once, he exposed a scandal involving Iraqi police in Tikrit, uncovering the death of an Iraqi civilian who had been tortured, on the orders of the police chief, to force him and others to confess to crimes they hadn't committed. After the story appeared in The Post in 2005, the police staff came under investigation. And Salih became an object of revenge. He was attacked and beaten, but he was determined not to quit his job. He was a courageous, committed and loyal reporter. And he paid the price for covering the truth in Iraq.

The murders of Iraqi reporters who work for the Western media have left the rest of us with few options. Many have quit our jobs or left the country. I was lucky enough to be accepted, with help from a Post reporter, into a master's program in writing at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, fulfilling my dream to earn a higher degree. But others haven't had my good fortune. They remain in Iraq either because they don't have enough money to leave or because they have no place to go.

And yet some journalists remain because they strongly believe that Iraq needs them at this difficult time. "I will never quit my job," said my aunt, Nidhal al-Mousawi, a reporter for the Iraqi newspaper Azzaman. Insurgents have forced her out of her house. They've left her a threatening letter demanding that she quit her job. Yet she hasn't. "If I quit and my colleagues quit, who is going to tell the world about Iraq?" she told me the night I left Baghdad.

Every day, my aunt drives her car to work, knowing that she might be another victim of the ongoing effort to suppress the truth.

bassamsebti@sju.edu

Bassam Sebti was a Washington Post special correspondent from 2003-06.