Middle East - Anthony Ham [10]
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Itching to get to the front lines, I made my way to the Kuwait Hilton, where many journalists were assembling to cover the biggest story on the planet. On 9 April, Baghdad fell to US forces. Still, I hitched a ride with several journalists to Basra. With no guards or customs officials at the border, we strolled into Iraq easily, occasionally passing British and American troops. In Basra, Richard Leiby (Washington Post journalist) and I hired a taxi to the capital. No armed guards, no weapons, just two guys and a taxi on the road to Baghdad. We arrived late at night to find hundreds of other journalists encamped at the famous Palestine Hotel. By then, the invasion was over, but little did we know that the war was just beginning.
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Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone by Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran is a blunt, often hilarious account at America’s attempt at nation building after the 2003 US-led invasion. It leaves many a reader laughing, crying and furious. A film adaptation by director Paul Greengrass will be released in 2009.
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Over the next several years, I returned to Iraq many times, occasionally embedding with other US forces including the US Marine Corps and US Army. Because of the ongoing violence, being embedded is often the only safe way for reporters to work and travel around Iraq, but it’s also the most restrictive. Contrary to popular belief, most journalists working in Iraq are not embedded or hunkered down in the Green Zone. These ‘unilaterals’, to use military parlance, live and work alongside Iraqi civilians, sharing their lives and the danger.
Since 2003, more than 130 journalists have been killed covering the war in Iraq.
César Soriano
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JORDAN
Vertigo on Horseback
She didn’t look capable of much when I slipped into the saddle but I should have known better than to underestimate a glossy chestnut Arab with a star on her nose. ‘You can ride, no?’ asked Mahmoud as we edged the horses uphill in the opposite direction to the Siq. Odd time to be asking the question, I thought as we broke into a trot on the makeshift bridlepath out of town.
I hadn’t intended to go riding but when offered a different way to reach Petra’s Treasury I hopped into the saddle without a second thought. ‘You first person ever to say yes,’ said Mahmoud, pointing his horse in the direction of a distant plateau, ‘you must be crazy woman!’ It was breathtakingly beautiful, high above the stone turrets of Petra, the crisp winter sun drawing the colours from the rocky outcrops like a magnet.
Suddenly we reached the edge of the plateau and the horses lurched immediately from a canter into a gallop, snorting breath into the cut-glass air. I just about remembered to lift out of the saddle, leaning forward as one whole, magnificent horsepower urged at full speed across the slight rise. Caught somewhere between fear and exhilaration, I noticed the plateau was large…but not that large, and that it was surrounded on three sides by the end of the world. It was towards this aerial vacancy that we were now charging at full speed.
The path narrowed, the vague outline of Petra’s tortured rock formations passed below on either side of us and the edge loomed terrifyingly into view. ‘Stop. Stop! Sto…!’ The last ‘p’ disappeared over the rim of the plateau, together with heart, lungs and stomach. The rest of me came to a perfectly poised four-legged tiptoe on the vertical edge. We dismounted. ‘Come,’ said Mahmoud, ‘let me show you my Petra.’ Flattened out against the rock and gingerly looking down, I spotted two climbers below us on the opposite ledge. They too were looking down. Somewhere in the dark end-of-day gloom, a trail of tiny figures marched in single file up through the gap in the rock. ‘I said I’d bring you to the