Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [142]
TWENTY-ONE
bombs, breakups, and bastille day
On the first Monday in July, an unlikely event restores my faith in my staff—a bombing. That afternoon, I put the paper to bed early and go home to try to nap. Sleep refuses the invitation, and I get up to check my e-mail, to find messages from Fox News, CBS, and Global Radio Network asking if I am still in Yemen and if I have any more information about the terrorist bombing in Ma’rib, a city a hundred miles east of Sana’a that is popular with tourists for its spectacular dam and ancient ruins. Why hasn’t anyone on my staff called me?
I’m dialing the office before I even finish reading the e-mails. Al-Asaadi is still there, al-hamdulillah, working on Yemen Today.
“Don’t let them send the paper to the printer!” I say. “We have to add the Ma’rib story.” Al-Asaadi has only just heard the news himself. This is, I think, as close to a “Stop the presses!” moment as I am ever likely to have. In a flurry of excitement, I ring Farouq and Ibrahim and ask them to report the story pronto and file it directly to me. I can edit it from home and send it to Zaid at the office for layout.
While waiting for them, I ring the spokesmen at the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Information. I don’t get anywhere. They just keep giving me each other’s phone number and don’t seem to know anything. If I were in the United States, I think, I would just get in a car and go to the scene of the bombing. But this kind of on-the-ground reporting is nearly impossible here. Getting to Ma’rib would mean not only finding a car, but crossing some thirty military checkpoints. For non-Yemenis, getting through those requires a sheaf of travel permissions: sheets of paper containing the name of the traveler’s organization, vehicle number, and dates of travel, authorized by the Tourism Police. Who has time for that on deadline?
If you are one of the rare foreigners who track Yemeni news, you notice after a while that there are almost never witnesses to newsworthy events. You never get the story from the guy who lives near the site of the car bomb, who heard it go off and watched the car go up in flames while bystanders raced for shelter. This is partly because journalists are rarely allowed anywhere near a crime scene and partly because witnesses would never speak to a journalist. They’re too afraid of getting into trouble. Of course, it also doesn’t often occur to Yemeni reporters to interview anyone but official sources. When I ask my reporters to find out what regular people on the street think of a proposed law, for example, their typical response is, “Who cares about regular people?”
The dearth of eyewitnesses and other nonofficial sources makes for dull and often misleading stories. I don’t trust the Ministry of the Interior to feed me anything but fraudulent pap, the aim of which is to make the government look good and anyone in conflict with them look bad.
I hound Ibrahim and Farouq until they e-mail me their stories, and I weave them together. Nine people are believed dead, seven Spanish tourists and two Yemeni drivers. They were ambushed by a suicide bomber who drove a truck full of explosives through their convoy at the site of the Ba’ran Temple, also called Arsh Bilqis (the Queen of Sheba’s Throne) in Ma’rib.
I e-mail the finished story to Zaid, tell him which photo to use, and send a copy to al-Asaadi to put on the Web. It’s a little exciting. Despite the tragedy, and the sorrow and fear it evokes, I can’t help but feel that familiar guilty journalistic thrill at a major news story breaking.
The story requires weeks of follow-up. This has never been the paper’s strong suit, but my reporters amaze me. They interview a surviving Yemeni driver who still has shrapnel in his right eye and left ear. They write about the financial hardship facing the families of the two dead and two injured Yemenis, who have no way to support themselves now that their sons and cars are gone. They write about the decline