Iraq
Comicbook journalism
War reporter cartoonist Joe Sacco is interviewed in the Star Tribune. Socca has cartooned from Palestine to Bosnia and, most recently, Iraq, I certainly wondered how seriously I would be taken when I started “Palestine.” First of all, comics at the time were still dismissed by the mainstream. And comics about Palestinians? Here was a […]
Excerpts from the sandbox
This week Slate publish excerpts from a series of stories from the frontlines of Iraq and Afghanistan. The snippets are taken from the Sandbox blog which is a collaboration between Doonesbury creator G.B. Trudeau and editor David Stanford. The blog is a mix of opium, bullets and dangerous encounters along with insights into the daily […]
Sac Bee pulls blog plug
It looks as though the Sacramento Bee’s man in Iraq has been biting off more than his blog can chew, On October 23, Bobby posted an entry bragging about being an arrogant jackass to a US soldier manning a security checkpoint. Here’s how Calvan himself describes his attitude toward his fellow Americans: “The Americans, however, […]
Meeting Resistance
Meeting Resistance, a film by Steve Connors and Molly Bingham, opens this week in the US. It’s a film about the ‘insurgency’ in Iraq from the ‘insurgent’s’ point of view. It portrays a side of the story that is rarely told in western media. The Washington Post says, Polished art it isn’t, but it […]
Embed a granny
Jane Stillwater is a 65-year old Californian grandmother and blogger takes the obvious course of all grandmothers her age and gone and paid her way for an embed position in Iraq. Chris Vallance from the BBC radio’s Pods & Blogs show pulls out a quote from Stillwater’s past, The violence didn’t keep her from wanting […]
Call to action
Aidan White is back in action in this post, after that post, with a call to action announced this week from the International Federation of Journalists for security for mediafolk in Iraq, The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) today called on the international community to take special action to confront the human tragedy in Iraq […]
Susman profiled
Baghdad based LA Times reporter Tina Susman discusses working as a foreign correspondent in Editor & Publisher, Susman is witnessing what she calls “one of the biggest, if not the biggest story of our generation as journalists.” She is chief of the Los Angeles Times’ Baghdad bureau, an appointment she received earlier this year. Her […]
The most dangerous man in Iraq in London
Fresh from winning a Lovejoy, John F Burns heads to London, The reporter John F. Burns, whom Chemical Ali mocked as “the most dangerous man in Iraq”, has returned to run the London bureau of ‘The New York Times’. He tells Ian Burrell about life working as a journalist inside Baghdad, of his admiration for […]
Dozier gets the Duhamel
CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier received the Helen Duhamel Achievement Award at the Association for Women in Communications National Conference in Orlando last Saturday, Dozier survived a 500-pound car bomb in Iraq last year that killed two CBS colleagues, cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan, along with a U.S. soldier and an Iraqi translator. […]
Some of us get out quite a lot, doncha know
The Washington Post’s Baghdad bureau chief, Ellen Knickmeyer, lays into a Editor & Publisher‘s David S. Hirschman vis a vis stay-at-home correspondents in Iraq, “It is critical in judging the quality of reporting in Iraq to know how much of it the reporter has actually seen for himself or herself; and therefore it critical for […]
Charlie don’t surf, but he does have cameras
Filmmaker Deborah Scranton talks about and shows clips from her documentary The War Tapes, which put cameras in the hands of Charlie Company, a unit of the National Guard, for one year in Iraq. The soldiers’ raw footage and diary excerpts tell a powerful, unsettling story of modern war. link
Embed humvee driver of the month award goes to…
This American bloke. Hopefully his finger is not poised on the trigger. In fact, watch all 1 minute and 12 seconds and you’ll see it’s poised perfectly clearly.
Reuters in Iraq
Residents are seen through a shattered windshield of a vehicle after clashes between U.S. forces and suspected insurgents, in Baghdad’s Shula district August 24, 2007. From a Reuters 36 snap Iraq slideshow published today.
Leaving the Palace
The soldiers lead a semi-nocturnal existence between guard shifts and operations. Reveille is usually a salvo of incoming mortar fire. Almost every man smokes and few could tell me what day it is, let alone the date. They have already suffered the worst casualty rate of any British unit in Iraq, and yet are not […]
A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja
After Saddam Hussein’s warplanes dropped poison gas on the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja in March, 1988 a cameraman found among the dead the bodies of a mother and her small son, “her arm outstretched as if to beg for help.” He had “a strong desire to lie down next to her and not get […]
Surge splurge
Heading to Baghdad soon? Bin your Lonely Planet and head over to the New York Times. From Kadhimiya to Saydia, the Times has the surge covered. The state of life and death in the Iraqi capital is mapped out in pictures, text and video, To study the ground-level effects of the American troop buildup, reporters […]
A Note from Baghdad
It’s three o’clock in the morning and the sound of mortarsand Katyusha rockets are my soundtrack. Gunfire is intermittent. Some is very close and some is far away. It does not matter anyway. I locked my building’s gate with an American-made lock and a large, stifling chain of steel. It cost me more money than […]
Fuel from the frontline
Alive in Baghdad brings the Iraqi capital to the internet – direct from the streets, unfiltered and outside the green zone. It’s produced by “a team of Americans and Iraqi correspondents on the ground” But, as the Philadelphia-based show producers Brian Conley and Steve Wyshywaniuk say, it’s not easy keeping on keeping on with the […]
Insight with Martin Woollacott
Martin Wollacott, foreign affairs correspondent of the Guardian, talks to Charles Glass about the striking similarities between the war in Iraq and the Suez crisis which brought down a government.
Covering Iraq
I always have a sense of dread when I drive through Baghdad. I don’t really want it to go away because it keeps me worried and alert. I see everything in terms of potential threat. Who is manning the next checkpoint? Is it the army or police? Or are the men in uniform I see […]
The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq
Patrick Cockburn’s latest book, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq opens with the following words: “It has been the strangest war. It had hardly begun in 2003 when President George W. Bush announced on May 1 that it was over: the American mission had been accomplished. Months passed before Washington and London realised that […]