Journalists become targets for jihadists

Randi is on a brief leave. This column was originally published Sept. 11-17, 2014.

The number of foreign correspondents has plummeted in the past 10 years, and most overseas news bureaus have either shrunk or shuttered their offices. At the same time, more reporters are being killed or kidnapped by extremist groups. No one knows the exact numbers, because families and news agencies are protective of information about individuals in captivity.
We may have come to a turning point in journalism, where the danger of reporting from jihadist strongholds has become too extreme to justify the presence of correspondents.
Steven Sotloff, 31, was the 70th journalist killed in Syria since civil war began tearing the country apart in 2011. That is a devastating number of fatalities for a noncombatant group comprising professional reporters who just want to get the story and send it home.
Despite a heartbreaking videotaped appeal by Sotloff’s mother, the terrorist group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, beheaded him and posted the video on YouTube. He was the second American reporter to die on his knees in a faraway desert in recent weeks. ISIS also recorded the murder of another reporter, James Foley, sending those brutal images, too, out into the world.

Sotloff and Foley belonged to a courageous band of brothers and sisters who travel the world to tell the who, what, where, why and how of natural disasters and armed conflicts. They do the counterintuitive thing — running toward danger in order to see what is happening on the ground.
A driven group of professionals, they are willing to endure just about anything that life in the field can throw at them: deplorable living conditions, foul weather, loneliness, fatigue and violence. Their goal is to get the most accurate facts and interviews they can and transmit or broadcast the stories, often from the battlefield.
There is the glory, too, along with the guts. And there is glamour as well, and a storied history of dashing correspondents who covered wars by day, hunkered down with troops, and caroused by night in bars from Singapore to Saigon.
Dexter Filkins, author of “The Forever War,” wrote about reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq during those wars. He spoke honestly about the addictive quality of living on the edge every day. I’ve followed his career, watching him return again and again to whatever city happens to be in flames.
That’s what foreign correspondents have always done, from Ernie Pyle and Ernest Hemingway in World War II to Dan Rather and Morley Safer in Vietnam. They fly into danger, push toward the front lines and try to nail the story. They employ fixers and translators and locals who work both sides of the street. And, too often, they die.
In 2002, journalist Daniel Pearl was killed in Pakistan on his way to meet an informant. In 2011, CBS reporter Lara Logan was sexually assaulted by dozens of men in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on the day that rebels toppled the regime of Hosni Mubarak. In 2012, a 21-year-old British journalist, Natasha Smith, was also attacked in Tahrir Square, and barely escaped with her life. A year later, a female Dutch journalist, 22, was attacked and raped in Tahrir Square by five men, while a chanting mob stood by and watched.
The atmosphere has turned toxic for foreign reporters, especially in the Middle East. In the past, all sides in a conflict respected journalists’ neutrality and sought out reporters in order to tell their side of events.
Now, however, a reporter in the field, especially a Western journalist, is seen as a commodity, a bargaining chip in a kidnap scheme, a source of ransom money, and a target. ISIS doesn’t need a foreign correspondent to vent and rant. It has YouTube. Reporters are not only expendable; kidnapping them is profitable, both in dollars and propaganda.
I watch Richard Engel, of NBC, reporting from the rooftops of Baghdad, and I see Anna Coren, an Australian correspondent, reporting from Mosul. I don’t know how they summon the courage to carry on in such a hostile environment, and I don’t know that they should.
Perhaps we need to rethink the model of sending journalists into war zones. CNN and the other major news organizations try to protect their people, moving them from safe house to safe house and changing their daily routines to discourage kidnapping. But the nature of war has changed. Freelancers, like Foley and Sotloff, are especially vulnerable; they don’t have an organization behind them. The risks they took outweighed any possible benefit.
It may have been worth the sacrifice in the 1940s to get news of faraway battles back to friends and relatives at home, and it surely was journalists who helped turn the tide of public sentiment against the war in Vietnam. But these days there are cellphones and social media to get the word out. Today’s wars in Iraq and Syria, in Gaza and Libya are turning reporters into coveted trophies, vulnerable to kidnappings that often end in death.

Copyright 2023 Randi Kreiss. Randi can be reached at randik3@aol.com.