A light fades over Samarra
By Megan K. Stack
Los Angeles Times
BAGHDAD, Iraq — As the light faded from the wintry sky over Samarra that day, Atwar Bahjat looked into the camera with a somber face and implored her country to stay calm.
"Whether you are Sunni or Shia, Arab or Kurd, there is no difference between Iraqis," said the Iraqi war correspondent. "[We are] united in fear for this nation."
There was every reason to be afraid. They were coming for her already.
The gunmen arrived in a pickup truck, hunting for Bahjat and her crew from satellite news channel Al-Arabiya. They seized Bahjat, her cameraman and her engineer.
Their bodies were discovered the next morning laced with bullets, dumped in the dirt on the outskirts of Samarra.
Bahjat had rushed to her hometown that day to cover the bombing of one of Shiite Islam's most sacred shrines. From the first minutes, Iraqis understood that the provocation was severe: The attack intensified the low-level battles between the two major Islamic sects.
Something fundamental died in Samarra that February day, and in her way, Bahjat epitomized it. The 30-year-old journalist represented a hope that is fast fading.
Admired by many
To many Iraqis, Atwar Bahjat was a local heroine. She'd gone from delivering propaganda through heavily censored state television to reporting on the U.S. occupation for the Al-Jazeera network. Earlier this winter she went on to Al-Arabiya, a Dubai-based satellite giant and the most popular news channel in Iraq.
I ran into Bahjat a year and a half ago, in the simmering, violent summer of 2004.
An Egyptian diplomat had been freed by his kidnappers that day, and Bahjat had been assigned to cover the story. At the Egyptian embassy, she was already inside with her crew — and dozens of other sweating, jostling, cranky journalists, mostly Arabs hunting for a scoop.
Bahjat worked the crowd like a moth, lighting on one group and then flitting away again. She laughed heartily instead of giggling, looked men in the eye and held their gaze. While the other journalists elbowed one another for camera positions outside, she'd arranged a private interview with the ambassador.
Getting too close
Bahjat spoke that day about her struggles to keep a professional distance from the spasms that were shaking her country. She said that she couldn't forget the carnage she'd seen. Tastes of mortality had given her a new reverence before God, she said, and had inspired her to adopt the Muslim headscarf.
"When I go to hospitals and see children dying, I fight myself to be objective," she said. "I've been affected mentally and psychologically, but if you're not neutral around here, you can lose your job."
Her job hadn't come easily. Bahjat had begged her bosses at Al-Jazeera for a chance to cover the war. They were leery of allowing a woman to plunge into combat, but she kept trying, took on the political beat and covered it relentlessly. In the end, her bosses relented.
"She was very strong. People in Jazeera always told her, 'If you ever feel uncomfortable, come back,' " said Ali Taleb, a cousin of Bahjat's who worked for her as a bodyguard during her Al-Jazeera days. "But she never did."
Death had just started to nudge against her that summer of 2004. She had run over a roadside bomb on her way to work one day; her car had been ruined, but she stepped out in one piece. She had covered the fighting in the holy city of Najaf and reported with bullets and mortar shells flying over her head.
"I have seen death now," she said. "I have been touched by it." But she said it lightly, by way of explanation.
A different look
Now, after three years of war, the clatter of city life has given way to the scrape of machine-gun fire, the deep boom of car bombs and the dull thud of mortars. Baghdad, with its tightly packed neighborhoods, date-palm groves and lazy-river vistas, has been swallowed by endless reels of razor wire and blank concrete barriers.
Like the rest of the country, Bahjat seemed to have grown more haggard. There was a heaviness, a fatigue, in her face that wasn't there when we first met. Before, she had sparkled; by the time she died, she looked exhausted.
She'd been receiving death threats for months, her family said later. She'd moved her widowed mother and younger sister to a new house in a safer neighborhood.
When the threats got too intense, she took her mother to Jordan for a month. She thought about staying away. She'd been offered a job outside Iraq with Al-Jazeera. But in the end, she couldn't bring herself to leave.
Like many Iraqi reporters, she found herself pitched into a vastly different landscape after the U.S.-led invasion. The heavy rules of Saddam's Iraq melted away. Newspapers appeared like weeds; satellite channels cropped up, one after the next. Reporters found themselves scrambling for footing in a deadly free-for-all.
Sixty-six journalists have been killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Of those, 47 were Iraqi. They've been shot by U.S. forces, gunned down by their countrymen and killed in bombings. They are covering the story of their lifetime — but it demands that they flirt with death.
"If I give up my position, if I am weak, who will be the substitute?" said Jawad al Hattab, Al-Arabiya's 50-year-old Baghdad bureau chief. "Every day we are exposed to many, many threats, killing or bombing or threats against our families. But Iraq deserves this from us."
Even after the shrine was bombed, Bahjat thought she was safe in Samarra; it was her hometown. She called her sister and told her not to worry; she was among family, she said. Security checkpoints blocked her path into the city, so Bahjat and her crew set up on a roadside in the farmlands on the edge of town.
She wore a turtleneck and tied her scarf in the jaunty, sideways knot that had become her trademark. As always, the Iraq pendant she wore to signify her outrage at attempts to obliterate national unity dangled from her neck.
"Iraq is swinging on your chest," teased Amna al Dhabi, a colleague at Al-Arabiya, when Bahjat called after the live shot.
"Yes, Iraq is swinging between insurgents and these Iraqi politicians," Bahjat said wryly. "It needs a warm chest to lie upon."
That was the last time Al-Arabiya heard from her.
On Friday, Iraqi officials announced they had a possible suspect in her slaying after a series of anti-insurgent raids in the area.
No rest
Even Bahjat's burial had a death toll.
It had taken two days to get her bullet-torn body back into Baghdad from Samarra. Sectarian killings and mosque vandalism had swept the country after the shrine attack. Baghdad and surrounding provinces were slapped under a strict curfew.
Bahjat's friends were deeply offended. They considered her a martyr. Her body should have been laid in the earth before the sun went down on the day of her death, they argued. Instead, hours and days had drained away in wrangling with authorities while gunmen and militias had the run of the streets.
When her body arrived, they laid it in a plain wooden box and strapped it behind the cab of an open-bed truck. The men among her family and colleagues gathered protectively around the casket.
They had tacked a black banner to the truck's grill; it was a promise from other reporters to continue Bahjat's work.
As the truck cut through the daylight, mourners drove behind in a rough column. They were headed into the badlands west of Baghdad, bound for the Sunni cemetery in Abu Ghraib.
The column of cars was passing through the town of Hassuwa when cracks of gunfire broke out: sniping between followers of one of Iraq's most important Sunni clerics and the Shiite policemen who were escorting Bahjat's funeral convoy.
The first bullets drew more bullets in reply, and soon the air was crackling. The fight was charged with sectarian overtones; police are widely seen by Sunnis as militiamen whose loyalty lies with Shiites.
The mourners abandoned the coffin on the side of the road, scrambled down from their cars and fled for shelter behind the walls of an old cement factory. The clashes were captured in detail by Al-Arabiya cameramen.
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