Journos Scrambling for Cover in Iraq

Journalists in Iraq are learning to "hit the deck" - an old Marine Corps tactic for avoiding combat casualties - while others are simply ducking for cover.

According to the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, due to the increasing violence in Iraq Western journalists are learning to restrict their travel and pass up stories that are seen as far too dangerous.

That's a lesson correspondent Colin Freeman learned the hard way, as he wrote in today's Scotsman, after attending weekly Friday prayers in Basra conducted by one Sheikh Sittar al-Bahadli, a leading ally of outlawed Shiite cleric Muqtadr al-Sadr.

He picked up an unwelcome souvenir on his way out: a .22 slug that penetrated his hip.

This, in spite of a safe-conduct guarantee from al-Bahadli, better known among British officers, he wrote, as "Sheikh behaving Bahadli."

He was lucky. Both Polish TV correspondent Waldemar Milewicz and his producer were killed in a machine-gun ambush south of Baghdad, although their Daewoo sedan was clearly marked with a "Press" sign, wrote Kurtz.

Such dangers, Kurtz wrote in today's Post, are restricting on-site reporting because the sites are just too hazardous for unarmed journalists wandering around the minefield Iraq has become.

Pamela Constable, a Washington Post reporter now back from Iraq, says conditions for journalists have "dramatically deteriorated," making it more difficult to "cover real people and events in a turbulent and complicated country, not just go to sanitized official briefings surrounded by barbed wire," she told Kurtz.

Kurtz cites the experience related by the New York Times' legendary foreign correspondent and Baghdad Bureau chief John Burns, who, along with several colleagues, was picked up by armed men, blindfolded and held for eight hours.

The next day, Kurtz wrote, another Times reporter, Jeffrey Gettleman, and his driver were also kidnapped by armed men wearing scarves over their faces.

Getleman was lucky; he and his driver were released when their abductors were convinced they weren't spies.

"Once you're taken hostage and blindfolded and driven out into the desert by angry, threatening men, there's really nothing you can do," Burns told Kurtz.

"Did it change the way we operate? Yes it did."

After consulting with the paper's security guards, he added, "we feel now we have to be reasonably satisfied the hazards are acceptably low before we'll contemplate a trip. It's a very, very dangerous assignment. ... And that's uppermost in the minds of all the reporters all the time."

Bill Spindle, the Wall Street Journal's Middle East editor, now home from Iraq, told Kurtz: "We've been largely confined to Baghdad. With the checkpoints and the kidnappings and the shootings that seem deliberately aimed at people working for Western organizations, moving around has been a dicey proposition."

So said Fox News Senior Vice President John Moody. "Some days our guys just don't get out of the building where we're located," he says.

"Travel across the country is almost impossible now because the roads are too dangerous. It's constricted our ability to report stuff going on that's not just a comment from the CPA," the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Such blazing hot spots as Fallujah are pretty much off-limits to Western journalists.

It's so hazardous, Kurtz reports, that the five major networks pooled resources with just one reporter to cover the fighting, CNN correspondent Karl Penhaul.

"The fewer people we have in these crazy places, the better," Marci McGinnis, vice president for news at CBS, which contributed a camera crew, told Kurtz.

"I've put out an edict that I don't want unnecessary travel if it isn't discussed ahead of time with our security and with me," McGinnis added.

Other strategies being employed include embedding more journalists with military units while traveling, Kurtz says.

The number of embeds jumped from 26 in February to 71 last month during the fighting in Fallujah and Najaf, and is now back to 26, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told Kurtz.

"We're much more dependent on embeds than we were, and much more restricted to Baghdad," Marjorie Miller, foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times, told the Post. "We do get out from time to time. But we haven't really been able to report from Fallujah. It's very frustrating."

"In the end," Burns told Kurtz, "you're faced with an irreducible risk because there is nothing that will protect you against a rocket-propelled grenade someone fires at a motor vehicle. Nothing will protect you against hostage-taking. Nothing will protect you against roadside bombs."

Editor's note: