Middle East Adventure Travel - The Rough Guide to Iraq (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine July 2003

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The Rough Guide to Iraq (Cont.)


	The first wave: Kuni Takahashi (in hat) and Laurent Van Der Stockt document the marine assault on the Diyala Bridge. (Gary Knight/VII)

WARS ARE LIKE PEOPLE: Each is different, each is unpredictable in ways that are not predictable. Laurent and I assumed, once we were in Iraq, that we had reached a happy war zone, that Iraqi soldiers would give up like they had in 1991 and Iraqi civilians would celebrate. I don't know where this assumption might register on the stupidity scale, but my only comfort is that we did not have a monopoly on idiocy.

It wasn't surprising, in Safwan, to find only a handful of SUVs containing unilateral journalists. Hundreds had tried to cross into Iraq on the first day, and most had failed; in subsequent days, they would try and fail again, because after the invasion's chaotic first hours, U.S. and British forces clamped down on the border.

We were not only unembedded; we were unwanted.



	(Map by Mark Todd)

After an hour in Safwan, 11 of us decided to continue up the open road to Basra, deeper into Iraq. We asked the troops in Safwan about the situation ahead, and several assured us that coalition forces had seized advance positions on the outskirts and if we journeyed up the road we would find them.

Those of us who headed toward Basra in our six SUVs did not constitute a convoy of fools. We had decades of experience in war zones. Laurent, who is 39, had covered the war in Croatia, where he had nearly been killed by a mortar (his left shoulder is scarred and bent unnaturally), and two years ago an Israeli sniper shot him in the knee. He now has trouble running, yet remains one of the most able companions you could hope for in dire circumstances. The second vehicle was driven by a 38-year-old Brit, Gary Knight, an award-winning photographer for Newsweek who has gone into, and survived, the worst conflict zones of the past 15 years. There were no rookies among us.

We drove for about four miles, through a dusty area that had a smattering of mud houses and palm trees. It was peaceful—but too peaceful. Where were the American military vehicles? Where were the telltale signs of battle? Laurent's SUV slowed down. A few hundred yards to his left was an Iraqi tank. To his right, about 50 yards from the road, several dozen Iraqi soldiers timidly waved a white flag. About a thousand yards ahead, through a heat mirage that distorted our vision, a line of people stretched across the road.

Laurent swerved around and headed back at full speed, and the rest of the convoy followed suit. There were, we realized, no Americans or Brits ahead; we had been driving toward an Iraqi checkpoint. The soldiers who wanted to surrender were doing so because no troops had arrived. Presumably some of them were the tank's crew, and had they changed their minds, they could have easily turned our caravan into smoldering steel and flesh. Just as easily, the American and British tanks in Safwan could have vaporized us as we raced back toward them. Fortunately, someone recognized our returning convoy; they did not fire.

It would be nice to say that I quickly realized this war was not the walkover I expected and that it was far too dangerous to cover without being embedded in an American military unit. But I failed to come to that conclusion even the next day, when we learned that a four-man team from ITN, the British television network, had ventured up an open road not far from where we had ventured, encountered Iraqi soldiers, as we had done, and turned back, as we had done. But an Iraqi pickup truck followed the two ITN vehicles, and as they neared the checkpoint, an American tank opened fire. One journalist survived; another was killed; the third journalist and the team's translator are still missing.

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