Death in the Kabul convoy
By Michael Lev Posted Sat, Dec 1 2001
Michael A. Lev sits on an overturned tanker in Jalabad, Afghanistan. Lev was only 30 minutes behind the car from which four journalists were pulled out and murdered by gunmen.
—COURTESY OF MIKE LEV
The car came speeding out of the dusty distance on the hard road from Jalalabad to Kabul, its occupants waving frantically as it passed: Turn around! Get back! One of the passengers, another journalist, flashed three hand signals to spell out the danger. A gun. Five people. Then he drew a finger across his throat. They were dead.
It took hours to confirm the fates of Harry Burton and Azizullah Haidari of Reuters, Maria Grazia Cutuli of Corriere della Sera and Jose Fuentes of El Mundo, four reporters pulled from their vehicles and murdered by unknown gunmen about 30 minutes ahead of my car on a day many journalists were trying to get to the capital.
War-torn Afghanistan is not just dangerous, it is mysteriously so. There is no real government in charge. There was no one to warn us against the drive. And when disaster struck, there were no police to call for help. It was up to the journalists to organize an armed convoy with a doctor and ambulance to get back to the scene, though more reports of shooting thwarted the attempt.
There is always some risk reporting from a war zone, but what has made covering Afghanistan so tricky is those areas of the country where there are no longer clearly defined front lines to respect. There is only territory, perhaps controlled by a friendly warlord, perhaps infiltrated by Taliban fighters or bandits.
Around Jalalabad, the only official protection is the hand-written notes provided on request by one of the militia commanders. It grants permission and safe passage from one district to another. Reporters collect as many as they can. But in the end they are not worth much, which is why reporters also hire armed guards to travel anywhere outside the center of the city.
Still, it is up to each reporter to decide what was safe and what wasn’t, which for me meant struggling to find the balance between being a responsible father and a driven reporter.
The prize out of Jalalabad was to get as close as possible to Tora Bora, the heavily fortified Al Qaida encampment in the mountainous region outside the city. It is described as a complex of hilltop caves and bunkers manned by 400 to 2,000 foreign fighters loyal to Osama bin Laden. They were said to be trapped and desperate. But no reporters had seen Tora Bora. Might local villagers have stories about Osama to tell? Would any of the Arabs talk?
I thought hard about the story. Maybe I could get close. Then I asked a former mujahedeen fighter, the secretary to Jalalabad’s governor. He chuckled heartily for a full 30 seconds. “You can go, if you don’t value your life,” he said.
When I grudgingly abandoned the idea, I didn’t feel particularly good about it. I felt that I had failed. I had been in Jalalabad for 10 days. The story was shifting to Kandahar. I was frustrated and antsy. Maybe the mujahedeen was exaggerating.
It took me another day or two to accept that I had come close to falling into the potentially dangerous trap of valuing the story over everything.
Reporters in Jalalabad had debated, in abstract, the question of whether any story is “worth it” — worth the real risk of getting killed. The answer, in abstract, is no, but reporters define themselves by the stories they get, not the prudent decisions they make. In Afghanistan risk assessment has proven difficult, which makes losing perspective easier. That is probably what happened to my three colleagues in the north who were killed by the Taliban after hopping aboard a Northern Alliance military convoy they thought had pushed back the enemy.
For me, the advice I will try to remember is what every city hall reporter learns: you can’t get every scoop. But there will be another newspaper tomorrow, and another chance to write a great story.
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Eight Journalists Killed in Afghanistan
As Philip Knightley noted in London’s The Guardian, eight journalists were killed in Afghanistan before the first American fighter died on the ground there. The journalists killed in Afghanistan since Sept. 11 are:
Maria Grazia Cutuli
Italian journalist reporting for Milan’s Correiere della Sera newspaper
Pierre Billaud
Reporting for the Radio Tele Luxembourg
Harry Burton
Australian cameraman with the Reuters news agency
Julio Fuentes
Correspondent for the Spanish daily El Mundo
Azizullah Haidari
Afghan-born photojournalist with the Reuters news agency
Volker Handloik
Freelance writer reporting for Germany’s Stern magazine
Ulf Stromberg
Swedish cameraman for TV4
Johanne Sutton
Radio France International journalist