Beyond the hazards of duty
By John Simpson Posted Jul 1 2003
The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein contained all sorts of innovations in military thinking, not least in the way the war was reported. After long years during which the American forces held journalists at arm’s length, the policy was reversed. Journalists were brought in so closely that they almost became soldiers themselves, working and living with their subjects. The embedding policy worked well in terms of coverage, especially for television. We saw warfare as it really is — close, confusing and nerve-racking.
This transparency was something of a return to the policies of World War II or the Vietnam War. It was fine in every way, except that proper reporting cannot be restricted to the view from one side — in this case, the dominant side. The interests of ubiquitous broadcasters like the BBC and CNN, or the highly successful news channels of the Arab world, cannot be satisfied by embedded reporting alone. There has to be a degree of independent, free-ranging coverage.
But in this war that proved to be highly dangerous. The embedded reporters were, by and large, safe; they had an army to protect them. The casualty rate among the independent reporters (‘unilaterals,’ as they were sometimes known) was higher in this short period of time than during any fighting since the Eastern Front in World War II.
This was partly due to the attitude and behavior of the American forces. Collateral damage is usually high when Americans fight; in this war, ‘friendly fire’ accounted for a disturbingly high degree of casualties among journalists as well as soldiers. Twice as many journalists were killed by American forces as by the Iraqis.
On the morning of April 6, 2003, my team and I, working independently of the coalition forces alongside the Kurds in Northern Iraq, were in the Kurdish-held village of Pir Daoud, between Erbil and Kirkuk. We heard that the nearby town of Dibargan had fallen to the Kurdish Democratic Party forces, so we headed along the road that had recently been relinquished by the retreating Iraqi forces. It was empty, and we were worried we might have pushed a little too far ahead of the Democratic Party.
We were then overtaken by a column of Kurdish special forces commanded by Waji Barzani, brother of the Kurdish Democratic Party president. He was guarded by his own men and by three or four vehicles containing U.S. Special Forces. It seemed safer for us to tag along with them.
At a crossroads overlooking the plain that led to Dibargan, the convoy stopped so Barzani could see the action for himself. Several Iraqi tanks were driving across the plain, and one of them fired in our direction. The officer commanding the U.S. Special Forces called in an air strike to deal with the tank.
Two F-14s streaked low across the sky, only about 500 feet above us, low enough to be able to see the orange panels on the roofs of most of the 18 or so vehicles in the convoy, showing that they were from the coalition. They were also low enough to show the pilots and navigators the outsized Stars and Stripes the U.S. vehicles were flying and the separate group of American Humvees that were stationed only about 50 yards from where we had stopped.
Maybe the navigator got the coordinates wrong and fired one of his Maverick missiles at the position which the U.S. Special Forces commander gave as his own, instead of the position the commander gave for the tank. Maybe the commander got the coordinates mixed up. It obviously didn’t help that a disabled Iraqi tank lay on the side of the road close to where we had all stopped. A careless, excited navigator might have fired off a missile in the direction of the tank before taking an instant to verify whether the group of vehicles below was Iraqi or coalition.
The missile hit the precise center of the crossroads. I was standing about 30 feet away with my cameraman, assistant cameraman and translator. The producer and safety advisor had gone back to their vehicle to get the tripod so that the cameraman could get a steady shot of the two American planes as they flew unusually low overhead. I actually saw the missile leave the plane, and a brief time later, I was aware of the huge downward rush of the missile to my right. I had an infinitesimally brief impression of something white and red, a split second before it hit the ground; a Maverick missile is usually silver with a red nose-cone.
It exploded into thousands of pieces of shrapnel, many of which hit the surrounding cars. One by one the cars went up in flames, and the bullets, mortar rounds and RPG-7 rockets that they contained, began exploding. This must have gone on for a good 10 or 12 minutes, and most of the 18 deaths (the figure later rose to 22) occurred during that time. The entire area was covered with dead and dying men, some of them burning to death. In a broadcast by satellite phone from the spot, I described it as a scene from hell; and for once the cliché seemed justifiable.
Remarkably, given that we were so close to the missile as it landed, all but one of my team escaped with light injuries: the cameraman suffered a cut on his forehead that bled profusely, the assistant cameraman had a small piece of shrapnel in his leg and I was hit by 14 pieces of shrapnel. The largest of the pieces was absorbed by my flak jacket. The second largest went into my hip, but did no serious damage. All three of us suffered perforated eardrums; in my case, the eardrum virtually disappeared. The producer was hit in the foot by an inch-long piece of shrapnel, which did no serious damage. The security adviser was scarcely touched.
Our local translator, however, was hit by a large piece of shrapnel that severed his femoral artery. Another piece almost severed his right foot. The producer and security advisor did what they could for him, and then the U.S. Special Forces medics took over and worked hard to save him. But he was probably beyond any help. Within 20 minutes he was clearly dying, and we put him on the back of a vehicle to take him to the hospital. He died soon afterward.
It was a meaningless, stupid accident that should never have happened, and it seems likely to have been the result of over-excitability and poor training on the part of the aircrew. The two F-14s continued circling for some time, but no more missiles were fired; this seemed to indicate that they realized almost immediately that it was a mistake. A senior American officer told us off the record that the two planes had come from the USS Roosevelt. In Dohar, at coalition headquarters, journalists were apparently informed that this, the worst ‘friendly fire’ incident of the war, would be carefully investigated. If so, the findings of the investigation do not seem to have been made public. Waji Barzani is thought to have received injuries that rendered him brain-dead. Perhaps for political reasons though, given the closeness of the Kurdish Democratic Party to the United States, this has not been stated publicly.
I went to see the family of Kamran, our translator, three hours after the accident. His widowed mother was almost too shocked for tears. “But the Americans know everything,” she said helplessly. “How could they not know they were killing friendly people?” The fact is, of course, that while the weapons of war have become far more powerful, the men and women who use them are just ordinary human beings, who are only as good as their training and service conditions can make them. In this case, it doesn’t seem to have been much good at all.