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Wednesday, April 09, 2003  

The list of journalistic casualties in Iraq rises sharply.

TAREQ Ayub, a 34-year-old correspondent for Qatar-based al-Jazeera television, died following a missile strike on the station's Baghdad offices, becoming the ninth journalist to be killed in the war on Iraq.
Five other people, including a Spanish cameraman and three staff of British news agency Reuters, were wounded today in a separate attack on the Baghdad hotel where most of the foreign media in the city is based.

The Pentagon aren't exactly apologetic:

Pentagon officials expressed regret three journalists were killed by U.S. fire Tuesday in two separate incidents in Baghdad but declined to call it a mistake on the part of the military.

Poor choice of words there, I think. After all, if it wasn't a mistake or an accident on the military's part, does that mean they deliberately targeted these journalists?

I've done a bit of searching and compiled the following list of media casualties (not including wounded) from sources around the Net:

1. Paul Moran, ABC Australia, March 22, suicide bomber
2. Terry Lloyd, ITV, March 23, friendly fire (two other journalists, Fred Nerac and Hussein Othman, missing after this attack)
3. Gaby Rado, ITV, March 30, undetermined causes
4. Kaveh Golestan, BBC, April 2, landmine
5. Michael Kelly, Washington Post, April 4, vehicle accident
6. David Bloom, NBC, April 6, natural causes
7. Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed, BBC, April 6, friendly fire
8. Christian Liebig, Focus, April 7, Iraqi missile attack
9. Julio Anguita Parrado, El Mundo, as above
10. Tareq Ayub, Al-Jazeera, April 8, US missile attack
11. José Couso, Telecinco, April 8, US tank attack
12. Taras Protsyuk, Reuters, as above

The International Federation of Journalists and Reporters Sans Frontiers are understandably not impressed. Will the outcry make the US military be any more careful in future, though? Somehow I have my doubts. In the meantime, here's what Lynn Sislo says in the comments at Talk Left:

Oh brother! Apparently someone failed to tell those poor noble reporters that there might be shooting.

Yes, and someone also forgot to tell the Coalition the Iraqis might actually not take too kindly to soldiers from another country enter theirs without their permission. I suppose the difference is that when Coalition forces get killed in Iraq, they're clearly noble and heroic; when reporters get killed in Iraq, they're clearly just crybabies...

posted by James Russell | 12:53 PM


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