Another loss for Iraq
The Al Arabiya television network has lost nine people in Iraq since 2003. Atwar Bahjat is the latest one. Her body, along with two other Iraqi journalists, was found near Samarra on Thursday.
I knew her before the regime collapsed in 2003, when she was at Al Jamhuriya newspaper. We used to run into each other at the same press conferences, festivals, that sort of thing.
Although she was very young and very beautiful, she wasn’t very showy. But she didn’t wear a hijab back then; it was only recently that she started because of pressure from all the Islamic extremists.
She was very humble and treated everyone well. With Arabs, women usually avoid speaking to male strangers. But, for her, because she was working as a journalist and needed information, she was willing to talk to everyone. She was very helpful and always joked, laughing at things. She didn’t need to show toughness.
The first time I met her – she graduated from the same university as I, but she came from the college of literature in the Arabic Languages Department so she didn’t speak English – I was helping her as a translator in an interview with one of the foreign bands participating in the Babylon Festival in 2000.
She transferred to Al Jazeera after that, and she arrived at Al Arabiya maybe two months ago.
Her father is a Sunni, and her mother Shia. That is typical of so many families in Iraq. But her father was from Samarra, where he was a secondary school manager, and it is exactly because she was from there and killed there that makes this especially terrible.
We hear so much bad news now, it’s strange to sit with someone for several hours, laughing, talking together, and then they are dead. Iraqis now expect to be killed at any moment. Even at home, he is not safe. This is what a normal Iraqi faces.
But imagine what an Iraqi journalist has to deal with, because he cannot avoid the bad news, has to report all these incidents, has to go to these hot areas, and has to go looking, searching, talking, and making interviews. This is especially true for TV journalists.
You can see yourself in the same position, reporting the same news, in Samarra or some other city, and then…. And because we have seen one another so often at the press center these past three years, we are all a big family. It’s a great loss.
Sometimes I joke with my wife, "Please don’t love me so much," and she asks me why. I say, "Because maybe you will lose me, and I don’t want you to cry too much. I don’t want you to suffer."
There’s an Arab poem about a father who loses his son. He says it’s not good to love our sons too much, because it will be so hard when you lose them.
* The names of NBC local journalists in Baghdad are not being used in order to protect their identity and security.
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