The Bombing Of
Al-Jazeera
BY
MICHAEL MASSING
On
Monday, April 7, Jihad Ballout, the press spokesman for al-Jazeera,
phoned me at my hotel and asked me to come to the network’s
offices in Doha, Qatar. As the war progressed, al-Jazeera’s
concerns about the safety of its reporters had grown, and it wanted
to discuss them with me in my capacity as a representative of
the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Al-Jazeera’s offices, built with a $140-million grant from
the emir of Qatar, are as modern as any western network’s.
Its sleek, cavernous newsroom is filled with banks of computers
and anchored by a wall of monitors showing satellite feeds from
around the world. I was led into the office of Mohamed Jasem al-Ali,
al-Jazeera’s managing director. It was large, spotless, and
lined with plaques from business groups and charities. Joining
us were Ibrahim Helal, the station’s editor in chief, and
Sheik Hamad bin Thamer al-Thani, the chairman of the board. A
member of the Qatari royal family, Sheik Hamad (who was wearing
traditional white robes) joined us — indicating the level
of al-Jazeera’s concern. He rarely meets with visiting journalists.
Over the next half hour, I learned about a series of troubling
incidents involving the network. In Basra, its correspondents
— the only ones reporting from that besieged city —
were staying at the Sheraton Hotel. They were the only guests,
and al-Jazeera — worried that the site might come under attack
— had alerted the Pentagon to their presence. Nonetheless,
the U.S. had dropped four bombs on the site; two of them exploded.
No one was hurt, but the incident had been deeply unsettling.
Near Nasiriya, my hosts continued, an al-Jazeera reporter embedded
with the Marines had been accosted by a member of the anti-Saddam
Free Iraqi Forces traveling with the unit. The man had accused
the correspondent of being an agent of Saddam and threatened to
kill him. Shaken, the correspondent complained to the commander
of the unit. The commander said there was nothing he could do.
He further advised the correspondent not to file any more reports
from the field. And, since then, he hadn’t.
Finally, on the very day of my visit to al-Jazeera’s offices,
a member of its staff driving on a highway outside Baghdad had
come upon a Marine checkpoint. When he presented his ID, he was
waved on, but after he’d gone a short distance a marine had
opened fire. The driver was not hurt, but his car was badly damaged,
and al-Jazeera believed the incident was meant to send a message.
It was no secret that the U.S. military was unhappy with al-Jazeera.
In the early days of the war, Centcom had rebuked the network
for airing a tape of U.S. POWs being questioned by their Iraqi
captors. Since then, al-Jazeera had been giving the U.S. position
more coverage, airing the Pentagon and Centcom briefings. Still,
it was highlighting antiwar demonstrations, the resistance inside
Iraq, and angry statements from scholars and clerics. Above all,
it was airing footage of civilian casualties. Over and over, it
showed hospital wards overflowing with the victims of the fighting:
children without limbs, women lying unconscious, men covered by
burns. Such images were stoking passions in the Middle East.
Now U.S. forces were preparing to attack central Baghdad. Al-Jazeera’s
offices in the city were in a villa near the Republican Palace,
the former information ministry, and other strategic sites. During
the war in Afghanistan, its office in Kabul had been destroyed
by a U.S. bomb. (The U.S. had claimed that the office was a “known
Al Qaeda facility.”) Remembering that, al-Jazeera had sent
the Pentagon a letter before the start of the war, specifying
the coordinates of its building in Baghdad and asking that it
not be attacked. But al-Jazeera remained deeply concerned.
Back in my hotel, I wrote a memo summarizing what I’d learned.
I planned to send it to CPJ’s office in New York the next
day. When I awoke in the morning and turned on the TV, however,
I found that al-Jazeera’s office in Baghdad had been bombed.
I immediately called Jihad Ballout. The building, he said, had
apparently been hit by a missile from a U.S. plane. Tariq Ayoub,
a correspondent who had been on the roof directing al-Jazeera’s
cameras, had been killed. Ballout urged me to return to al-Jazeera’s
offices.
Arriving, I found the staff
in a state of shock. Many of those in the building had known Tariq,
and as the network played and replayed a tape of him on the roof
the night before, they looked on in horror and disbelief.
Ibrahim Helal asked me to go on the air to discuss the incident.
I hesitated, for I did not yet know the facts behind it and did
not want to speak prematurely. But, as a representative of CPJ,
I decided it was important to show that al-Jazeera was not alone,
and so I quickly found myself sitting across from the anchorman
Mohammed Krichene. A familiar face in the Arab world, Krichene
seemed about to break down, but he managed to collect himself
enough to lead me through the interview. In it, I expressed my
deep concern over the attacks on journalists that had occurred
that day. I noted my special concern about the attack on al-Jazeera,
coming as it did after a host of troubling incidents.
Walking back out into the newsroom, I found people still clustered
around the monitors. Most seemed in a daze; some were crying.
While they watched, an Arabic-speaking representative of the U.S.
government came on to express his sorrow over the incident. It
was, he said, a “tragic accident,” but an accident nonetheless.
When he had finished, a receptionist glared at me. “I hate
America,” she snarled. “How can it do such things to
us? This is how hatred for your country grows.”
Enjoy
this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
Michael Massing is a CJR contributing editor.
