The brutal beheading of American freelance journalist James Foley should bring the international news community together for taking some effective steps to counter the risks of covering the world’s most dangerous conflict spots.
And because of the Pakistani links of the founder of the ISIS, Indian media outfits must also come together to devise ways to provide security to their reporters whenever they are assigned to the Iraq-Syria region for a first-hand reporting.
The ISIS was born out of a group called ‘al-Qaida in Iraq’, founded by Iraq’s firebrand Sunni mullah Abu Musab al-Zarqawi whose links with Pakistan began when he was 23 years old. He visited Pakistan to participate in the Afghan Jihad, started living in Peshawar and networked with leadership members of the then newly formed al-Qaida organization. There have been reports that Zarqawi’s sisters were also settled in Peshawar and his mother visited him frequently. It was in Peshawar that Zarqawi adopted the fundamentalist Salafist faith, which experts say made him a diehard enemy of Shiite Muslims and moderate Sufi governments. Zarqawi is also reported to have established a terrorist camp on the Pak-Afghan border to train fighters. He was hosted by Pakistan’s banned Deobandi terrorist outfit called Lashkar-e-Jhangvi for several years and Zarqavi reportedly trained their recruits in his camp. He traveled to Karachi several times before bidding goodbye to Pakistan in 1999.
Indian media outfits should also consider the fact that even the world’s biggest news channels are depending on young and inexperienced freelance reporters who are ready to risk their lives to go to such hot spots because of their passion for reporting from the front lines to become famous. Such journalistic passion can sometimes be exploited. Cash strapped news organizations know they can take advantage of such brave reporters who are willing to go over on their own. So a large part of the business model for international news in countries such as USA relies on freelancers who want to get published so badly that they’re willing to pay their own expenses and sometimes even take a loss to report a story.
On the one hand, it may be unethical for the news outlets to ignore the killing and continue outsourcing the coverage to freelancers such as Foley, but on the other they can’t ignore the ISIS story because that would help the terrorist organization.
Delphine Halgand is the US Director of ‘Reporters Without Borders’. She says Syria desperately needs the media to tell its story to the rest of the world but the efforts by jihadists to spread terror and scare the press are having chilling effects. War not only takes a human toll, its news coverage also becomes a collateral victim. To keep Syria on the map by keeping its story alive, some news organizations have started soliciting work from journalists who are already on assignment from another competing outlet. But a program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, Sharif Mansour, warns that a lot of international media outlets are totally avoiding covering the conflict in Syria.
Foley was abducted in November 2012, (believed to be taken at gunpoint from a taxi he hailed in Binnish, a town in northwestern Syria) and the risks of reporting from Syria were well known even before Foley’s beheading. The Committee to Protect Journalists says Syria, torn apart by civil war for the last two years, is now the most dangerous country in the world for journalists. At least 69 journalists have been killed there since an uprising began in 2011 and the number of kidnapped journalists has surpassed 80.
Seasoned war reporters like Tom A Peter, who has covered the Middle East for several publications, including the Christian Science Monitor, says that he and many of his colleagues began to pull back from Syria soon after the kidnappings and other incidents increased.
The kidnappings and killings underline the need for all parties, the reporters, the news organizations and their governments, to make sure that war correspondents are properly trained and prepared for the realities on the ground. Governments should realize that news outfits are trying to strike the right balance and they are facing a catch-22 situation. Covering the ISIS story is risky and dangerous but ignoring it would be even worse. They don’t want to help ISIS and its brutal forces by not covering the story, but by the same token, there is a lot to be done to make sure that journalists are safe and the story can be properly covered and promptly told to the whole world.
(Author/news analyst Ravi M Khanna is a former South Asia bureau chief of Voice of America who now does free-lance reporting from New Delhi)
Feedback: ravimohankhanna@gmail.com
