Also in Politics & Social Justice

Unembedded

Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq

by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Kael Alford, Thorne Anderson, Rita Leistner

Foreword by Philip Jones Griffiths

Excerpt 2

From the Introduction
by Phillip Robertson

If our journeys behind the lines were acts of faith, then they were also proof that often when one man is confronted with the humanity of another, he will not raise his rifle and pull the trigger. This is not disloyalty to one’s country. It is the thing that brings an end to war.

If this book offers an explanation of what it means to work as a journalist outside the U.S. perimeter, it is also an involuntary exorcism of intense memories. There have been worse battles in Iraq since the late summer of 2004, but that doesn’t matter. One death is still a death. It is the end of a universe. The photographs in this book, many of which were taken in Najaf during the siege that August, are the bright traces of the moments we witnessed there, and it is impossible for me to see them now without hearing the detonations, the entreaties, and the terrible silence of that time. During the siege of Najaf, a holy city to tens of millions of Shiite Muslims, the five of us—four photojournalists and I—were drawn together, pulled into a fierce orbit around the gold tomb where the saint Imam Ali lies buried.

On August 17, 2004, close to the height of the U.S.-led siege of Najaf, Thorne Anderson, Yassir Jarallah, and I crossed the U.S. cordon and the Mahdi Army lines on foot, thinking that if we could get to the old city, we would be able to understand what was happening at the center of the Mahdi movement. Very little information was coming from the old city inside the cordon because few reporters had made it through the blockade. Most had been turned back by gunfire or had been rousted from their hotel rooms by Iraqi police. For a period of a few days, journalists were threatened with arrest if they remained within Najaf city limits. We wanted to find our way through the cordon and break the news blockade.

About Phillip Robertson

Since 2001, Phillip Robertson has been convering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the American news and culture website, Salon.com. He has also reported for Time magazine, BBC World Service Radio, National Public Radio in the United States and CBC radio in Canada. Over the past three years, he has published fifty feature articles in Salon, relying upon first person narrative to communicate the effects of conflict on ordinary people. In 2003, Robertson was a finalist for the USC/Annenberg award for online journalism in the breaking news category.

During the August siege of Najaf, he collaborated with photojournalist Thorne Anderson to document the devastating course of the war in the Shia holy city. After crossing through the US cordon and Mahdi Army forward positions on foot, Anderson and Robertson remained in the Shrine of Imam Ali for three days, interviewing and photographing the Mahdi Army fighters as their lines collapsed under the American offensive.