Hard roads across Iraq, Syria and beyond: Freedom and safety are scarce five years after Arab Spring
18 hours ago
Patrick Cockburn
I was planning to visit Baghdad last summer and stay with my friend Ammar al-Shahbander, who ran the local office of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. I had stayed with him for 10 days in June 2014, just after Isis forces had captured Mosul and Tikrit and were advancing with alarming speed on the capital.
Ammar was a good man to be with in a moment of crisis because he had strong nerves, an ebullient personality and was highly informed about all that was happening in Iraq. He was skeptical but not cynical, though refreshingly derisive as the Iraqi government claimed mythical victories as Isis fighters approached ever closer to the capital. He did not believe that they could successfully storm Baghdad, but that did not mean they would not try – and one morning I found him handing over a Kalashnikov to somebody to have its sights readjusted.
We shared a fascination with the dangerous complexities of Iraqi life and politics and I had been looking forward to resuming our conversations in 2015. I was just about to send him a message saying that I was coming to Baghdad, when I heard that I was too late and he was dead. He was killed on 2 May by a car bomb that exploded as he left a café in the Karrada district, where he had been sitting with a friend after attending a concert. A piece of broken metal entered his heart and he died, along with 17 other people killed by Isis bombs in Baghdad that night.
All too many journalist friends have been killed in Iraq, Syria and Libya since 2011, but most were doing dangerous things when they died and knew the risks they were taking. Simply by living in Baghdad rather than London, Ammar knew that he was taking a risk but, high though the level of violence may be in the city, it is not a battle zone. He was not personally targeted so there was a greater element of ill-luck in his death than that of other journalists and people working in the media, making his murder feel all the more poignant and unnecessary.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/hard-roads-across-iraq-syria-and-beyond-freedom-and-safety-are-scarce-five-years-after-the-arab-a6793331.html