interesting follow up to the original article;
<snip>
Yousif, the station's acting director, and Ahmed Rikabi, its founder, blamed groups linked to Al Qaeda for Thursday's attack, which occurred on World Press Freedom Day.
"We're a symbol of unity. What we were doing is absolutely against their thinking," Rikabi said.
<snip>
- employees were drawn from a variety of religious and ethnic groups, and Rikabi believed that the station's nonsectarian, apolitical approach would shield it from attack.
.......
We never said what we think," said Rikabi, who spoke from London, where he spends most of his time because he has received death threats. "We never shut the phones off because someone expressed an opinion we didn't like."
At first, he said, callers who disagreed were often rude and even cursed one another.
"Slowly and gradually, we noticed
the dialogue becoming more intellectual, more developed. After a while, people got used to listening to different opinions," he said.
It was an unprecedented format for Iraq, where open political debate had been quashed for decades. But as Iraq's sectarian war and Sunni Muslim-led insurgency spread, Radio Dijla found itself sucked into the fray.
......
Some of the attackers wore masks. Some had managed to get on the station's roof, so the employees found themselves sandwiched between hostile forces. Other employees huddled in offices, some screaming and crying.
Eventually,
the attackers backed away, apparently aware that security forces soon would be on the scene.When they arrived, the security forces evacuated the staff, but Yousif said they did not respond to his appeals to provide armed escorts back to the villa later so he could retrieve computers and other equipment.
On Friday night, people in the neighborhood called Yousif at home to report strange noises. Then they called to tell him the building was on fire. But it was too late to salvage anything.
Yousif, sounding weary from lack of sleep, said he had repeatedly appealed for better protection.
"We've asked the government more than once to please secure this road. Every week, someone gets killed or kidnapped around here," he said. "They come and secure it for a week, but then it goes back to what it was.
<snip>
If you move to a Shiite area, your Sunni staff won't come to work. If you move to a Sunni area, your Shiite staff won't come to work," said Rikabi, who estimates that he has lost about 30 employees because of security worries. Now, the station has a staff of about 55.
"We should probably just choose a place in the middle of the river," he said with a slight laugh. "That's not Sunni or Shiite."http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-radio6may06,1,885677.story?coll=la-headlines-world&ctrack=3&cset=trueA communication bridge over troubled waters the Iraqi security forces couldn't protect.
imo,
I think the latest rash of radio callers were not lockstepping to the beat of the masked men and the 'fighters' destroyed it for the protection of all Iraqi's. And just in time for the summer rolling blackouts.
/Sarc
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