Red Zone

"Because he returned to Iraq in 2005, when things were going from bad to worse. The situation then had become so awful that many people had simply written it off. In early 2006 the sectarian civil war started in earnest (although it had been going on for the best part of the year before, but no one was willing to admit it was happening). Reporting outside of two very small areas as a non-embedded reporter was a very difficult and dangerous job. There were so few areas that you could go to that most news bureaus had given up – myself included. The risk was just not worth the reward. But Oliver stuck it out and in doing so penned a book about that very dark period, much of which I haven’t read elsewhere. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The accounts of how it all goes wrong in Basra are very good and it conveys the fear, the utter misery, and the sheer difficulty of working there. There is one part that sticks out in my mind, from a journalistic point of view. Oliver Poole visited the war cemetery in Baghdad sometime in 2006, and at that stage it was so dangerous for a foreigner to be there that when a little of group of kids wandered up and said, “Hello mister, how are you?”, it was time to leave. He and his translator knew the kids might wander off and tell an adult they’d seen a foreigner. When you have to be scared of children saying hello, it shows you how difficult things have become. Some people used to snipe and say that journalists in Iraq were sitting in hotels doing nothing, but I would say that if you have not been there it’s not fair to criticise. They never found out what happened to him. The worst thing was the taunting phone calls made to the translator. They would say: “We have your brother here…” In Iraq, Westerners were taken hostage and often killed, but Somalia did not have the same reputation for killing hostages. So we hoped that we would be OK. But the hard thing was that we were in the hands of a group of criminals, and they are not predictable people. My main fear was that, even if the people holding us seemed all right, I never knew when they might pass me on to someone else. We were not informed of what was going on behind the scenes and I was always concerned that someone would sell us to al-Qaeda or some other horrible group, and that would be it."