"An Iraqi working as a reporter for the New York Times was found dead in the southern city of Basra on Monday after being kidnapped by masked men, family members and a doctor said. His brother told Reuters in Basra that four masked men in a dark Toyota vehicle had arrived at the family home in an apartment complex in central Basra after midnight on Sunday.
They said they were from the intelligence services and that they needed to speak to Him in connection with an investigation, the brother said. They bundled him into their vehicle and told his wife and family not to interfere.
The reporter's body was found several hours later in a deserted area on the outskirts of the city." Reuters reported on Monday.
After reading this, a colleague of mine said, "I have to tell my family to be careful and to tell anyone asks about me that I am not here."
Are we going to be killed like this? Does it become so easy for armed men to kidnap reporters and then kill them? Everyday I go out to work, I pray to God to keep me safe, not for me, but for the sake of my family whom I don't want them to be hurt.
Once, at 10 p.m., someone knocked the door.
"I am going to open the door," my mother said.
"No, no. I will open," I said hurrying up to open it. I did that to prevent any danger that may happen to my parents. If someone wants to kill me, I should be the one killed not my family.
Working for a western media is something very dangerous in Iraq now. Terrorists and Saddam's remnants consider any one working for these westerners is a "collaborator" or "spy", forgetting about the freedom of word and the great humanitarian message the journalist conveys.
A curious neighbor to us asked me once where I work. I told him that I work in an internet café. He insisted that I don't show up in my neighborhood the whole day and that does not mean I work only in an internet café. I tried to convince him that internet is widely used in Baghdad now and that I spend the whole day at the café because many people use it. Finally he was convinced.
For me, I haven't told anyone in my neighborhood that I work as a reporter because I live in a relatively Sunni hot area, Adhamiya where three young men in my age were assassinated just because they work with westerners.
Sometimes, although returning back home exhausted, I go out to see my friends and to make others see me and not to think that I work with westerners. "I saw you on TV few days ago," my barber told me once. "You were sitting in a press conference and the camera was focused on you," he said. I was completely shocked and told him that it wasn't me and that was someone looked like me. He did not believe me, of course, because it was definitely me.
Nowadays, the messengers of free and honest word are being slaughtered and shot in a country that is lost in all prospects. Their weapons, pens and notebooks, are being taken from them by force and their activities are being stopped also by force. The reason is that Iraq, which is supposed to proceed, is going back to the dark ages, backwardness. No law that protects the journalist in Iraq are available. The result is killings and assassinations to the journalists whom, of course, cannot carry a weapon to protect himself as this is against the ethics of journalism.
What is left is God's mercy and the journalists' will to liberate their country from the backward ideologies that is controlling the minds of the people.
