Reporters Without Borders Annual Report 2004 - Iraq

The 2003 US military invasion, backed by 30 other countries, was the most reported-on war in media history and one of the most deadly for journalists. The overthrow of President Saddam Hussein's dictatorship ended more than 30 years of official propaganda and opened a new era of freedom, full of hope and uncertainty, for Iraqi journalists.

After months of diplomatic posturing between Washington and Baghdad about the supposed existence of "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD), the United States took military action in March 2003 to force President Saddam Hussein from power. Aerial bombing on 19 March signalled the start of the war and the regime fell three weeks later. The 13-year international embargo against Iraq was lifted at the end of May and the United Nations sent a senior official, Sergio Vieira de Mello, as its special representative in Iraq. He was killed in a bomb attack on the UN's Baghdad headquarters in August.

A transitional Governing Council of 25 Iraqis appointed by the US was set up in July, but soon faced the huge problem of restoring law and order and introducing democracy. At the end of the year, the US Administrator, Paul Bremer, asked the Council to draw up a national constitution and a timetable for nationwide elections in 2004 to speed up a handover of power to Iraqis. Former President Hussein was captured by US and Kurdish troops on 13 December not far from his northern stronghold of Tikrit after an eight-month hunt.

The Iraq invasion triggered an unprecedented human and technological operation by the world's media. More than 600 journalists, most of them Americans, were invited by the Pentagon to report on the war by being "embedded" in the military units, living and moving about with troops during the fighting. The arrangement, halfway between the great freedom the media had in the Vietnam war and the restrictions of "pooled" reporting during the 1991 Gulf War, produced immediate and expanded coverage of the war. "Embedded" journalists had to obey a list of 50 security rules or face expulsion from a unit, but they were still able to witness casualties and interview the wounded.

The Iraqi regime tried until the very end to tightly control the activity of the hundreds of non-embedded journalists in the country. The pan-Arab satellite TV station Al-Jazeera was strongly denounced by the US and Britain for broadcasting pictures from the Iraqi state-run TV of US prisoners of war. The war was proportionately more deadly for the media than for the troops – 12 killed and two missing, all while doing their job. A total of 18 media workers died during the war. US authorities failed to properly investigate the five of these deaths they were responsible for, calling them unfortunate incidents.

As guerrilla attacks increased in Iraq during the summer, US soldiers became more aggressive with the media, especially Arab journalists, who were accused by the US of sympathising or even collaborating with the attackers. US obstruction of journalists reached the point where on 12 November, the US media expressed their joint concern about it to the Pentagon. A press spokesman for the US-British forces, US Maj. William Thurmond, said "guidance" had been given to military units "explicitly stating that reporters are not to be interfered with" but he admitted that "individual soldiers" had not followed these instructions.

Decades of zero press freedom ended for Iraqi journalists when the information ministry building in Baghdad was bombed on 9 April. It was looted after the subsequent fall of the regime and the ministry was abolished, throwing nearly 5,000 officials, journalists and intelligence agents out of work. The US-British-led "Coalition" forces set up a new media group, the Iraqi Media Network (IMN), including the daily paper Al-Sabah and the radio and TV station Al-Iraqiya, which denied they were the mouthpiece of the occupiers but were not generally believed by Iraqis to be independent.

The new Iraqi press sprang up very quickly and about 100 often very vigorous and politicised newspapers and magazines appeared, replacing the four newspapers that Hussein's eldest son Uday once tightly controlled. Iraqis also rushed to buy satellite receiver dishes, which were banned under the old regime, and swarmed to Internet cafés, showing a thirst for uncensored news which they do not fully have because of the many threats still facing the country's media.

12 journalists killed

Paul Moran, 39, an Australian cameraman for ABC TV (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), became the first victim of the war on 22 March 2003, soon after it began. He was killed when a taxi car-bomb exploded at a military checkpoint outside the Kurdistan village of Khormal, near the Iranian border. Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer said the attack was probably revenge by the Al-Qaeda linked terrorist group Ansar al-Islam for the US aerial bombings. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan also blamed the group.

Also on 22 March, a crew from the British TV station ITN (ITV News), travelling in two vehicles marked "TV," was caught in shooting between US and Iraqi forces near the southern city of Basra. Veteran war reporter Terry Lloyd, 50, was killed and a Belgian cameraman, Daniel Demoustier, wounded. Two other members of the team, French cameraman Frédéric Nérac and Lebanese interpreter Hussein Osman, vanished without trace. The journalists, who were not "embedded" in military units, had crossed from Kuwait into Iraq when fighting began. ITN independently investigated Lloyd's death and said he was very probably killed by US gunfire.

Kaveh Golestan, 52, a cameraman for the British BBC TV, was killed on 2 April by a landmine explosion in Kifri, northern Iraq. The Iranian-born journalist won a Pulitzer prize for his coverage of the 1979 Iranian revolution and the gassing of the Iraqi Kurdish population of Halabja in 1988. Richard Sambrook, head of news at the BBC, said he was an exceptional journalist who had helped boost freedom of expression in Iran and elsewhere. In 1991, he made a film on censorship in Iran for an Italian TV station which led the Iranian regime to ban him many times from working in Iran.

Michael Kelly, 46, a columnist with the daily Washington Post who was embedded with the US 3rd Infantry Division (3ID), was killed on 4 April when the Humvee vehicle he was travelling in plunged into a canal to avoid Iraqi gunfire on the approach to Baghdad airport. A US soldier also died. Kelly was the first to die among about the 600 or so reporters embedded with US and British troops.

Reporters Julio Anguita Parrado, 32, of the Spanish daily El Mundo, and Christian Liebig, 35, of the German magazine Focus, were killed on 7 April when an Iraqi rocket was fired at a US army camp south of Baghdad. Both were embedded in the 3ID and had apparently decided not to go with troops into the centre of the city, thinking it too dangerous.

US forces fired a missile at the Baghdad offices of the pan-Arab TV stations Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV on 8 April, killing Al-Jazeera reporter Tarek Ayoub (a 35-year-old Jordanian Palestinian), wounding a colleague and badly damaging the Al-Jazeera office, in a city-centre residential area between the Mansur Hotel and the planning ministry. An Al-Jazeera presenter accused the US of deliberately targeting the station's office, noting that its office in Kabul had been similarly bombed by US forces in 2001.

A spokesperson for the US military Central Command (Centcom) in Qatar denied the attack was deliberate and said, as ever, that only military targets were bombed. The station had written to the Pentagon, Centcom and the US embassy in Qatar on 24 February giving the exact position of its offices in Baghdad so as to protect its 20 staff there.

A formal complaint for "war crimes" was filed in Belgium on 13 May against the US military commander in Iraq, Gen. Tommy Franks, by Ayoub's widow, Dima Tahboub, and others. Belgium's courts recognised "universal jurisdiction."

A few hours later on 8 April, Ukrainian cameraman Taras Protsyuk, 35, of Reuters, and José Couso, 37, of the privately-owned Spanish TV station Telecinco, were killed when a US tank half a kilometre away fired a shell at the Palestine Hotel, where most of the foreign media were staying. Protsyuk, filming from the balcony of his room on the 15th floor, was killed at once and Couso died in hospital a few hours later. Three other Reuters journalists were wounded.

A Centcom spokesperson said ground commanders had responded to "enemy" gunfire apparently coming from the hotel. But journalists in the hotel denied there were any Iraqi forces in or near the hotel at the time. Reuters editor-in-chief Geert Linnebank said the incident raised questions about decisions made by US forces, who knew the hotel was the base for nearly all the foreign journalists in the city.

Sgt. Shawn Gibson, commander of the tank that fired from the Al-Jumhuriya bridge at the hotel, said he did not know his target was a hotel full of journalists. He said he saw a man on a balcony with binoculars, speaking and pointing, and had called his superiors to tell them before being ordered to fire.

The Spanish and Ukrainian governments immediately demanded explanations from Washington about the shooting, which aroused worldwide protest. US officials promised to investigate. US secretary of state Colin Powell wrote to his Spanish counterpart, Ana Palacio, on 24 April saying "hostile fire" had seemed to come from a place later identified as the Palestine Hotel, justifying the response to protect US forces in danger.

Centcom announced the results of its enquiry on 12 August, though the full report was not released to the media, even to Reuters, which was directly concerned. It said the tank had fired a 120 mm. shell in legitimate defence because US forces had "positive intelligence they were under direct observation from an enemy hunter/killer team" at the hotel.

Protsyuk joined Reuters in 1993, worked in Kiev and Warsaw and distinguished himself as a journalist and cameraman in wars in Bosnia, Macedonia, Chechnya, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kosovo. Couso's death led to demonstrations by journalists in Spain against prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, who led his country into the war in the face of strong public opposition.

Ahmad Karim, bureau chief in Mosul for Kurdistan Satellite TV, was killed on 2 July during fighting in the northern city and his assistant, Hoshyar Ahmad, was wounded.

Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana, 43, was shot dead by a US soldier on 17 August as he was filming the outside of the Baghdad suburban prison of Abu Ghraib the day after Iraqi guerrillas had attacked it. Captain Frank Thorp in Washington said the soldier had mistaken his camera for a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher.

Reuters sound-man Nael al-Shyoukhi, who saw what happened, said journalists had been given permission to film the prison by US forces. They had then asked to take pictures of the soldiers guarding it. Reuters chief executive Tom Glocer called for the "fullest and most comprehensive" top-level US government enquiry into the death of one of the agency's most experienced cameramen.

Dana, a Palestinian, had filmed events in the Israeli-occupied West Bank town of Hebron for the past decade, won a prize for his work in 2001 and Israeli soldiers had several times beaten and injured him.

A US military spokesman in Baghdad said on 22 September that an official enquiry had concluded that Dana had been fired at according to the rules of engagement and said it was a regrettable incident. Neither Reuters nor Dana's family were informed of the enquiry's conclusions before they were announced.

Ahmed Shawkat, editor of the weekly Bila Ittijah (Without Direction), was shot dead in Mosul on 28 October when two men reportedly followed him when he went to the roof of his office to make a phone call.

His daughter Roaa, who also worked for the paper, said he had "called for democracy but people don't understand the meaning of democracy and maybe that's why the Islamists attacked him." He had received threatening letters telling him to close down the paper. She said he was a man of integrity. "He used to write against the resistance, against the Americans, against the local government and the old regime," she said. "His outspokenness didn't please everyone."

Two media assistants killed

Kamaran Abdurazak Muhamed, a Kurdish interpreter for the British BBC radio, was killed on 6 April 2003 when US planes mistakenly bombed a US-Kurdish military convoy about 50 km from Mosul. The BBC said at least 12 people were killed and many more wounded. Muhamed, 25, had worked for the BBC since March and was with veteran BBC reporter John Simpson, who was slightly injured and said a low-flying F-15E Eagle bomber had attacked the convoy.

Jeremy Little, 27, a free-lance sound-man for the US TV network NBC News, died on 7 July after being wounded in Fallujah on 29 June in a grenade attack on a US 3rd Infantry Division patrol he was travelling with.

Two journalists missing

French cameraman Frédéric Nérac, 43, and Lebanese interpreter Hussein Osman, 28, vanished without trace on 22 March 2003 when their British ITN (ITV News) crew were caught in shooting between US and Iraqi forces near Basra. US secretary of state Colin Powell, questioned at a Brussels press conference on 3 April by Nérac's wife Fabienne, promised to investigate. The press cards of the two journalists were found on 7 May at the headquarters of the old regime's Baath Party in Al-Zubair, 20 kms south of Basra.

British authorities declined at first to investigate the disappearances, saying ITN had to prove a war crime had been committed before an enquiry could be opened, but agreed in principle at the end of May to do so. On the spot investigation by British military police began in early June. Despite Powell's promises, the US army showed great reluctance to tell investigators anything about the incident.

At least 17 journalists wounded

Belgian cameraman Daniel Demoustier, working for the British ITN (ITV News), was wounded on 22 March when the two vehicles, marked "TV," that his crew were travelling in were caught in shooting between US and Iraqi forces near Basra. After hiding in a ditch, he was given a lift back to Kuwait by a passing British journalist. Also in the crew were veteran reporter Terry Lloyd, who was killed, and cameraman Frédéric Nérac and Hussein Osman, who both vanished.

Eric Campbell, correspondent for the Australian ABC TV (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), was wounded by shrapnel in a car-bomb attack on 22 March that killed Australian cameraman Paul Moran at a military checkpoint outside the Kurdistan village of Khormal, near the Iranian border.

Stuart Hughes, a British BBC news producer, had to have his foot amputated after a landmine exploded in northern Iraq on 4 April, killing BBC cameraman Kaveh Golestan.

Veteran BBC reporter John Simpson, 58, was slightly wounded on 6 April when a US plane mistakenly bombed a US-Kurdish military convoy about 50 km from Mosul. At least 12 people were killed, including his Kurdish interpreter Kamaran Abdurazak Muhamed.

Zouhair Nazen Abbas, of the pan-Arab TV station Al-Jazeera, was wounded in the neck by shrapnel during US bombing on 8 April of the station's Baghdad office, in which reporter Tarek Ayoub was killed.

A few hours later, three Reuters journalists were wounded by a shell fired by a US tank at Baghdad's Palestine Hotel, killing cameramen Taras Protsyuk and Jose Couso. They were Gulf bureau chief Samia Nakhoul and Iraqi photographer Faleh Kheiber, who had facial and hand injuries, and TV technician Paul Pasquale, who is British, who had leg injuries. All were hospitalised.

Kemal Batur (reporter) and Mesut Gengec (cameraman), of the Turkish TV station Skyturk, were wounded on 12 April in crossfire in Mosul while driving to the city's hospital. A second vehicle carrying other Turkish journalists stopped at once to tell people they were journalists. Some said the journalists were mistaken for some of the many looters in the city at the time, while others said they were attacked by Saddam Hussein followers.

Romanian journalist Andrei Nourescu was wounded on 15 April when his jeep ran into an ambush in southern Iraq, according to his own report on the incident on the privately-owned TV station Antena 1. With head bandaged and arm in a sling, he said he, two Italian journalists and a Russian, ran into gunfire after which there was an explosion under the jeep. Nourescu also worked for the sports newspaper Gazeta Sporturilor and the daily Jurnalul group and was on his way to Nasiriya to report on sport in Iraq.

Maria Joao Ruela, correspondent for the privately-owned Portuguese TV station SIC, was shot in the leg on 14 November when armed men attacked the convoy she was in soon after it crossed into Iraq from Kuwait without military escort. Portuguese radio journalist Carlos Raleiras was kidnapped.

Michael Weisskopf, senior political correspondent of the US weekly Time, and veteran war photographer James Nachtwey, on assignment for the magazine, were wounded in Baghdad on 11 December when a grenade was thrown into the Humvee vehicle of a US military patrol they were travelling with. Weisskopf had serious hand injuries and Nachtwey, a founder of the photo agency Seven, was hit by shrapnel.

Chris Kraul, Ann Simmons and Tracy Wilkinson, all of the Los Angeles Times, were slightly injured on 31 December when a car-bomb exploded outside a Baghdad restaurant where they and other foreigners, including journalists, were celebrating New Year's Eve.

A journalist kidnapped

Reporter Carlos Raleiras, of the privately-owned Portuguese TV station TSF, was kidnapped on 14 November 2003 by a group of armed men while in a convoy of journalists on their way from Kuwait to Basra without military escort. His kidnappers demanded $50,000 dollars. He was freed the next day but Portuguese prime minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso refused to talk about how this happened. His government noted that it had warned Portuguese journalists it could not ensure their safety in Iraq. Raleiras said he was freed after police arrested the leader of the group that seized him and said he had not been ill-treated.

Six journalists imprisoned

Four journalists were imprisoned and interrogated from 25 March to 1 April 2003 by the regime of President Saddam Hussein in Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad. Two of them – British reporter Matthew McAllester, 33, and Moises Saman, 29, a Spanish photographer – both working for the US daily Newsday, were accused of being CIA agents. They were arrested with freelance photographers Johan Spanner (Danish, 28) and Molly Bingham (American, 34).

Newsday asked Ed Abington, a Washington-based adviser for the Palestinian Authority and a former US consul in Jerusalem, to help free them. McAllester and Saman later described in the paper their nightmarish week in the prison, though none of the four were mistreated. Spanner, who said he feared he would not get out alive, entered Iraq on a tourist visa with "human shield" anti-war demonstrators after Iraqi officials had several times refused him a journalist's visa.

Said Abutaleb and Soheil Karimi, of the Iranian national TV station IRIB (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting), were arrested by US troops in southern Iraq on 1 July while making what they said was a documentary film. US forces, who collected their belongings from their hotel in Kerbala on 7 July, said they were suspected of spying and endangering security. The International Red Cross asked the US military command on 14 July if it could see them. Iranian President Mohammad Khatami demanded their release on 24 July and they were freed on 3 November. A British foreign office spokesman said the US army had decided not to charge them with anything.

At least 40 journalists arrested

Ten journalists were arrested by Iraqi authorities in late March 2003 and confined to Baghdad's Palestine Hotel for nearly two weeks for alleged visa irregularities. Seven were Italian journalists arrested in Basra on 28 March after entering Iraq from Kuwait the previous day. They were first pursued by British and US military police before being arrested by the Iraqis. The Italian daily Corriere della Sera said their computers, mobile phones, notebooks and passports were confiscated. They were not allowed to work and were held to await deportation.

The seven Italians were: Franco Battistini (Corriere della Sera), Ezio Pasero (the daily Il Messaggero), Luciano Gulli (the daily Il Giornale), Leonardo Maisano (the Milan daily Sole 24 Ore), Toni Fontana (the Rome daily Unita), Lorenzo Bianchi (the Bologna daily Il Resto del Carlino) and Vittorio dell'Uva (of the Naples daily Il Mattino). The other three – Frenchmen Denis Brunetti (reporter), Frederic Petit (sound-man) and Thierry Froissart (cameraman), all of the French TV station TF1, were arrested on 23 March in southern Iraq, also after crossing the Kuwait-Iraq border. All 10 were allowed to resume working on 9 April and their equipment and passports returned.

Akil Abdel Reda, cameraman for the pan-Arab TV station Al-Jazeera, was reported missing for 24 hours after he and his two drivers came under fire from British tanks near Basra on 28 March. In fact he had been arrested and interrogated by US troops, the station said, and freed after 12 hours.

Peter Wilson (reporter) and John Feder (photographer), of the daily The Australian, were arrested by Iraqi police in the southern port of Um Qasr on 1 April for supposedly breaking the rules about media activities. They were taken to Baghdad and held at the Palestine Hotel, where most of the foreign media was based, to await deportation. They had been travelling in their own jeep and US and British police were already looking for them to deport them. Wilson said independent journalists were not wanted, only "embedded" ones.

Marcin Firlej, of the privately-owned Polish TV station TVN24, and Jacek Kaczmarek, of the state-owned Polish radio, were arrested by armed Iraqis on 7 April at a military checkpoint near Hilla, north of Najaf. They were blindfolded and taken away for interrogation before being freed the next morning by a civilian who gave them back the keys of their vehicles when aerial bombing started. The journalist were "embedded" with US forces but had left the unit they were with.

US soldiers arrested a photographer of the French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) taking pictures of the scene of an anti-US bombing attack in a Baghdad suburb on 18 June. His press card and camera were confiscated for an hour, after which he was allowed to leave.

Reporter Abdel Azim Mohamed, of the pan-Arab TV station Al-Jazeera, along with another journalist and a cameraman, were arrested twice on 17 July by Iraqi police in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, who accused them of "inciting violence" but then apologised and said they were simply following orders from superiors. They were released the next day. Al-Jazeera had earlier that month broadcast the first audio message attributed to ex-President Saddam Hussein since the capture of Baghdad on 9 April.

US troops arrested five people during a search on 19 July of the offices of the newspaper of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and seized computers, office equipment and money. Editor Ghaleb al-Zangil was told the search was because arms and explosives were suspected of being hidden there. Those arrested were freed on 22 July but the confiscated material was not returned.

Al-Jazeera journalist Nawaf al-Shahwani and his driver was arrested on 26 July by US troops in Mosul. They were freed two days later but film shot by Shahwani was not returned.

Also on 26 July, Turkish journalists Yalcin Dogan (of the daily Hürriyet) and Özdemir Ince, Faruk Balikçi and Ferit Aslan (all of the DHA news agency) were arrested in the centre of Baghdad by US troops in a tank as they were taking photos of it. After intervention by two Turkish diplomats, they were freed an hour and a half later and their ID papers and digital cameras returned to them, though with the photos deleted.

Kazutaka Sato, of the Japanese Nippon TV Network, was knocked to the ground and kicked by American soldiers who detained him for an hour for filming their attack on a house in Baghdad on 28 July. He said he was filming from behind a security barrier when the soldiers tried to stop him without explanation. He was freed when other journalists came to find out what had happened.

Al-Jazeera reporter Atwar Bahjat and her cameraman, Yasser Bahgat, were arrested by US troops on 10 September as they were covering a bomb attack in the Al-Ghazzaliya district of Baghdad. They were accused of having prior knowledge of the attack and were interrogated at a US detention centre at Baghdad airport before being freed the next day, when Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of the Coalition forces in Iraq, said their arrest, though justified, would be investigated.

US troops arrested Associated Press (AP) photographer Karim Kadim and his driver, Mohammed Abbas, near Abu Ghraib, western Baghdad, on 23 September. They were looking for explosives in the area and accused the journalists of planting them. They were handcuffed, threatened with guns and forced to stay three hours in the sun facing a tank.

Kadim said they had identified themselves as media and had not taken photos after being asked not to. They were told to leave but a soldier called them back. He said the soldiers were very jumpy, shouting all the time, and he thought they might shoot. The pair were taken to a US base where an officer, Maj. Eric Wick, apologised. He told the AP bureau in Baghdad there had been a misunderstanding by the soldiers.

Al-Jazeera cameraman Salah Husein Nussaif was arrested by Iraqi police on 3 October in Shahraban, 100 km northeast of Baghdad, while filming a demonstration. He was taken to a police station, put in a cell until the next day and handed over to US forces, only to be returned to the Iraqis, who were told not to release him. He was freed three days later without being told why he was arrested.

French journalists Alain Dubat and Jerôme Bony, of the French TV station France 2, were stopped by US troops from filming at Baghdad University on 7 October, their film confiscated and they were told to leave.

Agence France-Presse (AFP) photographer Patrick Baz and Reuters cameraman Hamza al-Badri were arrested by Iraqi police in Fallujah (50 km west of Baghdad) on 19 October while covering the aftermath of an attack on a US military convoy. They had gone to a police station after being told a press conference would be held there, but on arrival were arrested. The Iraqis told them they were acting on the orders of US forces who were looking for the person who had filmed the attack. A few hours later they were sent to the local US army headquarters and then released.

Al-Jazeera cameraman Samir Hamzah was arrested by US troops on 28 October while filming an explosion in front of a police station in western Baghdad.They accused him of having prior knowledge of that and other attacks but freed him a few hours later.

AFP reporter Ali Youssef was arrested and held for two hours by US troops in Baquba (60 km northeast of Baghdad) on 2 November. He had covered the area, the site of many attacks on US troops, for several months. A US officer phoned the AFP bureau in Baghdad to check he was a staffer, saying he had been found taking photos of military installations.

Al-Jazeera cameraman Salah Hasan was arrested by US troops on 3 November as he and other foreign journalists were on their way to Baquba where there had been explosions. Al-Jazeera spokesman Jihad Ballut said that when the group were asked for their IDs, Hasan was singled out for arrest, held until the next day and his camera and film confiscated. Ballut said he was very concerned that Al-Jazeera staffers were being increasingly targeted.

At least 15 journalists physically attacked

Al-Jazeera reporter Waddah Khanfar and his cameraman were arrested and beaten by supporters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in Chamchamal on 24 March 2003. Khanfar had just filed a live report from the town, on the border between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq. The two men were freed soon afterwards.

Luis Castro (reporter) and Victor Silva (cameraman), both of the state-owned Portuguese TV station RTP, reporter Dan Scemama, of the Israeli state-owned TV station, and Boaz Bizmuth, of the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, were arrested by US military police near Najaf on 25 March, kept in a jeep for a day and a half and forbidden to call anyone by phone. They were freed in Kuwait on 28 March after a senior officer realised there had been a mistake.

The American soldiers badly beat one of the journalists who they accused of being "spies." The two Israelis had no permission to be in the area. Scemama said later on Israeli TV that he had spent "the worst two days" of his life and said the Americans had accused them of being "terrorists" despite their explanations and had kept their rifles aimed at them for many hours.

A group of Portuguese journalists were attacked and robbed by a crowd in the centre of Baghdad on 10 April. One of them, Carlos Fino, of the state-owned TV station RTP, said they were almost lynched and a gunmen had shot out the tyres of their vehicles. The journalists were then dragged out, threatened, beaten with rifle butts and their equipment, money and belongings stolen. Iraqis who appeared to be officials then arrived and allowed them to leave.

Three Malaysian journalists – reporter Terence Fernandez (of the daily The Sun), photographer Anuar Hashim (the daily New Straits Times) and cameraman Omar Salleh (the state-owned TV station) were ambushed and kidnapped for several hours on 12 April, apparently by Iraqi militiamen, while on their way from the Sheraton Hotel in Baghdad to the city's main hospital. Their Iraqi interpreter was killed and two doctors wounded.

Yazid Naim, of the Malaysian state broadcasting corporation, said the journalists had been well treated and had been attacked by mistake because their captors did not realise they were Malaysian. The victims were part of a group of 28 journalists sent to Iraq to report "objectively" on the war on the orders of the Malaysian government, which had accused Western media of biased coverage.

Sami Tolga Anadali and Kenan Gurduz, of the Turkish official news agency Anatolia, were attacked and robbed by six armed looters as they were driving between Kirkuk and Baghdad on 6 July. There were ordered to get out and lie on the ground and their sat-phones, laptop computer, money and passports were stolen.

Hassan Fattah, editor of Iraq Today, one of the country's main English-language newspapers, accused US soldiers of handcuffing him, knocking him to the ground and banning him from the conference centre in Baghdad, where the president of the Governing Council, Ibrahim al-Jafaari, was to give a press conference on 11 August. An American soldier said he had not arrived the required hour before the conference began to allow time for security checks. However other journalists who arrived after him were allowed to go in. There was an argument and he was barred from entering. He was later given an official permit to go in.

Sami Awad, a freelance Lebanese cameraman working for a German TV station, said on 7 November he had been knocked to the ground and threatened with rifles by US soldiers after he got permission to go through a roadblock in Baghdad.

Armed men briefly detained three Portuguese journalists, including Jose Manuel Resendo, of the state-owned radio station Radiodifusao Portuguesa, and photographer Alfredo Cunha, of the daily Jornal de Noticias, as they drove in two vehicles near Basra on 13 November. One of the vehicles, along with equipment, was stolen.

Journalists and media offices targeted

The state-run Iraqi TV station, its satellite channel and the Youth TV station (controlled by President Saddam Hussein's son Uday) went off the air after US warplanes bombed their headquarters during the night of 25-26 March 2003. The national TV station resumed broadcasting 45 minutes later, while the satellite and Youth stations were silent for several hours.

US officials said the building had been attacked to destroy the regime's links with the people and the army and mentioned the film of American prisoners and pictures of bloodied bodies of supposed US soldiers the TV had shown. The officials' remarks showed that the TV building had been deliberately targeted, although it could not be considered a military target under international law. State-run TV broadcasts were interrupted for half an hour after further bombing of Baghdad during the night of 2-3 April.

Freimut Duve, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)'s press freedom representative, condemned the bombings on 1 April, saying that destroying the media installations of a dictatorship was still an attack on the media. He said there might be an argument in favour of silencing its propaganda but there were still technicians and cameramen being killed who could be not be called propagandists or soldiers. By the same argument, newspaper distribution centres in the city could also be bombed, he said.

The pan-Arab TV station Al-Jazeera accused US military forces in April of firing on one of its marked vehicles on a highway outside Baghdad, though it did not say when, or what the result of the gunfire was. It said on 7 April that US-British forces had fired four missiles at the Sheraton Hotel in Basra, where its journalists were staying. It pointed out that it had given the Pentagon full details of where its journalists were during the war and had asked for this information to be passed on to troops in the field. Al-Jazeera was at the time the only foreign media present in Basra.

The Baghdad offices of Abu Dhabi TV, in a heavy combat zone between the Mansur Hotel and the planning ministry, were surrounded by US tanks and Iraqi fighters on 8 April and about 20 journalists and technicians were trapped inside. The next day, they phoned for help and asked for the shooting to stop so they go out of the building.

A crew from the US TV network CNN came under fire on 13 April in the northern city of Tikrit, which had not yet been attacked by US forces and was still in the hands of the President Hussein's supporters. The journalists, including reporter Brent Sadler, were travelling in several vehicles escorted by an armed Kurdish guard from a private security company who returned the gunfire, after which the vehicles turned back. CNN's Iraqi driver was slightly wounded and taken to hospital.

US troops opened fire on a vehicle of the Associated Press (AP) news agency in Khaldiya, 80 km from Baghdad, on 18 September when one of its reporters, Karim Kadim, tried to film a US military convoy that had just been attacked. As he prepared his camera to take pictures of a burning vehicle, soldiers fired automatic weapons from a tank. The AP vehicle was hit by about 20 bullets, smashing the windscreen and puncturing the tyres. Kadim, who said the words "AP" were cleared marked on the vehicle, fled under fire to take shelter by a building. US troops had suffered heavy losses in several attacks on another convoy in the town.

A bomb went off on 25 September near Baghdad's Al-Aike Hotel where a crew from the US TV network NBC was based, killing a hotel worker and injuring two people, including NBC sound-man David Moodie, who was injured on his hand. NBC moved out of the hotel but it was not clear if the journalists were deliberately targeted. There was no external sign they were staying at the hotel, said NBC correspondent Jim Avila, and the network had received no threats, but local residents said it was well known that Americans and journalists were staying there.

A vehicle belonging to journalists from the official Turkish news agency Anatolia was destroyed by a bomb placed under it on 18 November in Erbil, in Kurdistan. Nobody was injured and no motive was apparent.

The Palestine and Sheraton hotels in Baghdad, where many foreign journalists were staying, came under rocket attack on 21 November, injuring at least two people. Three were fired at the Palestine, where mostly broadcast media were staying, and one at the nearby Sheraton.

Harassment and obstruction

A dozen US journalists were evacuated from the main hotel in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya on 30 January 2003 by fighters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan after the Al-Qaeda linked terrorist group Ansar al-Islam had threatened to bomb it.

Mohammed Dahlan, of the Indonesian daily Surya (in Surabaya), was briefly detained by Iraqi guards in Baghdad on 3 February and deported to Jordan, where the Indonesian embassy said he had entered Iraq without a visa. The paper said he had been accused of attempted spying and could have faced execution.

US officials announced on 14 February they would deport the New York correspondent of the official Iraqi news agency INA. The Iraqis responded the same day by expelling the Baghdad correspondent of the US TV network Fox News, Greg Palkot, who had arrived in the country only two weeks before. He was not replaced.

The US TV network CNN said in March that Iraqi intelligence agents had planned to attack its journalists working in Iraqi Kurdistan, where police had discovered the plot and arrested two men they said were intelligence agents. Chief news executive Eason Jordan said CNN had obtained a videotape of the men confessing they had been sent from Baghdad to bomb a hotel in Erbil where CNN staff were staying.

Iraqi authorities deported Canadian reporter Scott Taylor, of the Toronto Sun and editor of the military magazine Esprit de corps, on 9 March, accusing him of being an agent of the Israeli secret police, Mossad.

Reporter Teresa Bó, of the Spanish daily La Razón, was deported on 12 March for allegedly speaking of the Iraqi government in an insulting way.

David Filipov, of the daily Boston Globe, was deported on 13 March for using a sat-phone to file a story from his Baghdad hotel room. Journalists had been told to keep and use them only at the government media centre.

Nizamettin Kaplan and Ibrahim Atesoglu, both of the Turkish all-news station NTV, and Fuat Kozluklu, of the Turkish station TV8, were forced by Kurdish soldiers to leave the northern Iraq town of Zaho on 19 March.

Most journalists moved out of the information ministry building on 19 March as it was considered a military target and set up operations in their hotels. When US planes began bombing the city the next day, Iraqi officials stepped up surveillance and harassment of foreign journalists and confiscated the sat-phones of several as they left the city. The media were no longer able to move about freely. Some were taken around the city in buses but forbidden to talk to ordinary Iraqis or go near targets that had been bombed. Associated Press and CNN reporters were escorted to a hospital and shown the first civilian bombing victims.

The Iraqi authorities expelled the CNN team of reporters Nic Robertson and Rym Barhimi, producer Ingrid Formanek and cameraman Brian Puchaty from Baghdad on 21 March. They were the last US TV network in Baghdad, after the departure for security reasons of the correspondent of CBS. Iraqi officials accused the CNN team of biased coverage and of being "worse than the US government." It was the third time CNN had been deported from Iraq since it opened a Baghdad bureau in 1990.

After the expulsion, CNN began hiring freelance journalists in Baghdad, but one of them, Robert Valdec, of the Croatian daily Jutarnji list and the TV station CCN (Croatian Commercial Networks), was deported the next day.

Iranian reporter Ali Montazeri and cameraman Abdolreza Abbasi, both working for TV stations in Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, were arrested by Iraqi soldiers on 24 March after illegally crossing into Iraq from Iran in a boat across the Shatt al-Arab river to cover fighting on the Al-Fao peninsula. They were handed over to the Iranian authorities two days later.

Phil Smucker, an "embedded" US reporter working for the US daily Christian Science Monitor and the British Daily Telegraph, was sent back to Kuwait from the front lines by US Marines on 27 March and his equipment confiscated for giving too many details about the position of US units.

Ian McPhedran, of the Australian Daily Telegraph, was ordered on 31 March to leave Iraq after he went without an Iraqi escort from his Baghdad hotel to the information ministry, which had been bombed. Deported with him, without explanation, was Bonny Schoonakker, of the South African paper the Sunday Times.

Geraldo Rivera, senior reporter for the US TV network Fox News, was deported on 31 March by the US army who accused him of revealing the position of the military unit he was "embedded" with.

The Iraqi information ministry announced on 1 April, as US troops were advancing on Baghdad, that Al-Jazeera reporter Diyar al-Omari, was banned from working and ordered another Al-Jazeera reporter, Tayssir Alluni, to leave the country at once. The station said it deplored the unjustified moves and for several more days continued to broadcast live from Baghdad, Basra and Mosul. It was the sole foreign TV station present in Basra, then encircled by US and British troops. It said on 4 April that the Iraqis had cancelled the ban and expulsion without explanation.

US troops searched the rooms of journalists at Baghdad's Palestine Hotel without prior notice over several days from 14 April. CNN producer Linda Roth said she found several armed US Marines searching her room who told her to stay outside "for security reasons" until they had finished the search.

US soldiers kept foreign media away from the Palestine Hotel, home of most of the foreign press and also a US military operations centre, when they tried to cover a demonstration there on 15 April by 300 Iraqis demanding, for the third straight day, the restoration of electricity and other utilities and better security in the city. A Marines officer said the Iraqis were only protesting for the media.

For the first time since the start of their occupation, US authorities closed an Iraqi newspaper, the daily Al-Mustaqilla (The Independent), on 22 July for alleged incitement to murder in a 13 July article headed: "Death to spies and collaborators" (with the Americans) and saying that killing them was a "religious duty." A decree the previous month by the US Administrator, Paul Bremer, had banned incitement to violence against Coalition forces and also incitement to racial and religious hatred.

US authorities and Iraqi police said the paper was a serious threat to the public and Iraqi police shut down its offices, arrested one of its staff and confiscated his equipment. The paper reopened a month later.

The US military announced on 14 August that reporters, photographers and TV crews could no longer accompany troops in certain military operations. By the time the Associated Press had reported this, the measure was reversed without explanation.

Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera, among the most popular TV stations in Iraq and the region, were banned by the transitional Iraqi Governing Council on 23 September from covering its activities and official events for two weeks for allegedly encouraging "political violence," the murder of Council members and US and British troops and broadcasting tapes of "terrorists." The move came after the attempted assassination on 20 September of Council member Akila al-Hashimi.

The Council's first president, Ibrahim Al-Jaafari, had said on 29 August that it would not close the bureaux of any Arab TV stations. Two days earlier, Al-Arabiya had broadcast a tape showing two armed and hooded men threatening to kill Council members and those who worked with them. Since the fall of the old regime, Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera had broadcast audio tapes supposedly of former President Hussein calling for resistance to the US-British forces. US officials were very critical of the Arab stations, accusing them of giving too much coverage to anti-US attacks in the country.

US forces closed the newspaper of the Iraqi Turkmen Front in Tallafar, north of Mosul, at the end of October, saying it had incited violence against Americans and caused unrest in the town through an article headed "Mosul belongs to the Turks."

The Governing Council ordered the closure of the offices of Al-Arabiya on 24 November and banned it from Iraq until it promised to stop "encouraging terrorism." Council president Jalal Talabani accused it of inciting violence and murder by broadcasting a tape supposedly of ex-President Hussein's voice calling for resistance to the US forces and those working with them.

The US government said the next day it supported the move and that Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya were fiercely biased against US-British forces. Al-Arabiya, based in Dubai, said it would suspend its Iraq operation until a legal solution had been reached with the Council. It unofficially resumed its activities after ex-President Hussein was captured on 13 December.