Thursday April 3 2003 we recieved our first personal email from our correspondent in Iraq):
Dear all
Apologies for round robin nature of note, but pretty busy and no time to personalise.
News from the front.
I am in Umm Qasr, in southern Iraq, for today in order to get my “tank” fixed. We took some shrapnel in the front wheel earlier yesterday - a jagged six inch piece of a U.S. laser guided rocket that missed its target by quite a long way (I hope) - and I am waiting for a spare tyre to be sent from Kuwait.
It has been an astonishing roller coaster of a last two weeks. I can’t believe the war has gone on for that long already. The Americans said it would be over in a matter of days, but this is completely different from the first Gulf War. The Americans seem not to have realised that they are not kicking the Iraqis out of another country, but rather invading their own country, and the Iraqis don’t like that one bit. We really are caught in the middle here. The Iraqis don’t particularly like us or if they do they are too scared to show it because Saddam Hussein’s spies are still everywhere. The American and British military definitely don’t like us because we are reporting things they can’t control. We are having to live very, very roughly and in very difficult circumstances. It is a real struggle, but a tremendous reward just to get through each day. I have to remind myself all the time that there are people worse off than us and that they don’t have any choice in the matter.
The war for us started a couple of days before the invasion itself. The Americans basically took over the whole of Kuwait and closed off the whole of the Iraqi border area, but we managed to sneak through all sorts of roadblocks by disguising the tank as a British army vehicle and we then convinced a Kuwaiti farmer on the border to allow us to stay in a shed overlooking the frontier.
I am with Chris Helgren, my fantastic Canadian photographer and Fedja Stanisic, a giant bear of a Serbian cameraman about the size of two normal people. Brenda is our tank. We were the only people to manage to sneak through to the border, so we had a world first when the invasion started as we managed to send footage via satellite phone of tanks and troops crossing over as well as sensational pictures of the beginning of the bombing campaign. The next morning, we sneaked behind a column of British tanks crossing the border and were also the first independent journalists into Iraq. From then on it was wild. We have been shot at, machine-gunned, mortared, bombed, beaten up and threatened nearly every day, but we are still at it. We were also the first journalists into Basra, Iraq’s second biggest city, but we had to leave as we came under a very severe mortar attack and were very lucky to make it out alive, never mind unscathed. Six Italian journalists followed us about half an hour later and were arrested by the Iraqis.
The first couple of days were absolute chaos. Three colleagues from ITN were killed about half a mile from us by British troops who mistook them for Iraqis. Then two more journalists were blown up by Iraqis in a place about half an hour after we had been there. Two more journalists have been killed in northern Iraq and three more are missing presumed dead. The main problem has been a lot of very inexperienced journalists have come here thinking they are going on a picnic, but have discovered very quickly just how dangerous it is. The three of us, fortunately, have a lot of experience between us so we are managing to keep going.
Most of the other independent journalists have left, which I am glad off because many were hopeless amateurs. Conditions are very tough. The British and American troops are officially not allowed to help us in any way, so every day is a struggle to find a safe place to spend the night. We can’t stay more than once in one place, because word will spread very quickly and we will almost certainly be attacked by the Iraqis. Food and Water are very scarce, but we have become experts at stealing from soldiers and haven’t been caught yet. I also stole a brand new car from the port of Umm Qasr after the Americans captured it. The Americans raided a warehouse containing hundreds of new cars that had been imported from Dubai and were driving around in them, so I decided to ”liberate” one as well and we drove it around as a back up vehicle until it ran out of petrol.
Brenda has served us well so far, but is very crowded as she has to carry all our equipment, food, water, tents etc. It takes about half an hour to pack up every morning, and then we drive around looking for stories until later afternoon when we then have to find a place to camp. We are absolutely filthy having not showered for two weeks and it has been back to the mountain pine air freshner spray all over instead of a bath.
Our best and worst day has been when we got into Basra for the first time, last Friday. We crossed the bridge over the Euphrates river, which is the entrance to the city, on foot and just walked into town behind two British tanks, but they came under a ferocious mortar attack and turned back. We were really stuck in hell - bombs going off all over the place; you can’t imagine the noise of metal zinging through the air. Chris and Fedja took cover under a blown up Iraqi T54 tank, but there wasn’t room for all of us, so I decided to run back and get Brenda so I could drive back and get them out. I had to go back about one km, then get over the bridge about another km and then to the car, about another km. Well I sprinted the first km and there was just metal flying everywhere. By the time I got to the bridge, I was fucked (20 Malboro Red a day will do that to you ….). The tanks were long gone ahead of me, and the mortars were following them, but some were still landing short, but I just decided “Fuck it” and walked. It was really weird, as if some strange invisible protective cloak came all over me. I just walked up the bridge with mortars going off around 30 yards away from me every 30 seconds or so, strolled through two British tanks parked up to the other side, got into Brenda and drove back. The soldiers in the tanks tried to stop me from going, but I told them “would you leave your friends there?” and they let me through. Well the Iraqis started targetting me as I went across, but Brenda also seemed protected by divine intervention. I pulled up to the dead Iraqi tank, Chris and Fedja scrambled in and we turned around and drove out. The British soldiers were cheering and whistling as we went through and for the first time were good to us, giving us boxes of army rations and a big box of water. We were laughing like lunatics. Chris’s pictures of the attack (of a family running away) were on the front page of every newspaper in the world and Fedja’s footage will almost certainly win him one of the top awards for a cameraman. I was interviewed live on BBC, CNN, NBC, ABS and almost every other network you can imagine. World famous for about five minutes!!
Today we were over the bridge again the British have pushed about another km further and has we were coming out we got hit by a huge piece of shrapnel in my front tyre which blew the wheel out. We had to change the tyre there and then with all this shit going on, because the Iraqis had spotted us and started zeroing in. Fortunately the Brits were also after them so they kept them pinned down with machine guns which put off their aim. We changed that tyre faster than it take a formula one motor racing team to change in the pits, I tell you!!!! I have got the piece of shrapnel as a souvenir. It will make a very good paperweight.
Am holed up near the Kuwait border for today on the prowl to see if I can steal a tyre from the Brits to replace our damaged one. I managed to buy a bottle of Iraqi whisky in Basra, so I’ll probably trade some squaddie for it.
All good fun and grist for the never ending book I’m still writing.
Love and stuff
(Desert) Fox
snipped email and contact address
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