Me and Anthony in a Djibouti bar in March — much better times.

Among the passengers of the Boeing 737–800 was a Nairobi-based Associated Press correspondent, Anthony Mitchell, one of five Britons on a passenger list released by the airline. Mitchell had been on assignment in the region.

Most of the passengers were apparently en route to Nairobi to transfer to other flights.
I met Anthony, who is 39, in March in Djibouti, when we both were onboard the _FGS Bremen_, a German frigate, for a story on maritime security operations in the area. Anthony was full of funny, self-deprecating stories about himself and Africa, stories that contained no small amount of hard-won wisdom, too. He talked about the clans of Somalia, the US military’s actions in the Horn of Africa and constantly took the piss out of our military escort in the most good-natured way possible. (Anthony’s from London while LCDR “Grassy” Meadows of the Royal Navy is from the north of England.)
I didn’t know him long, but in the few days I knew him, he was a reporter’s reporter, working constantly, cell phone seemingly glued to his head as he chased down reports of the kidnapped Britons in Ethiopia and set up an interview with the president of Djibouti.
He was kicked out of Ethiopia last year, he said, because he upset the government there. Apparently, they didn’t like his reports on corruption and he was given just 24 hours to leave the country. While that was no doubt a huge inconvenience, I can’t help but have a soft spot for reporters who tweak the powers-that-be as much as he did.
He loved Africa, he said. He liked small towns and eschewed most of the “mod-cons,” as he called air conditioning and the like. He also carried around in his wallet a photo of his wife, Catherine, and his kids, Tom and Rose. They looked like a really nice family.
I wish the outlook looked better, but right now I’m left with hoping for the best for Anthony’s family — and for all the families of the people on that plane. For while this post is about Anthony — only because I know him — I know that he was just one person and that 114 families are anxiously awaiting word.
*UPDATE 5/7/07 12:38:20 PM +0200 GMT:* A grim update. Cameroon officials say there is “no chance” of survivors.

BAGHDAD — A leading Iraqi academic and prominent hardline Sunni political activist was fatally shot by three gunmen Monday as he was leaving his Baghdad home, police said.
The killers escaped in a car after gunning down Essam al-Rawi, head of the University Professor’s Union and a senior member of the influential Association of Muslim Scholars, according to police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razaq.
The association is a Sunni organization believed to have links to the insurgency raging against U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies. The group has boycotted elections and stood aside from the political process.
An association official confirmed the killing of al-Rawi, a geologist, saying he was behind the wheel of his car and had just left his home for the drive to work at Baghdad University accompanied by two bodyguards.
The gunmen drove in front of al-Rawi’s car, forced it to stop, then sprayed it with automatic weapons fire, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared reprisal. One of al-Rawi’s bodyguards was killed and the other was wounded, the official said.

I wrote about Dr. Al-Rawi in June 2004 for Seed Magazine, shortly after I got back to Iraq. I don’t remember if the story ever ran or not as there was a payment dispute, but here’s the story I wrote:

The scientists among the shell casings
BAGHDAD — Dr. Isam al-Rawi, a geologist at Baghdad University, sweeps his hand over a set of dog-eared journals. The arc of his gesture continues on to include a bare laboratory with a few slices of rock samples, a sagging chair and a dripping sink. The room is mean, long and narrow, with barely enough room for a colleague to squeeze past al-Rawi carrying a tray of glasses filled to their chipped rims with Sprite. Finally his hand returns to the journals and books, and he points an accusing finger at them.
“I am a university professor,” he says. “I need books!“
Indeed, he needs a lot more than that, but few things sum up the current state of Iraq’s scientific crisis more than its lack of books and journals. Al-Rawi’s most recent acquisition is a photocopied version of the 1998 edition of the Atlas of Rock Forming Minerals, which he bought in Libya on his last trip outside Iraq. His most recent journal, a copy of the Geological Society of America Bulletin, dates to August 1985. To a one, his books and journals are old, out of date and falling apart, much like the country’s scientific community itself.
Before the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq’s scientists were some of the most respected in the region and they made a good living. The country’s universities churned out engineers, technicians and Ph.D.s. They often did post-graduate work in the West and had access to the world’s scientific literature. They traveled to scientific conferences all over the world.
But things started to get bad in the mid-1980s when the Iran-Iraq war was raging; Saddam Hussein began restricting access to scientific journals. After the disastrous 1991 war and the impositions of sanctions, things took an even graver turn. Salaries plummeted. Al-Rawi’s monthly income went from about $2,000 a month before the 1991 war to about $400 a month. New scientists and professors earned about $100 a month. They could not travel; they could not subscribe to periodicals, as they were forbidden by the sanctions regime. New books were too expensive. Much needed equipment, which was often marked as “dual use,” was prevented from entering the country. The Middle East’s most advanced scientific community was effectively sealed up in a time capsule.
But now, even with most of the restrictions gone, things are still hard 15 months after Saddam Hussein was removed from power. While scientists are no longer prevented from ordering new books and journals and are allowed to leave the country, they often can’t for the simple reason that they have no money to do so. And a sinister series of killings has terrified and decimated the scientific community. In mid-June, Sabri Al-Bayati, professor of telecommunications at the college of Science and Education at Baghdad University was shot dead near his home in the Bab Al-Athamiya area in central Baghdad.‏ A few days previously, a physician, Dr. Mohammed Abdullah Faleh al-Rawi (no relation), was killed while sitting in traffic. Their deaths are just two of about 250 university professors, medical doctors and engineers who have been killed since May 1, 2003.
“No one knows why, no one knows who,” al-Rawi says, and flicked his prayer beads back and forth.
In such an environment, there is no work on new research, says Dr. Nuhad Ali, a mechanical engineer at the university. The only money being spent is to keep up the salaries of the professors, and the only new equipment are some computers paid for with the now-defunct oil-for-food program. The universities aren’t even accepting new graduate students, Ali says. All current graduate students, who used to receive a monthly stipend, were enrolled before the war.
But not all is hopeless, two solid state physicists, Dr. Izzat al-Essa and Dr. Raed al-Haddend, says they had been able to attend the Saudi Solid State Physics conference in Riyadh in March. The praised the lifting of travel restrictions, but says it was still very expensive.
Baghdad University was also lucky. Almost every other university in the country was looted in the civil unrest following the fall of Baghdad. But American troops decided to bivouac on the campuses of Baghdad University and the nearby Al-Nahrain University neé Saddam Hussein University. Their presence prevented the wholesale looting of everything down to electrical fixtures that was going on just across town at al-Mustansiriya University.
So now the scientific community must rebuild with limited financial resources in a security vacuum. It’s no wonder there’s an abiding sense of hopelessness among the professors. Al-Essa and al-Haddend dream of X-ray machines, electron microscopes and FT-IR spectrometers. Al-Rawi wants to replace his 1974 X-ray fluorescence machine so he can analyze some rock sections he recently took near Perispike in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq. Dr. Emad T. Bakir, an industrial chemist with a specialty in polymers, hopes for research assistants, catalysts and solvents.
But the money is simply not there. The former administrator for the now-dissolved Coalition Provisional Authority L. Paul Bremer III was found of saying, “Iraq is a rich country that is temporarily poor.” The new government is inheriting many of Iraq’s old debts, including $29.8 billion for war reparations to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, but the Transitional Administrative Law, which is the working constitution for the interim government, forbids deficit spending. All ministries, including the Ministry of Higher Education, headed by Dr. Taher Khalaf Jabur al-Bakaa, are feeling the vice grip of national poverty. The minister doesn’t even have a bullet-proof vest; he can’t afford one.
But if Iraqis are good at anything, it’s hoping. The scientific community is no exception. Fueling this hope is a promise promise from Bremer. Before he left June 28, he said he would attempt to increase communications between American scientists at universities and their Iraqi counterparts. An Iraqi delegation recently returned from the University of Oklahoma whose president Bremer went to school with.
“We hope our friends in America and England will come to see what has happened to us,” says al-Rawi.

It should be noted that almost all of the murders of university professors have gone unsolved. Al-Rawi was working to change that when he became a victim himself.

Muhsin Khudhair, editor of the news magazine Alef Ba, was killed by unidentified gunmen near his home in Baghdad Monday night, becoming the third journalist killed in Iraq in the last week, Reuters and Agence France-Presse reported. The shooting took place just hours after Khudair attended a meeting of the Iraqi Journalists Union, which discussed the targeting of local journalists in Iraq, Reuters said.
The killing punctuated a deadly week for the press. Amjad Hameed, head of programming for Iraq’s national television channel Al-Iraqiya, and driver Anwar Turki were killed on Saturday by gunmen apparently affiliated with al-Qaeda. Munsuf Abdallah al-Khaldi, a presenter for Baghdad TV, was killed by unidentified gunmen last Tuesday as he was driving from Baghdad to the northern city of Mosul.
At least 67 journalists and 24 media support workers have been killed in Iraq since March 2003, making it the deadliest conflict for the media in recent history. The killings continue two trends in Iraq: the vast majority of victims have been Iraqi citizens; and most cases have been targeted assassinations rather than crossfire. CPJ research shows that Iraqis constitute nearly 80 percent of journalists and support staffers killed for their work in Iraq. Overall, sixty percent of journalist deaths were murders.

Maybe Mr. Peters would like a nice chat with “Salih” from the _Washington Post_, who reported a story about the looting of Saddam’s palaces in Tikrit after the U.S. military turned it over to the Iraqi security forces. His reward? A $50,000 bounty put on his head by the head of security in Tikrit, Jassam Jabara.
Perhaps he’d like to talk to the family of Allan Enwiyah, the translator for the _Christian Science Monitor_’s Jill Carroll. He was killed when Jill was kidnapped Jan. 7, unprotected by American firepower. She is still captive, by the way.
Or perhaps he’d like to discuss “blood money” with the widow of Yasser Salihee, a careful and conscientious reporter for Knight-Ridder who was killed by American soldiers at a checkpoint when the car in front of him blocked his view of the troops, who opened fire and killed him. Did I know him? Yes, but not well. I found out about his death when Hannah Allam, then bureau chief for Knight-Ridder called me in hysterics.
You want to know what the Iraqis — who frankly do a better job that we do — feel and think? “Read this”:http://cjr.org/issues/2006/2/McLeary.asp. Highlight:

“To get a story you have to risk your life,” [said Salima] matter-of-factly. “Sometimes I wonder if the people in the U.S. really understand how much we go through in order to write the story.” To underscore that, she told of being pushed from behind by an Iraqi man while covering a story with a Western reporter, of being caught in a firefight in Sadr City, Baghdad’s sprawling and violent slum, and of being threatened by a group of insurgents while out reporting. Yet in a country with few opportunities, journalism is a way to make a living, and to stay involved. “We never know when something could happen to us,” she said. “But then at the same time, I cannot stop living.”

How dare you, Ralph. How dare you question these men and women’s intentions and honesty. I’ve worked with our staff in the TIME house for two years and I’ve never seen a more dedicated, careful group of journalists. They’re not in this for the money. We pay them well, yes, but they could make more money doing other work. Lord knows they’d be safer, and their families would be, too. But they come in to work every day and do their level best to get us every scrap of information and to get it right. Anyone of them is a better journalist than Ralph Peters, who feels his view from the back of humvee is the only valid one. It’s _a_ viewpoint, yes, but hardly the whole story. You come talk with _me_, Ralph, we’ll go walk the streets of Karradah, drive without armor, feel the copper in your mouth when the fear and adrenaline comes to you in wave after wave and you realize the L-T from the 320th hasn’t got your six for you, man. You come talk to me then.
Finally, I’ll let a former Army guy have the last word. This from a buddy of mine who was a Public Affairs Officer just a few short months ago:

Oh my god, dude. [Peters] is completely full of sh*t. That’s all I can say. Apparently that f**k hasn’t spent enough time down in the trenches here to understad the little bastards will run out and wave at any patrol for one reason — begging for choclate or soccer balls. They don’t care the Grunts are valiently coming to save the day. … He’s not aware of how f**king dangerous it is for gringos to roam the streets here.

BAGHDAD — Following up on my “previous entry”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2006/02/aftermath_of_th_1.php, I found the “video claim of responsibility”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/Files/al-Hamra.rmvb (60MB, RealVideo, sorry) for the Hamra bombing “back in November”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2005/11/the_hamras_been_1.php. It’s all in Arabic, but it’s pretty typical _jihadi_ video stuff, albeit with better production values than I’ve seen usually.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s organization, Al Qaeda in Iraq, did the operation in the name of “Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheik_Omar_Abdel-Rahman, the “blind sheikh” currently in prison for his role in a plot to blow up New York City landmarks. Early in the morning on Nov. 18, two white vans laden with explosives approached the back wall of the Hamra compound. The first one, driven by Abu Ayub al-Iraqi, was to clear a path for the second van. In the video, the bomb-makers claim to have loaded the second van with 2.5 _tons_ of explosives, but I find this doubtful. You can see, however, that they used a number of 155mm artillery shells.

Abu Abdul Malik al-Najdi, a Saudi, drove the second van. Alongside him was Abu Samain al-Tunisi, from Tunisia, who carried a Russian machine gun to shoot any guards who arrived at the scene of the first bombing and tried to prevent the second bomb from getting to the heart of the compound. This means they learned from the “unsuccessful Palestine Bombing in October”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2005/10/three_car_bombs.php, when the van carrying the main payload came under fire and was, possibly, stopped because the driver was shot.

Also, you can see that they make use of the latest open-source intelligence, mainly Google maps. In one part of the video, the plotters are shown poring over printouts of the neighborhood, marking routes of access. They look exactly like Google maps. The maps are also later used to show the planned points of attack.

Why attack the compound? The video claims it was in retaliation for the torture of Sunnis at the hands of the Shi’ite-led Ministry of Interior as well as for the deaths of Iraqi officers by Americans interrogators. They also saw the compound as a den of foreign intelligence, the Badr Brigade and housing for Kurdish _pesh merga_ and Western security companies. The attack also was billed a success in the video: “It was the anger of God to heal the hearts of believers,” the video proclaims. It ends with a recording of someone who is claimed to be Zarqawi himself: “To the Islamic nation, we promise you we will continue fighting until the last drop of blood.”

This claim of responsibility is unusual in that it came in January, two months after the attack. It’s possible the delay is because of the relative failure of the attack. Only Iraqi civilians were killed or injured and the second bomb didn’t make it to its intended target. Whether that means al Qaeda will come back as they usually do after initial failures is still unclear.