Stephen Farrell covers Baghdad for The New York Times. He has been stationed in the Middle East for a number of years and served as the bureau chief for The Times (London) before joining The New York Times. In 2004, while covering the fighting in Falluja, Stephen was kidnapped. In spite of that experience, he is still covering Baghdad and Iraq.
Mr. Farrell spoke withThe Media Line's Felice Friedson.
The Media Line: Stephen, you’ve watched Iraq more intimately than most since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. How is Iraq 2008 different from Iraq 2004?
Stephen Farrell: It’s considerably less violent in the center of the cities. It’s less violent all over, according to the figures. But we don’t go so much on the figures. We go on the feelings. Where we feel comfortable to go, where Iraqis feel comfortable to go, where the Iraqis we talked to tell us they used to be able to go here, now they can’t go here anymore. In 2004 was when the country began to close down. You couldn’t… It went from being able to run around Baghdad, jump in a taxi at midnight, head back to your hotel or house and then gradually it was salami-sliced down. There were certain areas you couldn’t go to, certain provinces you couldn’t go to without the risk of kidnapping and then beheading. The situation is different now in large areas of the country. The basic assumption journalists make now whereas before the really bad guys used to be everywhere. Now you know they’re somewhere out there and you’re stupid to ignore the risk -- they may hit you but you don’t have to operate on the assumption you will be grabbed if you go to a certain town or place. There are areas such as Diyala, Mou'sul, the "Sunna – Shi'a Kurdish fault line" where it is still too dangerous for western journalists to go to on the whole.
TML: You were kidnapped in 2004. You are back in 2008. Do you ever ask yourself why?
SF: No. I mean I stayed from 2004 through 2008. I think had I left in 2004, I would not be there in 2008. I think I knew that. In fact I did know that back then.
TML: How many journalists or foreign press are currently stationed in Iraq?
SF: We do this calculation quite often. We think it’s about 50. Contrary to popular belief, journalists aren’t based in the green zone. I think there are two American news organizations that have their offices there. The rest are outside. There are three or four big clusters around the center of Baghdad. So at any given time we think 40-60.
TML: How many women?
SF: Again that depends on certain rotations. Our bureau will have two women out of the five there. Sometimes none. Sometimes three. I would guess, off the top of my head, I can immediately think of 10 who are there permanently or semi-permanently.
TML: Politically there is a government in place and militarily there is an army. Do the Iraqi people still need the coalition forces?
SF: That depends on the Iraqi people you talk to. The generals, the Iraqi generals and the police. I have spoken to them in a number of cities recently. We went down toBa'sra. They talk a very good game as we say in England, about how well they have done in the recent operations in Baghdad, A-'Sadr City, Mou'sul city, and then you put that question to them "well if you’re doing so well, why do you need foreigners?" And then all of a sudden there’s a mass puttering. And, "dear chap, things are blah blah…" The commanders say they need them. The politicians don’t want to say they want to acknowledge it, certainly on the Shi'aside. I’ve noticed it in several press conferences and interviews with the Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki. It is a consistent theme of his: "the Americans should go as quickly as possible." Now to a certain extent, he’s playing to his base on that one. Privately, his own commanders, his own politicians know their own regime would be an extremely fragile one without an extremely large number of Americans and other coalition forces there. Principally because of the air support. None of the operations which happened in Ba'sra, Baghdad, Mou'sul, could have happened the way they happened, and certainly as quickly as they happened, if they did not have overwhelming air support which came from the American military.
TML: If you were in a political or diplomatic role rather than a correspondent, what would be the road signs you would look for to determine if Iraq is ready to stand on its own?
SF: You would want to see large inflows of foreign capital, especially from the Gulf Arabs. I think when I was down in Basra in 2004 or 2005 speaking to the British military there, they said ‘the only thing that’s really going to put this country back on its feet is foreign money.’ The Iraqis have no tax revenues. Effectively it’s a country dependent on one income stream, that, oil. And because they have such vast government bill, even with the oil prices in their favor at the moment, they have a huge amount of rebuilding to do. I think what everybody is looking for, the first sign that the fundamentals have really changed, would be if I was to go down to Basra again in two or three months, and see Kuwaitis, Quataris, Saudis spending their money in Basra because I think that would be a real litmus test that things were getting better, if people were able to put their money where their mouths were. I think it likely even though we have seen some recent evidence, American and other Western oil companies are sliding their toes back in the door. I think it likely that Arab businessman and investors are likely to take the first risk. Once they are more established, you will probably see more come in behind them . That would be one indicator – foreign money.
I think the second sign would be that you would start to see fewer Americans on the streets at the checkpoints. I think there’s a real fear amongst Iraqis now that the government checkpoints are doing well, they’re doing fine but there’s always this American umbrella there. Once they pull back and out there will be a concern amongst many Iraqis that the militias and the insurgents who have been lying very low in the last year because it would be stupid to go up head-to-head against the largest military superpower on earth, will come back and start re-infiltrating the police and paying people off and then you’re going to start sliding back into what we had before.
TML: These same indicators that you’re speaking about, is this the barometer you would use, that the coalition forces should leave? Is that the timing?
SF: I think ultimately the coalition forces would have to go if the Iraqis said ‘that’s it, time to go.’ Certainly I think it would be a very hard sell if Al-Malikistood up and said “that’s right, go.” Now I remember at a press conference 18 months ago, when we actually asked him this question and he said ‘look, just give us the guns, give us the money and we’ll take care of it from there.’ I think the problem with that would be while he would be very happy to get his hands on the guns and the money and the planes and so on and so forth, I think there would be an awful lot of very nervous Sunnis in the country. There was a radical switch in the country, around about the middle the 2005, 2006, I noticed up until that point the Sunniswho had hitherto been fighting the Americans fiercely and defending the honor of Saddam and so forth, pretty much switched when they realized they were on the receiving end from the Shi'ite militias who were driving them out of certainly East Baghdad and compressing them into pockets in West Baghdad and the Sunnis, you began to hear the rhetoric change. You began to hear Sunni instead of tiradesagainst the Americans, that was phased out and phasing in came tirades against the Shi'ites and against Iran. So therefore if you go back to the original question when Iraqis would want them to go, that depends on the Iraqi you were talking to. The Shi'athink ‘we’re in control now, thank you very much it’s time for phasing out’ and the Sunnisthink ‘whoa if you go, you’re leaving us at the mercy of Iran and the Shi'itemilitias and they drop in the very unveiled warnings. I think you will find local Sunnineighboringcountries like Syria and Saudi Arabia will have something to say about that.There’s a lot of external factors as well.
TML: Stephen, from your interaction with the Iraqi people, what stories are not adequately being told, or not told at all?
SF: I think the thing that we’re most conscious of is that the subjects we’ve all covered in the past like the appalling state of the Iraqi infrastructure, electricity, water and so forth, is, it’s been covered but because then as large parts of the country became very difficult to go to, it didn’t continue to be covered and that’s something that now as the security situation gets better, we’re very mindful of going back and doing hard, again and again, because this is real hearts and minds. It’s the pyramid of needs. When the death toll falls, the stuff that people have been complaining about before, but that wasn’t uppermost in their minds, because uppermost was staying alive, is the daily hardship of lives. Having to sleep on your roof because it’s too hot in your house, right through the night, five years after the mightiest power in the world invaded you and put a man on the moon, that’s the thing you always hear from Iraqis. ‘If the Americans wanted to do something they would have done it. They don’t care about this country. They have not provided us with the basics of life and I can’t imagine the recent news, that Western countries’ oil companies have been involved with recent negotiations is going to do anything to dispel that mindset. So the daily needs of Iraqis, without which no government is going to have consent, and there are geographical areas that are so frustrating that you cannot get to. Places like Diyala. There is really bad stuff happening in Diyala but it’s just not possible to, unimbedded. And when you go in embedded anywhere, you cannot get the full story. It’s only when you feel free you can slide into town in an unmarked car, driving around without huge western muscular tattooed body guards who you can spot for a mile off. We did that in Ba'sra for four days, slid around for four days talking to people, you really get a sense of the street. To do that in Diyalawould be close to impossible at the moment and that means people in Diyala are not having their stories told and that frustrates us. And there are other areas as well. Mozel, also, is another nasty place and we hope to be doing it within the next three months.
TML: What do you think would change it?
SF: Well in both those areas it’s the security situation on the ground. Both Diyala and Mou'sul are effectively where the Sunniextreme Islamist jihadi groups have been pushed sinc e the Sunni awakening as they call it in the other parts of the country. So you’re talking about an area where there it is very volatile, you’re right on the ethnic and political fault line and people like, the Al-Qa'idain Iraq, the Islamic state of Iraq, all the various little splinter jihadi groups youhear about, they exploit that resentment, that Arab fear of the Kurds around the corner. They expoit that Sunni fear of the shia on the other side of the street. Therefore feelings are running high. Any outsider who comes in is immediately regarded as a spy. Again we are exploring ways of going there. We did go to Ba'sra recently and until recently Ba'sra was a pretty much a ‘no-go’ area for western reporters and again you get the sense that there’s been some really vicious nasty stuff going on up there. And you can cover that to an extent on embeds, but you can’t do it properly.
TML: Speaking of 'the street', what is the average Iraqi’s feeling toward America?
SF: Again, that depends on where you go in the country. If you went on the street of Saddam Hussein’s hometown around Tikrit, there would be a sense of entitlement removed. They still hugely resent the Americans. They still believe they are the natural ruling power. They still haven’t given up. If you went into Ba'sra for instance -- 2 to 3 million Shi'ites under Saddam’s yoke for 30 years; no investment in the city; absolute slums; and poverty stricken. Then, they were obviously delighted to be removed of Saddam by any means necessary. However, they felt the coalition, in that case, the British didn’t do much for them because as soon as Saddam went, the Shi'ite militias, "the Turbans", as everyone calls them in the streets of Ba'sra, slipped into town and started to take over, Ba'athist despots to Islamistdespots. So they have mixed feelings there. I think as I touched on earlier on, if you go to sunni areas like Al-Anbar, I think there’s been a recalculation— my enemy’s enemy is my friend. I don’t think anyone likes having a Christian invading power. However just across the border, two or three hour drive away, they have Iran and that is a country, the Persians vs. the Arabs, the Persians vs. the Arabs that has been going on a lot longer than the Americans vs. the Iraqis and they have a deep visceral fear of Iran and the Persians. So at the moment their calculation is, we’re are protected under the American skirts. And if you go into Baghdad you have a sense of the Shi'a there thinking "we’re in control, we’ve got things in control. Time for you to go. We’ll take it from here."
TML: Given the dangers to journalists in Iraq -- and you certainly are in position to speak of those dangers -- is the news coverage thorough?
SF: It feels thorough to me, in my own paper. But then I’m lucky to be working for The New York Times. We have a huge staff there of Iraqis who know every inch of the capital and we have stringers all around the country. So I can just say ‘bring up our guy in Basra and say, what do you think, can we try it? Can we do it? And when he says, yeah we can do it, and just get away with it, we have the resources together, an Iraqi protection team and we slide down there and do it. So we feel that pretty much, with the exception of Diyala, Mou'sul and 'Salah A-Din, we can do stuff there limited, but we get around a lot. We get out of the bureau every single day, two or three of us out of the bureau each day, sliding around town, going into other towns. I think what is increasingly happening in Iraq is that the number of journalistic players there are being whittled down and down and down. I think that’s dangerous for democracy and its dangerous for journalism because what you will end up with is either organizations [that] were once represented there or not, major American newspapers, major European newspapers that aren’t there at all. The British newspapers, you would expect to be there, but The Times of London is the only British newspaper that has a bureau there. I always found it shocking when I was The London Times’ person there. As it has become more expensive, organizations either drop off the map all together or they drop down to one person. And when you’re one person in a country, you can’t do anything properly if you’re trying to do stories on any sort of daily basis. I think television finds it a lot harder to work in Iraq and I would wonder if it’s likely that anybody following television coverage of Iraq would have as thorough a view of it as if they were reading the papers, reading the news agencies, who obviously have a lot more Iraqis to get out and about. And I sympathize with my television colleagues, because we now do multimedia on The New York Times and we carry a camera. I’ve got the smallest little video camera we could get. It’s tiny. It’s the size of a cigarette packet. The idea of putting a camera on my shoulder and doing a piece to camera, or filming in the middle of the street, you’d just be a complete magnet . There’s very good reasons for a very very bad situation which is, until recently Iraq has not been covered as thoroughly as all of us would want it to be.
TML: If you were to look at the media at large collectively from 1 to 10, in terms of good journalism, how would you rate it from being able to effectively cover Iraq?
SF: In terms of the quality of journalists there, I think they’re top of the range people. They are a lot of very good, very frustrated journalists there who are just are too aware that if you cover Iraq consistently for a year, two years, three years and if you push the boundaries too much, it’s going to happen to you. You are going to get grabbed. Almost everybody I know in Iraq has had a very near experience, or an experience. So I think the people are very good. I think the circumstances militate against thorough coverage. They have to. We talk about this all the time. I just about did a little bit of Bosnia. I was in Kosovo my older colleagues going back before that. None of them can remember a situation that was certainly in 2005-2006 into ‘07 as hostile as Iraq. I have very little experience of Africa so I can’t speak to that.
TML: Do you have any official constraints, governmental constraints, in coverage?
SF: In what sense? In the sense of anybody saying ‘you can’t write this, you can’t print that?’
TML: Absolutely. Or you can’t go somewhere.
SF: There are no official constraints on us. The only reason we don’t go somewhere is that we’re pretty sure we would be killed if we go there. And that’s never our judgment. I’m always saying, ‘can I go to X, can I go to Y?’ And we have a group of sage Iraqis at the bureau saying that can be done, let me get back to you in 10 minutes. Or it’s a flat out no. So it’s never the government or the Americans saying you can’t go there. Twice recently, once in Kirkuk and once in A-'Sadr City, we just drove in and in Kirkuk, I jumped into a battered old taxi, with a translator and a photographer we just drove around and we bumped into an American colonel who nearly collapsed and said "what are you doing in Karkuk? You’re not embedded with us." "Well, correct." "Well, why aren’t you embedded with us?" "Well we don’t think we need to be colonel, with respect." "Well, why didn’t you come embedded with us, we would have taken you to see Iraqis?" "Well, why would we need you to see Iraqis? We’ve just been to see Iraqis."
There’s an 'embed mindset.' He wasn’t saying, "get out of town." He was surprised and startled. But by the end of the conversation he just shrugged his shoulders and said, off you go, with no attempt to stop us. And if he had tried to stop us … I just don’t think he would have. It would have been crazy. It would have provoked an immediate censorship brow. We would have ignored him anyway. The one exception to all of this, the one place in Iraq that everyone has heard of that nobody really knows, and that is the Green Zone. There are extreme restrictions of what we can do and cannot do. And if you break them, your access cards are taken away and that means you can’t move around there at all. Now I don’t go in the green zone as much, maybe once a week. But sometimes you just need to go in, to see an ambassador, or to see a general. To meet Iraqi politicians, the diplomats, the American generals, they are all based there. Occasionally, you need to go in to get the numbers, whether you believe the numbers or not from them. You effectively can report on the green zone. You can report what they say. If you have an escort you can go around the green zone and have a look at things, but they are very tight on just journalists walking around, reporting on where things are in the green zone because they are afraid it will give away positions and help 'rocketeers' and mortar-attackers and so-on. So that’s an unsatisfactory situation. Again the real story in Iraq is not in the Green Zone. The real story is out in the rest of Iraq. It’s a frustration we can get around it but as you asked, is there an area where there are controls, well yes, in the green zone, there are definitely controls.
TML: I want to go back to a subject you hold close to your heart: A great deal has been made of what’s called "embedding." Journalists join combat units and report from inside the army. Some argue that it’s not great coverage at all but rather that a cynical manipulation of the coalition-PR machine. What experiences in Iraq have been good for journalism and what holds back and is embedding a good thing?
SF: Well I prefer not doing it. I don’t think there is any substitute for just going to a town yourself, either speaking to people in Arabic yourself as much as you can in Arabic with a translator. There is just no question that having a large group of American soldiers around you, or British soldiers, or Georgian soldiers, it doesn’t matter, will intimidate people and they will be asking themselves, ‘are these guys civilian journalists, are they military journalists, who are they?’ So I prefer not to do whenever possible. There are some areas… The only way to get into Diyala, parts of it, such as Ba'aqouba, certainly the only way to get into some areas in the middle of a major military operation is with the military embedded. Embedding is something that provokes very strong feelings. For a start, it’s a new word for an old term. If you back through history, how do you think the photographers and correspondents got to Normandy beaches. I doubt they windsurfed across the channel on their own. If you go back to earlier wars, the Crimean war, William Howard Russell of London was standing on a hilltop looking down on the charge of the light brigade, with the senior officers. Journalists moving with the military is as old as war. The word "embed" brought it to the fore. And that’s a good thing. I think it should be a matter of public debate. Effectively the conversation I had in Kirkuk was one of unilateral, with someone who was used to an "embed situation." We politely pointed out to him that we can do a lot more and we feel safe to do. And if that is our judgment, politely sir, that has nothing to do with you. That would be my favorite way of doing things. Embedding is difficult. You arrive with a unit. The intention is that obviously you will bond with that unit. They expect negative stories to come out of it. Once you’ve embedded a few times you’re pretty familiar with the dynamic. You almost always in the course of a story, a junior officer, a senior officer, is going to say or do something that is newsworthy, that perhaps contradicts the official line, that is not the image they were seeking to convey. And I can’t read the mind of the military but some journalists feel guilty about letting down the people as they see it, to let down the people they’ve gotten to know over a week, a month, a year. Others have no compunctions about doing it whatsoever. I think it’s just one of those things you have to learn to do. You just get rather friendly working with them while they are saving your life, but ultimately your loyalty is to your reader and to your newspaper. You have to say and do what you see. The classic example of that was that we went to Fallujain 2006, I think and we had a series of very good briefings about how sensitive the American military was being, how they were seeking to reach out to the local populations. And then we spoke to one corporal and we asked what his job was and he said, "I’m a door-kicker-inner, sir." And you could see the majors slapping their heads in frustration. A little detailed but that’s the sort of dynamic you have to put up with. I think many people assume that journalists bond too much with the military, and again, I’m possibly not the best person to ask this because I’m not an American journalist with the American military. As a non-American journalist, I think I am slightly better position to be objective than maybe an American with people from his hometown. I have noticed in my own country. I don’t think Brit journalists embed particularly well with the Brit journalists for exactly the same reasons. The ‘our brave boys’ factor. When I got into Ba'sra, you try to steal yourself aganist letting that happen to you, although, frankly in Ba'srathe city was such a mess, for three or four years, all you had to was talk to three to four Iraqis and they said what needed to be said.
TML: After the fall of Saddam Hussein, American corporations, private security companies, construction companies were rushing to Iraq anticipating an economic boon. Where does the economy stand now and are American companies welcome?
SF: I think all money would be welcome in Iraq. I think American companies would think very hard about going into a situation which is still too dangerous to operate in without a huge amount being spent on protection. I think there are two or three factors here. The first is, things are better now largely because of the change in Sunnimood that we mentioned earlier on, the fact that the Sunnis are no longer attacking every American they see in Al-Anbar. And then, on the back of that, you had the surge coming in that freed up a lot of people to nail Baghdad down. So things are better. If you were a corporate leader looking for a 15-20-30 year investment plan in Iraq, would you be absolutely sure that the situation would remain the case for more than another six months, 12 months, three years. I don’t know. I suspect you would be looking very carefully before you committed huge amounts of money. Also when you see western organizations, and the majority of the ones you see are humanitarian and diplomatic, rather than corporate moving around the city. They go around in these huge armored vehicles, in convoys bristling with guns. They make complete bullet magnets for themselves. So that’s really no way you could conduct business in any meaningful way. I think if it were to be done, it would have to be done through sub-contractors, local agencies, local companies. And certainly I know in previous years, the problem with that has been accountability, oversight and scrutiny. You know, where is the money going, who is spending it, is it being spent on what we think it’s being spent on. And which Westerner is going to jump in a car, drive to the middle of nowhere and check knowing full well they could become a target for it. And what happens to the Iraqis who are doing all that sub-contracting for you if the mood swings and they are seen as collaborators.
TML: As a correspondent for one of the world’s most important newspaper, do you ever envision how a reader in Middle-America is going to relate to a story?
SF: Yeah, all the time, because before I became a journalist in the Middle East, I have to confess, when I picked up a story about the Middle East, I remember my brain hurting as I was trying to go through complexities of it. And that wasn’t too much long ago. There are certain things you try and do. Unfortunately, leading with the number of people dead that day is although it would be the first you would go with a story of a bombing in say, London, Paris, New York, say god forbid in each case, because they are rare events and people want to know how many people are killed. To do so in Baghdad, the dynamic is flipped. They are not rare events. As soon as you go off with a number, five people dead, 17 people dead, 23 people dead, it’s a number that is lost probably for the reader and the listener in the welter of bombings that have been in recent months. You try to find another way to make it memorable, to try to convey to people what it was like on that street at that time. When there was a bomb outside an alcohol shop, probably most people can relate to walking past an alcohol shop on the streets of their town. So you try and describe it in those terms. There’s bottles of whiskeys, bottles of ouzo, the glass, the customers’ bodies. You try to make it appear and convey to people in terms they can relate to. Numbers, while important have to be in there, although they’re difficult in Iraq, numbers. Probably not the best way to go on that. Secondly, I think mention of too many politicians and too many splinter groups is likely to make eyes glaze over. We get this from Iraqis a lot: Why don’t you tell them the details of the fractures and disagreements within the main A-Tawaffuq-Sunni coalition. You’ve completely neglected politician X and politician Y is much stronger than you said. So fine, should we go through the political parties in Kashmir, sir? And of course he has no ideas of what the political parties are in Kashmir. You try to get it over to them that that is not the most transparent way of conveying it to the average reader in middle America, or middle Britain, or middle Europe. Sometimes you just have to put that aside and quite regularly we say, today it is the political story for those who want to know, here is what we think are the significant runners and riders and players and parties. And you just lay it all out in great length.
TML: What degree of understand on the part of the reader are you presuming when you write a story from the Iraqi theatre?
SF: You make different presumptions on different stories. The other day, one of my colleagues, Andrew Kramer, did an exceptionally good story on the plight of Christians in Iraq having to pay blood money to Islamist killers. You obviously would assume that there would be a general understand that Christians are finding it very difficult in the Middle East at the moment and you wouldn’t need 14 paragraphs of background on that. However, if you were talking about the Yazidis, for instance, or the the [Turkmen of Shi'ite] belief, you wouldn’t just throw that into a sentence. You would have to say these people are in a particularly difficult situation because they’re neither Arab nor Kurds. They are minor in terms of numbers. Population across Northern Iraq, in other words, you try and fit the number of background paragraphs you have in the story according to what you think the reader would know.
TML: What inspired you to be a journalist?
SF: The act of writing, the act of communicating and the experience of human nature in its extremes. The extremes of experience. The absolute pity, misery, anger, hatred, love that you want to convey to people. Those elements together made me gravitate towards it. I am there. I want to tell you what it is like. I want to understand for myself what it is like. Many times, to be honest actually, I’m writing for myself. I’m trying to explain to myself what’s going on there. I’m not an Arabist. I didn’t grow up from the age of three in love with the Arab world. It’s a posting for me. It’s an interesting one. It’s a fascinating one. I’m basically an ordinary person chucked into the middle of Iraq I hope. I hope if I can explain it to myself and understand it clearly for myself, then I can help other people to understand it. And when you don’t, the comments you get at the end of the stories help you to understand it yourself anyway.
TML: Can you separate Stephen Farrell the journalist with Stephen Farrell, the man in Iraq, what is it like? A day when you go out and say let’s have fun, this is a different city than the one I am reporting on.
SF: Well there’s two extremes of experience there. The day I was kidnapped, just outside Falluja, in 2004, it seemed like my brain was split in two. As we were being grabbed, to me-the-journalist and me-the-person, and we were being grabbed, me the journalist was thinking ‘oh that’s interesting. Who is taking me, because that’s obviously crucial to talking yourself out which we managed to do. So while one half of you is going, ‘I’m doomed, I’m doomed,’ the other half is going ‘that’s interesting, he’s just referred to "Ra'is Saddam Hussein", (President Saddam Hussein). That indicates he’s probably a Ba'athist. You’re just constantly analyzing what they say and about 20 minutes into the kidnap you’re thinking, hang on, he’s just thrown a pen and paper at me to draw a map of the American position. Well I’ve got a very interesting man in front of me, and I’ve got a pen and a paper. If I don’t get doomed here, I maybe could fit this into an interview. And as you’re doing that you’re thinking you’re completely bonkers. What are you doing? Get yourself out of here. So the two halves of you are squabbling with each other, in your head, as you are trying to flip it. And then the other side of that, driving down to Ba'sra recently. Ba'sra has been a hell hole, a miserable, vicious, nasty place. Women were forced into strait jackets by the islamists, where men couldn’t do anything without the permission of the Islamists. And I’ve been there and it’s been miserable. And then to drive down to Ba'sra on our own, and it’s a long drive. You’re nervous. You’re worried. But as you get into Ba'sra and you start talking to the first people there, and the relief and the happiness. Personally you just feel just pleased for them that they’re not dying and professionally, you feel, how much is this down to genuine improvements in security and how much is down to their desire for things to be better. Are they really seeing things through rose-tinted spectacles? So again, your personal feelings, of, ‘I’m glad they’re not being killed. I’m glad these people I met two years ago are still alive and so on so forth. And professionally, again, you’re scanning, you’re constantly scanning. Alright, are they getting carried away, is it really safe, have things really changed, what are the fundamentals like? You can’t separate the two. They’re both in the good, the bad and the everyday. One is scanning the other all the time.
TML: Can you walk into a local market and not feel you’re looking over your shoulder? …
SF: No.
TML: Stephen Farrell, Baghdad correspondent for The New York Times, thank you very much.
SF: Thank you.
