Greetings to all war correspondents

A British photographer who had just returned from Ukraine told me how he spent more than two weeks there in great concern between his personal safety and following up on the conditions of his wife, who had left her alone with their infant son, and then she contracted Corona. Nevertheless, he is a lucky photographer, not only because he was working in the regions of western Ukraine that are less militarily hot, but because he did not stay there for a long time after which he returned safely to his family, and this is not always the amount of those who go to cover wars.

I will never forget what the famous British journalist Robert Fisk told me. We met by chance at Baghdad airport in 2003, just two days before the beginning of the US invasion of Iraq, when he said that journalists are the only ones in the world that you see heading to places where their people flee. They do this even though they know very well that they may pay a price with their lives and they also know that no journalistic story is worth that price, but they are not always the ones who kill themselves, as one of them may be injured by a stray bullet or be targeted by an armed person despite his full knowledge of his capacity as a journalist, which is clear to all.

“Difficult, poignant, and painful,” this is how the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York described the atmosphere of journalistic work these weeks in the Russian war on Ukraine, which has so far claimed the lives of the American journalist Brent Reno, who worked for the New York Times, while another was wounded with him. The car of the American "Fox News" channel was attacked, killing Irish photographer Pierre Zarzewski and his colleague from the same team, Ukrainian reporter Oleksandra Kovchinova, while British reporter Benjamin Hall was seriously injured, after which he was taken to hospital before being evacuated abroad for further treatment. The Al-Araby TV team was also trapped in the Erbin region, north of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, for four days, during which reporter Adnan Jan and cameraman Habib Demirji remained in mortal danger, after the team came under direct fire from the Russian forces.

All this happened and the war was in its first month, which warns that more difficult days await the correspondents who are there, especially if we enter the stage of a tight siege of the capital, Kyiv, and an attempt to bring it down. All of this, and what happened in several previous wars, proves once again the heavy price that many journalists have paid and paid, especially those who transmit it live in audio and video.

Perhaps the first Arab television experience in covering wars differently from the normal coverage or even the propaganda that Arab public opinion has experienced in previous wars, through radio stations in particular, is the experience of “MBC” when it covered the war of secession in Yemen in 1994 between its north and south after four years. Only years of their unification under the late President Ali Abdullah Saleh. However, with the launch of Al-Jazeera as the first news channel in 1996, such coverage entered a new phase after the world had been fascinated by CNN's coverage of the second Gulf War and the liberation of Kuwait in 1991.

Al-Jazeera’s first experience was in Operation Desert Fox in December 1998, a process in which Iraq was subjected to American aggression for four days with intense raids, which it was able to brilliantly convey to the Arab public and the late Palestinian journalist Muhammad Khair Al-Buraini, then wars continued to prove The correspondents of this channel were able to convey the most brutal facts, from the second intifada in 2000 and the Palestine team consisting of Walid Al-Omari, Sherine Abu Aqleh and Guevara Al-Budairi, to the war in Afghanistan and its famous star, Tayseer Alouni, who paid the price for that coverage dearly, between imprisonment and house arrest in his home after an unfair trial In Spain, then came the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in which the station was distinguished by its team, who killed Tariq Ayoub from the roof of its office in Baghdad. Abu Dhabi Channel also excelled in those events with Shaker Hamed and his colleagues. Then the Israeli wars continued on Lebanon and Gaza, and in both of them, Al Jazeera’s war correspondents did well, and the Arab public kept memorizing their names such as Abbas Nasser, Ghassan bin Jeddo, Mazen Ibrahim, Tamer Al-Mishal, Wael Al-Dahdouh, Heba Aqila and others. Even during the revolutions of the Arab Spring, the various correspondents of the “Al-Jazeera” network did not hesitate to report the facts of the scourge that took place in Syria, for which they paid the price with their lives, such as Muhammad al-Masalma, Mahran al-Diri, Hussein Abbas, Muhammad al-Qasim, Muhammad al-Asfar, Zakaria Ibrahim and Ibrahim al-Omar. Qatari photographer Ali Jaber was also killed in Libya. After the station's team car was hit by an intentional shooting.

Greetings of appreciation and gratitude to all of these, and may God protect him who is still struggling there to convey the facts of wars so that no one will say one day that he did not know.