Two Women Veteran AP Reporters Shot in Afghanistan, One Killed
Author: Womens UN Report Network
Date: July 22, 2005
WUNRN
TWO WOMEN VETERAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
REPORTERS SHOT IN AFGHANISTAN, ONE KILLED
APRIL 4, 2014 – KABUL, Afghanistan — For the two seasoned war correspondents, it was not an unusually risky trip.
Getting out to see Afghanistan
up close was what Anja Niedringhaus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for
The Associated Press, and Kathy Gannon, a veteran reporter for the news agency,
did best.
eastern province of Khost,
where Ms. Niedringhaus and Ms. Gannon traveled to cover Afghanistan’s
presidential election on Saturday, is considered dangerous, still plagued by
regular Taliban attacks. But they had carefully plotted their trip, arranging
to move beyond the relatively safe confines of the provincial capital under the
protection of Afghan Army troops and the police.
Yet it was
those precautions that proved fatal for Ms. Niedringhaus on Friday morning. As
she and Ms. Gannon waited outside a government compound, a police commander
walked up to their idling car, looked in at the two women in the back seat, and
then shouted “Allahu akbar!” — God is great — and opened fire with an AK-47,
witnesses and The Associated Press said.
For both Afghans and Westerners, the list
of adversaries has expanded beyond the resilient Taliban, who have staged a
series of attacks in an attempt to disrupt the election. Afghan soldiers and
the police have repeatedly turned on one another and their foreign allies. The
squabbling between President Hamid Karzai and American officials has grown into
a deep-seated animosity.
At the same
time, Afghans have seen scores of their fellow citizens killed by errant
American airstrikes. And even as the United
States pushes for a long-term security deal
that would allow it to keep troops here beyond the end of this year, it does so
with the understanding that its forces will be largely hidden away behind the
high walls of fortified bases.
The dwindling number of foreigners here already live that way, frightened
by a recent surge in attacks
aimed at Western civilians.
Ms. Niedringhaus, 48, and Ms. Gannon, 60,
had no desire to hunker down. The focus of their work over the past dozen years
has been putting a human face on the suffering inflicted by the war. As a pair,
they often traveled to remote corners of Afghanistan
to report articles, and Ms. Niedringhaus also spent significant time embedded
with coalition forces.
Many of their colleagues noted sadly that
they were attacked by a police officer who appeared to have seen in the back
seat of the journalists’ Toyota Corolla a pair of anonymous Westerners on whom
to vent his rage. If Afghans have a dominant complaint about the West, it is
that they are often treated as faceless, dismissed as nonentities by the people
who say they are here to help.
That was not the case with Ms.
Niedringhaus and Ms. Gannon.
“They just seemed so bravely willing to go
into these kinds of situations and get to the places that you needed to get to
tell stories that weren’t being told,” said Heidi Vogt, a reporter who worked
for The A.P. in Afghanistan until last year.
“They’re the last two people you’d expect
this to happen to,” she added. “It felt like they had a little protective force
field around them.”
In the process, they helped redefine
traditional notions of war reporting. Even as they covered the battlefield,
they also focused attention on the human impact of conflicts known for their
random, unpredictable violence against civilians.
Ms. Niedringhaus’s fascination with Afghanistan
continued to grow even as she was pulled away to other trouble spots, including
Iraq, where she
was part of a team of A.P. photographers who won
a Pulitzer Prize in 2005.
“If I’d told her, ‘You don’t need to do
this anymore, you’ve earned your spurs, leave it to another generation,’ ”
said Tony Hicks, a photo editor at The A.P., “the response would have been a
series of expletives, then laughing and another pint.”
But, Mr. Hicks pointed out, Ms.
Niedringhaus was equally at home at major sports events and other less
high-stakes diversions, such as the Geneva
auto show.
She was on the finish lines when Usain
Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter, broke the world record for the 100-meter dash. And
“she loved Wimbledon,” he said. “It was almost her
second home.”
Ms. Gannon, a Canadian who is a senior
writer for The AP, arrived in Peshawar, Pakistan,
in 1986 when the Afghan mujahedeen were battling the forces of the Soviet
Union. She went on to serve as The AP’s bureau chief in Islamabad,
and she was one of the few Western reporters whom the Taliban permitted to work
in Kabul when they ruled Afghanistan.
Ms. Gannon was in Kabul
during the American invasion in 2001, and she wrote of covering the Taliban’s
last days in the city with her Afghan colleague, Amir Shah. The two cowered in
the basement of a house during air raids, often working by candlelight or
lantern. They tried to avoid members of Al Qaeda, who were much more hostile
than the Taliban. When a bomb struck nearby, she was thrown across the room —
and then went straight back to work.
“She knows Afghanistan
very well,” said Mr. Shah, an AP reporter in Kabul,
according to an article by the news agency. “She knows the culture of the
people.”
Though Western civilians working with the
coalition have at times been killed in such attacks, the shooting on Friday was
believed to be the first time an Afghan police officer had intentionally killed
a foreign journalist.
Afghan security officials said they
believed that the shooting was an opportunistic attack, not the work of the
Taliban, who offered no comment.
The police commander, whom officials
identified as Naqibullah, 50, was known for his anti-Western views, one
official said. The officials did not believe he had advance notice that Ms.
Niedringhaus or Ms. Gannon was headed his way.
The two spent Thursday night at the
compound of the provincial governor in Khost, and they left on Friday morning
with a convoy of election workers delivering ballots to an outlying area in the
Tanai district, The A.P. and Afghan officials said.
The convoy was protected by the Afghan police, soldiers and operatives from
the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s
main intelligence agency, said Mubarez Zadran, a spokesman for the provincial
government. Ms. Niedringhaus and Ms. Gannon were in their own car, traveling
with a driver and an Afghan freelance journalist who was working with the news
agency.
Mr. Naqibullah, the police commander,
surrendered to other officers immediately after shooting the journalists and
was arrested.
Ms. Gannon was taken to a hospital in
Khost. She underwent surgery before being evacuated to one of the main NATO
bases in the country, where there is a hospital equipped to handle severe
battlefield trauma. She was said to be in stable condition.
Yet even as Friday’s shooting provided a
stark reminder of how broader tensions can set off violence at the most
personal level, its aftermath also highlighted the bonds between old friends
and strangers alike, be they Afghans or foreigners.
Aides to Mr. Karzai, who has known Ms.
Gannon for years, said he tried to get her on the phone to see she how she was
doing after he heard about the attack. He later spoke with her husband, and his
office then put out a statement condemning the attack.
The doctor who first treated Ms. Gannon,
Muhammad Shah, was distressed by the shooting.
“Not only me, but all Afghans are
disappointed and sorry for this loss of life,” he said by phone Friday night
from KhostProvincialHospital, between operations. “She
was a guest here in Afghanistan,
a foreigner.”
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