Iraqi journalist dies in the
crossfire By Aaron Glantz
BAGHDAD - Inter Press Service (IPS)
contributor Alaa Hassan was killed on his way to
work last Wednesday. He was 35 years old. He is
survived by his mother, four brothers, five
sisters and his new wife who is pregnant with
their first child.
Alaa was not killed for
being a reporter. Indeed, he had only just begun
helping IPS gather news. When fighters ambushed
him and machine-gunned his car, it was simply
because he was in the wrong place at the wrong
time - one of so many people killed seemingly for
no reason in Iraq each day.
The same day
Alaa was killed, Reuters reported 11 other violent
incidents in Iraq - including the car bombings of
day laborers in
Baquba, 50km northeast of
Baghdad, and of shoppers in the Shia Qadamiya
district of Baghdad.
At least four Iraqi
policemen and a US soldier died in separate
attacks across the country. In Baquba, the US
military admitted to killing a "non-combatant"
during a raid on a civilian home. Most of the
people killed on June 28 will remain only numbers.
But because we knew Alaa so well, we can tell his
story.
Alaa lived in al-Tajiyyat
neighborhood in northeast Baghdad. He managed the
inventory of a stationery store in Baghdad's famed
book market on Mutanabe Street. He lived near the
Tigris River, in housing that had been reserved
for employees of the Ministry of Industry when
Saddam Hussein was president.
He lived
next door to what was once an electronics factory
and across the street from the former building of
the Institute of Arab National Oil Studies. Both
were looted after the US invasion. After that, the
US government turned them into military bases. So,
Alaa's neighborhood was regularly rocketed by
insurgents.
The only way from his
neighborhood to central Baghdad was to cross the
al-Muthana Bridge over the Tigris, a regular spot
for insurgent attacks. Because of an Iraqi police
checkpoint and a bend in the road, every car
passing over the bridge has to slow down. Killings
occurred there many times a week.
When
Alaa crossed the bridge on June 28, gunmen sprayed
his car with machine-gun fire, killing him with
six bullets. A second passenger was seriously
injured.
The day he died, Alaa had worried
aloud about crossing the bridge. A good friend,
Abu Laith, had just been killed there. "He was
just coming home from work and randomly someone
showed up and shot and killed him," Alaa said. "I
know it's dangerous to leave the house," he told
his brother Salam over the phone. "But what can I
do? I have to go on living."
Alaa was
always in a difficult situation. "The Americans
built a base that's in front of my house that used
to be a government institute, and another one
across the street that used to be the al-Karrama
factory," he told his brother.
"Now when
we go out the Americans are right there at our
front door. The wall for the American base is
exactly in front of the house. Now it's not safe
to go from the house to the main road just a half
a kilometer away."
Alaa Hassan was born
near ancient Babylon and was one of 10 children.
His father was a courthouse clerk and his mother a
housewife. As a young man, he moved to an area
just outside Baghdad and worked as a computer
programmer in the Ministry of Industry. In 2000,
he met a young woman and they decided to marry.
Under Saddam's reign, one could not get
married, or open a shop or business, without
security clearance. But Alaa married without
following proper procedures. He later ran into
problems with his wife and her family; eventually
someone reported his illegal marriage to the
government. Alaa was held in a torture center for
nine months in 2000.
"The family had to
pay a bribe to find him," his brother Salam
recalls. "He was held in a warehouse near the law
college. They beat his hands and his body. He had
bruises everywhere."
Salam recalls
visiting Alaa where he was detained. "It was a big
warehouse with a lot of rooms on the top floor.
They would do the torture in an open area so all
the other prisoners could see. Eventually, they
decided to put him on trial. They sentenced him to
25 years in jail but we paid a bribe so it was
reduced to three years."
Alaa served his
sentence at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison among
hardened criminals and political prisoners. He was
incarcerated there until just before the US
invasion in 2003, when Saddam Hussein announced a
general amnesty for all prisoners. Alaa emerged
from prison traumatized. He divorced his wife and
moved back to Babylon.
He continued living
with his family there for three months after the
fall of Saddam, but eventually he decided to look
for a job again. When a cousin found him a job at
the stationery shop, he moved back to Baghdad. He
remarried three months before he died. He had just
learned his wife was pregnant.
As with
many Iraqi casualties, it has been difficult for
Alaa's family to grieve his death. When one of his
brothers called the Baghdad morgue to see about
retrieving his body, an employee advised them not
to come because the area around the morgue was
controlled by insurgents.
So his extended
family and friends gathered together - all armed -
and walked to the morgue together through random
gunfire to retrieve the body. When they arrived,
they had to pick their way through corpses to find
Alaa.
Alaa was buried in the holy city of
Najaf last Thursday. It was a difficult trip for
the family because the roads are unsafe. The
family obtained guards from the Mahdi Army of
Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who escorted them
on the highway to Najaf and provided security at
the funeral.
Alaa's family will be
observing the traditional 40 days of mourning at
their home in Babylon. His whole family is now
moving out of Baghdad.
With colleague
Alaa Hassan, Aaron Glantz covered the
increasing violence and sectarian divisions
swallowing up Basra in the south of Iraq; the
untold stories of Haditha, raided by the US
military last year; and the local reactions over
the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the
Jordanian-born leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
