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“It is such a feeling of failure.”Īyyoub, of Al Jazeera, was the first Arab journalist to die in the war.
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“I can’t explain to you what it is to have someone you know just die in your hands,” he said. Later, Delay agonized that his efforts to save Protsyuk had been unsuccessful. “When I got him on the table in the emergency room, the doctor said, ‘He is dead.’ ” It took five more minutes to get to Olympic Hospital in downtown Baghdad.
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Instead of going to a major hospital, their hired driver took them to a small clinic that was unable to handle the serious wounds. The hotel elevator stopped at every floor on the way down. He and others put Protsyuk on a blanket to rush him to a hospital. We forced open his jaws to get some air into him and got him breathing again.” Delay also saw that his friend had a severe abdominal wound. “Taras was lying on the floor on his back, unconscious,” Delay said. “The window was shattered.”Īmong the wounded, Delay found his longtime friend Protsyuk. “People were screaming and crying, out of control,” he said. munition claimed the life of a correspondent of the Arab news station Al Jazeera. And they tell themselves the odds are against being hurt, especially if they are in a hotel filled with other reporters.īut Tuesday, an American tank fired a round into the Palestine Hotel, killing a Ukrainian cameraman and a Spanish cameraman, only hours after another U.S. They make rules such as not going out after dark and always wearing a flak jacket. Journalists working in wartime often concoct rationales to persuade themselves they’ll be safe. With its seedy demeanor, it was much like the old Commodore Hotel in Beirut, where journalists flocked in the 1970s and ‘80s because they believed they would be safe there even in the face of civil war and Israeli attacks on the Lebanese capital. But the Palestine Hotel, on the east bank of the Tigris River, had been seen by journalists as a sanctuary.Īnd because of that, the erratic elevators and the absence of hot water and electricity in the rooms - not to mention the occasional cockroach - were endured as nuisances in covering the Iraqi side of the war. bombs to the wrath of hard-core Iraqi loyalists to the chaos that could erupt in the event of a power vacuum.
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There have been a range of fears for journalists here since the beginning of the war, from U.S.
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The slender illusion of safety for journalists in the Iraqi capital was shattered Tuesday as a reporter and two cameramen were killed - all by American fire.
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