Just three nights ago in Baghdad, Rory Carroll told Lara Marlowe of his concerns about the dangers of working in Iraq and the assignment that would see him abducted yesterday at gun-point
Rory Carroll, the young Irishman and Guardian correspondent who was kidnapped in the Shia Muslim slums of Sadr City yesterday, is one of a handful of Western journalists who are based full time in Iraq. He came here from Johannesburg last January to work for one year, after which he is to resume his job as Africa correspondent.
When we had dinner on Monday night, Rory told me he'd already booked his flight out at 10.15am on January 21st. In the meantime, he was looking forward to covering Saddam Hussein's trial. He intended to stay here through Christmas and New Year's Eve.
As a permanent correspondent here, Rory is on the roster of journalists allowed to enter the courtroom for Saddam's trial.
The order was determined by lottery, and he drew number 14. Since only four can attend at one time, he knew he would not get into the trial for weeks. Rory initially planned to go to the Convention Centre in the Green Zone and watch the trial on television there. There would be Iraqi politicians to talk to. But he changed his mind and on Tuesday night told colleagues he would watch it on television in Sadr City with a Shia Muslim family who had suffered under Saddam's rule.
Rory is one of the best informed correspondents working here. Before anyone else, he explained how British troops in Basra had bought peace with the local Mehdi Army and Badr Brigade militias by incorporating them into the British-trained police, then turning a blind eye while they fought each other and terrorised the local population. We talked about the assassination in Basra last month of an Iraqi stringer who worked for the Guardian and the New York Times - an event that deeply disturbed him.
Rory is also one of the most generous correspondents I've met. He volunteered to share the trial pool reports from the permanent press corps with me. He listened carefully to my queries about what one could and could not do in Baghdad. I know a Shia sheikh in Sadr City who is close to the popular leader, Moqtada Sadr, and speaks English, I told him. On the telephone, the sheikh told me it was too dangerous for him to come to my hotel - he thought he might be kidnapped on the way - and Rory understood perfectly my reluctance to go to Sadr City.
"Interesting question," Rory mused. "I haven't been to Sadr City for a while. [ Sheikh] Moqtada's people usually don't start working until late afternoon, so the system we'd worked out was that our driver and interpreter would drop by the evening before and tell them we'd be coming in the morning, as a courtesy."
I was weighing two other offers of interviews: a meeting with the Sunni politician Saleh Mutlak, and an offer through friends to go to the home of pro-Saddam Sunnis in Aadamiya, another Sunni neighbourhood that is a stronghold of the insurgency.
Mutlak should be all right, Rory said. One of the US networks went to see him the other day. Aadamiya was dodgy for Western men, but women reporters had gone in and out, wearing hijab. The thing was to get quickly out of the car, walk straight into the house, not linger in the street.
As my interpreter put it: "If we go to Sadr City, there are criminal gangs but no terrorists. If we go to Aadamiya, there are terrorists but no criminal gangs."
The difficult thing about working in Iraq, Rory rightly said, is that "the risk-to-reward ratio is totally skewed". In most war situations, you have a sense of where you can go safely, and what the risk is. In Baghdad, the danger is diffuse and omnipresent. It is impossible to say whether a given press conference or interview is "worth it". But if you stop going out of your hotel, you stop learning.
Last weekend, Rory went to Falluja with a US unit to cover the referendum on the constitution. Falluja has been one of the most violent cities in Iraq almost since the beginning of the occupation, and I was impressed by his courage. He and other "embedded" journalists were dropped off by US armoured vehicles a few hundred metres from polling stations, then walked there on their own.
"Don't you ever get scared?" I asked Rory. The new "shaped charges" which the insurgents use in roadside bombs worry him, he said. Before, a roadside bomb might damage an armoured vehicle and wound those inside. Now the shaped charges, which concentrate explosive power in a smaller area, destroy the vehicle and kill everyone inside.
I was trying to arrange an "embed" with US forces in Amariya, a request which has since been denied. "Amariya is good," Rory said. "There's a lot going on there." He explained - as the military press office had not - that I would enter the Green Zone by early evening and sleep in the Convention Centre.
"I'll lend you my sleeping bag," he offered, adding with a laugh, "I'm afraid it's smelly." Rory knows the routine by heart; early in the morning, the US helicopters take you out from the Green Zone, even if the base you're visiting is just a few kilometres away.
Rory thought the security situation might be improving. "It's been a long time since there was an attempted kidnapping," he said. "Some of us are even thinking about going out to restaurants again."
I was surprised to hear that Rory still goes to Warda and the Honey Market, grocers that sell imported food. "It's one of my few contacts with real life in Iraq," he said. "I don't want to give it up."
With his slightly ginger hair, he could be mistaken for a Kurd, he said. But his employees - interpreter, driver, and the two men who followed in a "chase car" - invariably blew his disguise by insisting on carrying his grocery basket.
The French ambassador to Baghdad was on my flight from Paris to Amman last week. He scolded me and other journalists who were coming to cover the referendum and Saddam's trial, saying: "You're taking enormous risks. You must know that there are spies in every hotel, tipping off the kidnappers."
"He's right," Rory said (though I don't believe the men who seized him in Sadr City yesterday were tipped off by his hotel). "I buy a lot of chocolate bars, and I give them to all the hotel guards," he laughed. "Because I always hope that when it comes time to sell a journalist, they'll think, 'Oh, not him. He's the nice one who gives me chocolate'." I hadn't thought of chocolate, I said, but I tip generously, and am careful never to have rows with anyone, for the same reason.
Most foreign correspondents here use a chase car, the idea being that the second car can alert you by cell phone if you're being followed. When I arrived in Baghdad this time, I discussed the possibility with Kassim, The Irish Times interpreter. "Iraqis know about the chase car now," he said. "It just makes you more visible, and it multiplies the number of people who know where you're going."
We decided not to hire a second car. But we use three different cars, depending on the day. To try to ease Baghdad's horrific traffic jams, the government has instituted an odd/even plate number scheme. Whenever we've been slightly uneasy about appointments, we take a powerful BMW, in the hope of outrunning kidnappers. We also leave a note on my desk, with the names, phone numbers and address of the people we're going to see.
These preparations are an integral part of working here. So is attention to clothing. "Have you noticed that Iraqi men wear baggier jeans, higher up on their waists than Westerners?" Rory asked me on Monday night. "And they tend to wear striped pyjama-like shirts." He had gone to Iraqi shops and bought local clothing.
He's also noticed that Iraqi men carry their personal belonging around in plastic shopping bags, so for example when he walks those perilous few hundred metres from the car to the entry of the Green Zone, he carries computer, notebooks, pens and cell phone in a plastic bag.
"Some of the American correspondents have got the swarthy, unshaven Arab look, even the clothes," Rory said. "But then they can't resist carrying that chic reporter's bag, and the effect is spoiled." Rory and I then had a detailed discussion of hijab or Islamic dress, which I began wearing in Iraq when the situation turned very nasty in April 2004.
Until this trip, I'd never given much thought to the details. Rory agreed with me that Western journalists never seem to get the hijab right. "Most Iraqi women don't wear full abayas [ long robes]," he observed correctly. I had realised that my black cotton manteau, a pocketed, big-buttoned sack that I bought in Tehran years ago, stood out here.
The women who frisked me when I went into the polling station last Saturday asked me, intie iraniya (are you Iranian)? It was Kassim who suggested I change headscarves. I'd chosen the least conspicuous ones before leaving Paris, but they were still coloured. He lent me a black scarf belonging to his wife. During those long hours in Baghdad traffic, I immediately noticed the difference: no one looks at me.
Or at least I hope not.