World View: I have never had a knife held to my throat. But a gun has been pointed at me several times and I was nearly beaten to death at one stage. It was a terrifying experience that left me physically bruised and psychologically battered but wiser. That was during my time as a BBC war correspondent when front lines and gunfire were the order of the day.
Back in 1997 I waded into a crowd of Bosnian Serbs who had spent the day firing Molotov cocktails at American soldiers in Brcko in northern Bosnia. High on violence and fuelled by the local brandy, they were thirsty for action. As I jostled through the sweat and stench of the mob, I realised I was delivering them dinner on a plate.
They began whacking me with planks of wood and shoving me towards a wall as they tried to throw me to the ground. Being beaten up by a mob is a very lonely experience. I remember wondering how long would it take for them to kill me and how much pain I would endure before death grabbed my hand.
As it happened my time wasn't up. I was rescued by American soldiers barricaded behind an imposing wall of barbed wire, armoured cars and tanks. They fired shots in the air, and I was dragged over the barricades and yanked to safety.
I was lucky. I survived. Other war correspondents were not so fortunate. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) says war reporting has become dramatically more dangerous; 78 journalists reporting on conflicts around the world have been killed so far this year according to the IFJ. In Iraq alone 51 journalists have died there since March 2003. Now kidnapping of journalists and other civilians is adding to the statistics.
Take Enzo Baldoni, the Italian journalist whom Iraqi militants executed after capturing him in August. Baldoni (56) reported for the Milan-based weekly Diario. His captors demanded Italy withdraw its 3,000 troops from Iraq within 48 hours. It was an impossible request.
France has also felt the pinch. Georges Malbrunot (41) of the French daily Le Figaro and Christian Chesnot (38) of Radio France were abducted last month while working in Iraq. Their captors, who call themselves the Islamic Army of Iraq, demanded an equally impossible result. They wanted France to rescind a new law banning the wearing of religious symbols like Muslim headscarves in French schools.
A Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, was also beheaded by Islamic extremists in Pakistan in February 2002 after being kidnapped during his investigation into possible links between the accused British "shoe-bomber", Richard Reid, and a Pakistani militant.
The escalation in the targeting of journalists and other civilians is a sign of the times. The changing nature of modern-day conflicts is blurring the line between messenger and message. Chesnot and Malbrunot were captured, not for their reporting, but because they represented a country seen to disrespect Islamic custom.
What's bitterly ironic is that the two men may have considered themselves immune from attack given their government's opposition to this war. The French are rightly outraged.
Since 9/11 journalists, aid workers and other civilians are being sucked into the vortex of enemy lines. In Iraq's case the enemy now includes cooks and cleaners, truck-drivers and laundry workers. Twelve domestic workers from Nepal had only just arrived in Iraq in early August when they were kidnapped by Islamic extremists and executed.
And yet, what the executioners fail to understand is that the guillotine is self-destructive. If journalists and aid workers cannot go to war zones, the truth will remain hidden.
This week's siege of the school in Beslan in North Ossetia is an example. Chechen rebels complain that the world ignores their plight. When Chechen militants stormed a Moscow theatre in October 2002 one of their demands was greater media coverage. Yet they seemed oblivious to their own contribution in preventing coverage of their story.
Chechnya is considered too dangerous a place to visit for most reporters, aid workers and other international civilians. Both the Russians and the Chechens are guilty of this censorship. The outcome prevents proper coverage of Russian atrocities against Chechens and Chechen violence in return.
We don't get to hear why widows and grieving sisters end up strapping themselves with belts of explosives and pressing their deadly buttons in planes over Russia or by Moscow's metro stations.
I vividly remember attending an international press conference in 1996 when the spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross delivered the sobering news that six of her colleagues had been murdered in a hospital compound outside Grozny, the Chechen capital.
The five nurses and architect, all international workers, went to Chechnya to help locals. Their thanks was a bullet to their heads. Chechen rebels were blamed, but truth is illusive in Chechnya.
One courageous journalist I knew who reported from Chechnya was the excellent Reuters war correspondent, Kurt Schork. I got to know Kurt in Bosnia where he wrote some of the most compelling reports during the war.
I remember being highly entertained by Kurt as he recalled, with typical New York wit, his war tales in Chechnya. He told me he scrambled with Chechen rebels through Grozny's buildings so he could follow the fighting. He said the Chechens were so tough they wanted to be up close to the Russian soldiers so they could see their eyes when they fired their fatal bullets.
Kurt Schork was killed in a military ambush in Sierra Leone in May 2000. The award-winning Spanish cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno travelling with him was also shot dead.
We are all worse off without them.
• Karen Coleman is foreign editor of Newstalk 106 and presenter of the station's Wide Angle programme on Saturday and Sunday mornings