We parked our cars along the road near a checkpoint as we tried to get information about the situation in Khurmal from the civilians and to photograph their fear. Local villagers screamed at us to leave the area, to keep our flak jackets on. But there was a calm hanging around this chaos: The shooting and mortar fire between the Western-allied Kurdish peshmerga and Ansar al-Islam had stopped. We decided to heed the locals’ advice and leave. As I headed toward our car I paused. Had I gotten everything I needed? I ran back for some final images.
A pickup truck full of Kurdish peshmerga, posing with their guns, headed toward me. I photographed them as I stood alongside a tall, trim television cameraman who held his giant camera steady on his shoulder. I suddenly felt my stomach burn, an urge to flee. I ran back to our vehicle, where Elizabeth sat waiting and pulled at my car door. It slammed, and then boom.
Civilians and fellow Kurdish peshmerga soldiers carry the body of a severely wounded soldier minutes after a car bombing by the Ansar al-Islam terrorist organization at a checkpoint near Halabja, northern Iraq, March 22, 2003.
A massive explosion behind us blew our car forward. Smoke and debris clouded the windows. A mortar round? Our driver immediately hit the gas, springing us away from the scene. Behind us, all I could see was black smoke, a charcoal sandstorm billowing toward us.
“Go! Go! Go! Get out of here! Go go go go!” Elizabeth screamed.
Yes, yes, yes, go, go, go! It didn’t occur to me to stay at the scene and continue photographing. An experienced conflict photographer would know to stay, to shoot the wreckage, injured, and dead, but I was young. This was my first bomb.
A few miles down the road we pulled over as cars zoomed past us. A carcass of a pickup truck riding on three melted wheels careened past, the dismembered remains of a body in the back. We followed the truck to a marketplace, where the limp body, miraculously still alive, was passed from one car to another. Brains poured out of a gash in the head. The man was one of the peshmerga fighters I had been photographing before I ran away. It was my first casualty in Iraq.
At the hospital, bystanders, nurses, and relatives unloaded bodies into a room with gym mats on the ground. Blood covered the floors and splashed the walls. Supplies were minimal. The injured kept coming through the doors. We heard people say the explosion had been a car bomb; I was wrong, it wasn’t a mortar. I still didn’t know the difference. A car bomb—a vehicle laden with explosives, sent to detonate near a specific target—could have been aiming for our line of Land Cruisers, carefully marked with the letters T.V.
I was queasy. I held my camera tight against my face like a shield and kept shooting. An interpreter who had been working with my friend Ivan arrived with his leather jacket melted onto his arms and back and blood spattered on his face and chest. I panicked, thinking something might have happened to Ivan.
“Where’s Ivan?” I asked.
“I was not with Ivan.” He could barely speak.
I walked out to the front of the hospital to find Elizabeth. She was standing beside Eric, an Australian TV reporter, his face and glasses smudged with blood. He, too, was in shock.
“Does anyone have a satellite phone?” he asked in monotone, to the air, as if expecting no response.
“What happened? Is everyone you were with OK?” we asked, prying, as he passed in and out of waves of consciousness, trying to gather himself. He put his hands out in front of him and gestured like a conductor—waving his hands slowly back and forth, silencing us.
“One minute,” he said. “One minute . . .” His hands were still raised before him. “My cameraman is dead. Paul is dead.”
I knew Paul was the cameraman who had been next to me when I fled. He had continued shooting, and died.
Eric held Elizabeth’s phone, then looked at us. “Could you dial some numbers for me?”
I stood back a bit, fearing that Eric might sense my weakness. His shock was still acting as a sort of buffer; I didn’t want the look on my face to shatter his calm and thrust him into the agony of loss.
A Kurdish taxi driver pulled up to the entrance of the hospital and jumped out.
“Is anyone here a journalist?”
I needed an excuse to walk away from Eric and the phone call he was about to make.
“Is anyone here a journalist?” the driver repeated. “I have the body of a journalist in the trunk of my car and don’t know what to do with it.”
I definitely couldn’t handle that. I walked back over to Eric and Elizabeth. Eric rattled off a phone number, and Elizabeth dialed and handed the phone back to him. It was a number for the wife of his dead colleague, and the answering machine picked up. He hung up. Eric uttered another number, and someone picked up. It was his office in Australia.
“Hi. This is Eric. Paul is dead.”