My recent diary about the Salvador/Phoenix Option in Iraq was based on a posthumous article by Knight-Ridder’s Yasser Salihee. The article concluded with a postscript about Salihee’s death being under mysterious circumstances. The circumstances have been revealed.
Knight Ridder Baghdad Bureau Chief Hannah Allam recently wrote of Salihee: “We weren’t really looking for reporters at the time, but Yasser’s impeccable English and sunny personality made him too hard to pass up. We hired him and took great delight in watching him blossom into one of our best reporters, the one who accompanied us to militant mosques and talked his way into insurgent-controlled Fallujah.”
In the last story he worked on, Salihee used his medical expertise to review records of Sunnis brought to city morgues after reportedly being taken by men in police uniforms.
Salihee is survived by his wife, Raghad, also a physician, and their 2-year-old daughter, Danya.
link
While witness accounts leave many aspects unclear, there is no proof to date that he was specifically targeted for being a journalist or for his writings.
He was shot as his car neared a joint patrol of American and Iraqi troops who’d stopped to search a building for snipers. […]
Most of the witnesses told another Knight Ridder Iraqi special correspondent that no warning shots were fired.
Yasser Salihee, RIP
How horrible to have someone like him no longer with us. It does worry me terribly that so many journalists have been killed. I can’t help but wonder if he was targeted. My thoughts and sympathies go towards his surviving wife and daughter, Raghad and Danya. This is just so depressing.
I’m pretty sure of it. No evidence mind you. But come one. Shot by a sniper. This administration has stooped to new lows in the pursuit of the ends. Whatever means necessary. Including lying to their own country.
Yes, journalists have been targeted. It is a form of terrorism, it is to quash freedom of speech. We’re not going to win this “war”, with freedom of speech.
The lines terrorist and “legitimate war” are often blurred.
I’ve suspected as much ever since we learned that journalists were afraid to venture outside their hotel in Baghdad. The US tank attack on a hotel where a bunch were holed up near the front lines was the first step. The threats and attacks on journalists during the al-Sadr mess were an escalation. Now it looks like US snipers are picking off those whose reporting they find inconvenient, and US patrols are being tipped off about journalist vehicles as dangerous potential hostiles. (The case with the Italians)
The sheer number of “accidents” involving journalists seems strange. Perhaps our military did learn a lesson from Vietnam. Take out the journalists first.
…be before U.S. government-trained death squads start operating on U.S. soil against U.S. citizens.
Thanks for this grim story, Hal.
If this is happening to well-known Iraqis, imagine how
many ordinary people are getting hit by snipers. It’s
open season on any Iraqi-looking person, anyone driving
a car, anyone walking down the street.
US military please leave Iraq, you are not preventing
civil war, you are killing Iraqis.