Journalist Charles Sennott

DATE April 17, 2003 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Charles Sennott of The Boston Globe describes recent
events in northern Iraq
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

After spending over two months in northern Iraq, Charles Sennott returned home
to London this week. Sennott is a foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe.
He's a former Middle East bureau chief for The Globe, and covered the war in
Afghanistan. We last spoke on FRESH AIR a couple of weeks ago, just after he
gained access to the terrorist camp in northern Iraq run by the militant
Islamic group Ansar al-Islam. This was right after the camp was taken over by
US Special Forces and Kurdish fighters.

During Sennott's travels through northern Iraq he stayed in touch with a
brigade of Kurdish fighters. He was with them when he reported on the
liberation of Kirkuk, the oil-rich city in northern Iraq which Saddam Hussein
ethnically cleansed of its Kurdish population. Sennott had become friends
with the brigade's commander, but the commander didn't get to see the
liberation of the city his family is from. He was killed in the fighting at
Ansar al-Islam. Earlier today, I asked Charles Sennott to tell us about some
of the Kurdish fighters in this brigade who did see the liberation of Kirkuk.

Mr. CHARLES SENNOTT (Correspondent, The Boston Globe; Author, "The Body and
the Blood"): Well, these men were very interesting warriors. They are
fighters for the Kurdish opposition. They've fought Saddam's regime for at
least 20 years, all of them.

GROSS: So they're no youngsters.

Mr. SENNOTT: They're not youngsters, and I think maybe that's why I related
to them, feeling like an aging warrior myself in this war zone, to be hanging
out with fighters in their mid-30s to even 40. It gave them a completely
different perspective on this war. When they lost Tarek(ph), they were very
emotional about it. They had a very stoic sense, as the Kurdish fighters do,
of letting it go and realizing that, you know, the name peshmerga, which is
what they call their militias, means `those who face death,' and they accept
death, but they had a particularly hard time accepting it with Tarek, because
he was such a unique individual, such a great reputation not only for
fighting, but as a friend and as a very funny man. He made us laugh very
hard.

And they in the brigade had seen us getting to know Tarek, and so when we went
in, we went in on our own, but we quickly met up with probably 10 other
members of the unit, all of them from Kirkuk, which made their story very
unique. They had all been forced out of Kirkuk for at least 12 years, since
1991. Some had been forced out even earlier. Many of them had participated
in the failed uprising of 1991 and suffered the real brutal response to that
from Saddam's regime. So this moment, when they came in, meant so much to
them on so many levels and we were able to know several of those levels. And
we also just experienced that moment, that incredible moment of when the big
bronze statue in the center of Kirkuk came down. I was standing with them,
and they were hugging each other and they were hugging me, and they were
saying things like, `If only Tarek had been here to see this.' And so it
really was a very personal level on which we were able to experience that
liberation.

GROSS: Now here's one of the things that they and a lot of Kurds are up
against now. The Kurds who were ethnically cleansed from Kirkuk might want to
go home now, but in their homes are going to be Arab people who are living
there because they moved in when the Kurds were ethnically cleansed, so who
claims the right of ownership to those homes and to that land? I mean, this
is a real problem up ahead, isn't it?

Mr. SENNOTT: This is what makes Kirkuk so complicated and what I think makes
Kirkuk, I think, actually the truest test of the interim government as it
takes shape, with the United States and the Iraqi opposition leadership, and
those members of the Iraqi government who will become part of the interim
government. Kirkuk is a tinderbox, an ethnic tinderbox, made up of Arabs,
Kurds, the Turkoman, who have been there since the Ottoman Empire, and
Assyrian Christians, among others. Those groups all have a kind of roiling
tension that's going on between them, and all of that tension was playing out
on the street.

And you're absolutely right. There are Kurds who are returning, who know now
that there are Arab families who've been assigned to their homes by Saddam's
so-called policy of Arabization, which he started really in the late 1980s in
earnest. Many of the Arabs, fearing the Kurdish return, had left, certainly
those Arabs who came in as recently as the late 1980s. The Arab families
who'd been there longer when the policy of Arabization first got going in the
'70s, I think they have stayed on, and what we heard in many cases was the
Kurds are willing to allow them to stay there until the situation is resolved,
until the deeds for all of these homes can be obtained and all of the
paperwork can be gone through.

And so one of the critical components of the return to Kirkuk was actually
seizing those documents, getting into the equivalent to city hall and
capturing the documents before they could be looted or stolen or burned or
destroyed in some way. And that actually was part of the political component
of the Kirkuk brigade's responsibility. That was their job, and I was with
them when they seized a large group of these files. I'm not sure if it was
the entire file for the city, but it certainly was a pretty significant number
of filing cabinets full of old deeds, and they felt confident that this will
give them a start in trying to undo the history that Saddam had put in place
in Kirkuk.

GROSS: One of the great historical tragedies of the war is the looting of the
museums of Iraq. Were there museums in northern Iraq that got looted?

Mr. SENNOTT: Yeah. The first day, I did not have time to go to the museum.
It was one of those scenes where you're rushing to accomplish your work, and
you kind of--I remember driving by the museum, thinking, `My God, I wonder if
that's been looted,' and on the second morning, I went in to see, and of
course, it had been completely looted within the first hours of the collapse
of the regime in Kirkuk. The guard was there, who had witnessed the looting,
and the museum director was there, who had also been present when most of the
looting took place, and they both told us that it was fighters who claimed to
be part of the peshmerga, or the Kurdish forces, who came in at gunpoint and
cleared the shelves of pieces that date back to the Babylonian time, through
the Sumerian era and the Assyrian empire.

The big fear here is that this was not just chaotic looting, but that there
may actually be an organized attempt through an underground and a black market
in these pieces, to have seized the moment. A lot of the museum directors who
I spoke to and some of the experts on this in the Kurdish-controlled part of
the north who were very concerned about it said that the speed with which
these pieces were taken and kind of the efficiency with which it was done
indicate that it may be a professional ring, so they're investigating it, and
they're very worried about it.

GROSS: So when you say that people in the museum said that the people doing
the looting claimed to be members of the peshmerga, the Kurdish fighters, did
the people in the museum doubt the claim?

Mr. SENNOTT: It's impossible to know, because it was just such a chaotic
scene, with all of these forces wearing these kind of baggy tan pants,
sneakers and a shirt that just says `PUK' on it, and a Kalashnikov rifle, and
the traditional head scarf, all of them just rushed into the city, and it's
very difficult to know if, indeed, that person who came to that museum and
said `We are with the Kurdish forces,' or the peshmerga, indeed was. It's
impossible for me to know, and it's even impossible for this museum director
to know. You don't necessarily ask someone with a Kalashnikov for their ID or
for their names or for what division they're from, and of course, this
official, who was a Turkoman from Kirkuk who ran the museum, was really
frightened for his life, because the truth is, he was part of the regime, and
so he was very quiet and stood by as most of these items were taken out.

Now he claims that many of the items in the Kirkuk museum were actually
replicas, and in an interesting twist, some of the Kurdish officials I talked
to were very worried about that claim. How do they know they were replicas,
and where is the paperwork that can prove these were replicas? And if they
are replicas, where are the originals, and where were they kept? And all of
this becomes this investigative process, almost like a crime story in which
people are just beginning to gather all the facts, to find out what has
happened to their history, and how did it vanish, and what will it mean for
Iraqis when they return and their history has been stolen from them? So this
is a very intense corner of this story that's going to unfold, I think, in the
next few months or even years, where they'll be looking for these pieces to
emerge in the black market.

GROSS: Do you think this could easily have been avoided?

Mr. SENNOTT: I do. I think with a little bit more planning, a little bit
more foresight on the part of the officials on both sides; they could have had
more telephone contact, for example, or sent messages in to the museum
directors to say `We have someone who is assigned from our peshmerga. This is
their name; this is the, you know, code word. As soon as they get there, you
relinquish the museum to them.' Certainly these messages were communicated
for other areas of Kirkuk. For example, the huge tribal lands that were held
by the Arab families, there was direct communication between the Kurdish
opposition forces and those Arabs who owned that land. Messages were sent
back and forth through the smuggling routes, even during the war, and if that
kind of attention could have been paid to vast tracts of farming land,
certainly that kind of attention also could have been paid to the museums that
hold their history.

GROSS: My guest is Charles Sennott of The Boston Globe. We'll talk more
after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Charles Sennott is my guest, foreign correspondent for The Boston
Globe. He just returned home to London from over two months in northern Iraq.

Charles, how did you know it was time to leave?

Mr. SENNOTT: Well, I knew it was time to leave because I really felt like the
story was winding down. I think the story of the war was in its final stages.
I think the last piece of it was Tikrit, and we were hearing that there was no
opposition in Tikrit. And certainly the large-scale fighting was over. I
think there will be a lot of fighting that will continue in small pockets in
all of these cities all over Iraq. But we really felt like it was time to go.
I have a family. I have four boys under the age of five, so it's a pretty
extraordinary pressure on my wife when I'm away that long. My brother has
children. I was traveling with my brother, and he had just been through a
pretty traumatic experience. And we just kind of looked at each other, and
you just know, `Let's start working on getting out of here.' And we made our
decision and just began working on trying to leave.

GROSS: You mentioned that your brother had a pretty traumatic experience.
It's a pretty extraordinary experience. Why don't you tell us what happened
to your brother.

Mr. SENNOTT: It was on the first day...

GROSS: Let me start by saying...

Mr. SENNOTT: Sure.

GROSS: ...your brother's a photographer who works for the Minneapolis Star
Tribune, and you were traveling together. He was traveling with the reporter
who he works with. You were traveling with your brother, that reporter and
another reporter from a British newspaper. Do I have that straight?

Mr. SENNOTT: That's correct.

GROSS: And so what happened to your brother?

Mr. SENNOTT: My brother, Rick, is a very good photographer, very aggressive.
And we were rushing down the road towards Kirkuk that morning. And you
literally could see the abandoned positions on the roadside, people coming out
and starting to celebrate; very chaotic scene. And we were separated on the
road. And I went into the center of town and began reporting there, watching
the bronze statue coming down. And I kept looking over my shoulder thinking
it's very unlike Rick not to be right on this image, which was a powerful
image of the liberation. But I figured if he's not here, then there's
probably somewhere I should be.

So I later learned that Rick was actually one of the first reporters to push
forward to the collapsing front line. And as he did that, he drove toward the
oil fields where there was an oil fire burning. A very powerful image in the
oil field burning because the fire is enormous and it's so much a piece of the
story of Kirkuk because of its vast oil reserves and a sense that it is the
ultimate prize of the north because of that oil industry. And Rick wanted to
capture that image quickly.

What he didn't realize is there were still Iraqi forces in that area who had
not yet completed their retreat. And there were elements of the Fedayeen,
which is almost like a volunteer force that Saddam had created. And it became
one of his more brutal pieces of his military apparatus that was able to
recruit fighters from Syria and other Arab countries. And they're
particularly tough and particularly dangerous and particularly had an eye out
for killing Americans.

Rick began to move forward on the road and two Kurdish fighters stopped him
and said, `We think there are Iraqi soldiers in here who have not yet left.'
Rick and the reporter who he was working with, Paul, pulled back and stopped
to watch because if there was going to be a fight, they would have been on top
of it and they would have been able to document it.

What happened in the next few minutes was one of the--a military truck
literally, as my brother describes it, came out of the smoke from the oil well
fire directly toward the Kurdish forces. Two men were in the truck. One was
driving and holding a rifle; one was a passenger and had a grenade pin in his
mouth and another grenade in his other hand and a Kalashnikov over his
shoulder. And he jumped out of the truck and there was an engagement between
the Kurdish forces and him. They literally were grabbing each other by the
throat, which I think is the most powerful image my brother took. And there
was a struggle going on. What my brother didn't know was happening, and later
learned had happened, was the Fedayeen soldier said, `We don't have a fight
with you, Kurdish fighter, but we want to kill those Americans down the road.'

GROSS: Those Americans being your brother and the reporter from the Star
Tribune.

Mr. SENNOTT: And the reporter Paul McEnroe from the Star Tribune.

They let the Fedayeen fighter, who had the grenade in his mouth and one in his
hand and the Kalashnikov across his shoulder go. Some agreement had been
struck in which he would not pull the pin on the grenade and kill the Kurdish
fighters if they let him go, and he quickly disappeared. They then turned and
shot the other fighter who was with him because he did not have a grenade on
him. He is dragged out of the truck and left on the side of the road.

Rick and Paul are documenting all this and, of course, wondering where did
that other fighter go because there is a large field between them and the road
they are on in which this fighter has now disappeared. They stayed, in
retrospect, maybe a little too long documenting this scene, and as they turned
to get ready to go they saw the Iraqi soldier who had lived, who had the
grenades, running down the roads towards them, and they basically jumped in
their car and drove away and got away. But he clearly had been kind of lying
in wait to kill them.

We believe that that soldier was then killed by the Kurdish forces. And what
was strange about all this was Rick and Paul had this very frightening
experience and some very powerful images that they documented of the
experience. And I happened down the road 45 minutes later and actually saw
the first Iraqi soldier, the Fedayeen fighter, who we now know was from Syria,
lying on the side of the road. This is the first one they had shot who had
been driving the truck.

I had no idea who he was, but when we drove up to his body there were Kurdish
soldiers kicking him in the head, and every time he tried to lift his head
they would kick his head again. And he was clearly in the throes of death,
clearly suffering, had been disarmed. Myself and another reporter basically
asked them to try to get him to a hospital, to take him and put him in an
ambulance or put him in the back of any vehicle they could find and get him to
a hospital. If the war is over, if he's unarmed, why not do that? And they
came running out with passports that were Syrian and said, `He is a Syrian,'
and they tried to kill peshmerga. He didn't say they tried to kill Americans,
but we know now from the photographs it was the same body, the same person,
who had tried to kill my brother and the other reporter, Paul.

GROSS: So...

Mr. SENNOTT: Eventually they put him in the back of some beat-up vehicle, in
the trunk, and his head was literally kind of hanging out the side. You could
tell he was barely clinging to life. And they told us they would be driving
him off to a hospital, but our sense was that had we not shown up they were
about to kill him. And so just a weird coincidence in a war zone to have
paths cross like that and not realize this is the same fighter who had,
minutes before, tried to kill your brother.

GROSS: Well, that's the thing. When you tried to spare his life you didn't
know he had tried to kill your brother. Then you finally found your brother
and figured out that the guy you had tried to save was the guy who had tried
to kill him. So did you have second thoughts about trying to save his life
after that?

Mr. SENNOTT: No, I didn't. And I don't think my brother would, either,
actually. You know, there was a point where even Rick and Paul were saying,
`If that guy's not dead, you should take him to the hospital.' They could see
him dying. So I think even when you're a reporter and you're caught up in the
middle of the fighting and you feel the intensity of all of it going around
you, I think those of us who've done it before realize you're not in this
fight. And as much as you can recognize the sense of hatred of one side
toward you and the sense of them, frankly, in this case, being on the wrong
side of history, I don't think that diminishes your sense that they're still
human beings, and maybe in the aftermath of this war should be given a chance,
at a minimum, to live.

GROSS: Charles Sennott is a foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe.
He'll be back in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is
FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

GROSS: Getting into northern Iraq wasn't easy; neither was getting out.
Coming up, we continue our conversation with Boston Globe foreign
correspondent Charles Sennott.

(Announcements)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Charles Sennott. This
week, he returned home to London after reporting from northern Iraq for over
two months. Sennott is a foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe and is a
former Globe Middle East bureau chief. He traveled through northern Iraq in a
small team of journalists that included his brother, Rick Sennott, a
photojournalist working with the Minneapolis Star Tribune. When we left off,
Charles Sennott was telling us the story of how his brother Rick was nearly
killed by one of the Fedayeen, Saddam Hussein's paramilitary group. The
fighter who tried to kill him was attacked by Kurdish fighters known as the
peshmerga.

Well, you know, your brother published photographs in the Minneapolis Star
Tribune of the fighter who tried to kill him, and there was a photo of him
dead, lying on the road as he was abandoned, as the peshmerga were driving on.
Pretty incredible to publish a photograph of, you know, a guy lying dying, a
guy who tried to kill you. Did you talk to your brother about the photograph
and about having it published?

Mr. SENNOTT: I did. I wish my brother was here. He's traveling, and he
would be more eloquent than I could be on this topic. But he felt very
strongly that they had seen this war on a very personal level, from the
beginning to the end, and it was almost a strangely fitting closure to a story
for them that it got that personal, that the war became something that
involved them directly and in which they were targeted. And when that
happened and when they had that intense personal connection to the end of the
story of the liberation of Kirkuk, they both felt, `It is time to call it a
day.' And I think they felt that not just personally because of their safety,
but I think they felt it journalistically in that this was a very personal
experience, and that's how it ended and they're ready to let it go.

GROSS: When your brother and the reporter, Paul McEnroe, realized that they
had survived this very close call, and then when you met up with them later in
the day, did you do anything to celebrate the fact that they were still alive
or did you just kind of get back to work and keep going?

Mr. SENNOTT: Well, I, in fact, worried about them all night; did not hear
from them until I got a message the next morning. Then I called them and
immediately headed for the city where they were, which is Sulaymaniyah, which
is about an hour and a half from Kirkuk, and in relative safety. And, you
know, as soon as I heard that, I worked for a couple hours to reach my
brother. Because one of the things about being in a war zone is communication
is extremely difficult. So as soon as I could get to him, I did, but I
actually didn't know about it for too long, frankly. It was one of those
situations where I kept asking all of our friends who are colleagues, `Have
you seen my brother? Have you seen Paul?'

And when we finally met up, yeah, there was really an intense sense of, `Let's
go through this. How did this happen? And how did you get out there that
quickly?' And, you know, you always second-guess yourself, and you revisit
these trips and you ask yourselves, `Did you do the right thing?' I don't
know if you can ever come up with the right answer. All you do is fall back
on the idea, `Hey, I'm glad you're alive.' And in this case, you know, not
just glad that a colleague's alive but glad that my brother was. So, yeah, we
celebrated. We had one of these warm horrible beers that you can get in
northern Iraq called Efes, and we were very happy to see each other.

GROSS: Did you feel like you came across a lot of stories in northern Iraq
that were astonishing, yet not quite appropriate for The Boston Globe, your
newspaper?

Mr. SENNOTT: I think every reporter who's working the story, you end up with
two different realities happening. You are essentially trying to cover the
war, or at least your piece of it, and the amount of time you spend waiting
for that piece of your war to happen is so much longer than I think people who
watch CNN realize. You cover a front line for days and weeks, and you wait
for it to move and you wait for that moment when the air strikes start. And
certainly in northern Iraq, the waiting was even longer because of the failure
of the opening of a massive northern front. The gains were incremental.

And so the reporting side of it is almost like one file. Then you have a
split-screen separate file, which is your personal story of the people with
whom you're living and the people you're getting to know, and for us in the
Kurdish areas, those relationships were very intense, and a few of them were,
for example, getting to know Dr. Baktiar Fayeek(ph), who's the doctor in
Halabjah, who is still struggling every day with thousands of patients who
suffer the aftereffects of the 1988 gas attack on Halabjah, which really made
it synonymous with Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons. He works every
day with young teen-age girls or girls in their 20s who suffer from very
complex cancers, with people who've been blinded by the attack, congenital
birth defects, miscarriages which are at a rate 15 times higher than a similar
sized village that they've done a comparative study with.

And you become very personal with these people and very close to them, and
when George Bush and the White House announces that we're going to be fighting
in the name of these people of Halabjah against whom Saddam Hussein used a
chemical attack on his own people, and then you talk to Dr. Baktiar, who's a
very polite man, who quietly tells you, `Yes, well, that's true, but where
were they 15 years ago when this happened? Why didn't they condemn the attack
then? Why didn't the United States provide any medical help to the victims of
Halabjah?' And you begin to know his history and you begin to know his sense
not only of suffering the attack but of being used for years and decades and
even generations by all of the vying powers in Iraq. And when liberation day
happens and you look in his eyes and you know all of that history, it doesn't
fit in your daily newspaper story, but it's what makes being a reporter who's
not embedded, who's not with the US military, but who's spent time with the
people on the ground a very intense and I would even say rewarding experience
in that I think you get to know the complexity of the whole story.

GROSS: When you were in northern Iraq, did news of the death of the two
American embedded journalists, Michael Kelly and David Bloom, reach you?

Mr. SENNOTT: Yes, it did. And, you know, all of us were, of course, terribly
saddened by the news, but I think a lot of people also knew Michael Kelly. I
had met him briefly, and I know that there were many correspondents who knew
him very well. He'd done outstanding work for The Boston Globe, for one
thing, in the first Gulf War. And it just came as such a--I don't know--I
mean, it's not a shock, because in a way, you're almost expecting to hear this
horrible news. But when you hear that news about someone who is such a
respected colleague, who on many levels didn't have to be there--he had proven
himself in so many different conflicts and in so many intense levels. I think
he wanted to return as a kind of bookend for a career that really began with
the first Gulf War and could end with it.

And I think there are many of us, including myself, who came with that kind of
framework; that, you know, one of the first experiences many of us had was the
first Gulf War. Now here's this other one. And when you hear of a
correspondent who's done so much with his life and so much with his work in
those intervening years and who has a family, children, it is a deeply
depressing moment. And everyone just kind of stops and everyone gets very
quiet, and all of the personal calculations of `Why are you here?' begin to
take effect, and you begin to go through all of your reasons again. And I
think everyone does this every time they hear tragic news like that. Why am I
here? Is this worth it? Is it time to get out? Is this story that personal
and that intense for me that I am willing to risk my children not having a
father and, you know, your wife not having a husband and your mother not
having a son, your brother not having a brother? And you do these
calculations often but, of course, most intensely when you get news like that.

GROSS: Is part of that personal calculus that you have to do figuring out how
much of wanting to be there is bearing witness to a really important story and
how much of it is about career?

Mr. SENNOTT: Yeah. I think a lot of it is career motivated, to be honest. I
think a lot of correspondents get into this zone where they don't want to miss
the big one, where they really want to be part of the big story. It's a
genetic flaw of journalists, if you will, that we get addicted to being close
to the flame. But I think for the journalists, for the good ones who really
care about the story, who've really gotten to know the Middle East, I think
there's a lot of really feeling an obligation of reporting it accurately, of
wanting to get there so that you can bring all that history that you know, so
you can bring all of that layered complexity to the story as best you can, and
to do it in a way that someone who has never covered the region--you know,
they just can't do it, and you know that, and it makes you want to, as you put
it very well, bear witness to what's going on, because you feel like you have
a lot to add. I wouldn't say you're an expert witness, but certainly, you're
a witness with experience. And if you are a witness with experience, I think
you can be a truer witness to what's going on.

GROSS: My guest is Charles Sennott of The Boston Globe. We'll talk more
after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Charles Sennott, foreign
correspondent for The Boston Globe. He just returned to his home in England
after over two months in northern Iraq.

You and your brother Rick, who you were traveling with, had satellite phones;
at least I'm certain you had a satellite phone. I assume that he did, too.
So what was your approach to using that to call your wife or your mother and
letting them know how you were? You know, did you want to stay in constant
touch or just not share some of the more horrible things that were happening?

Mr. SENNOTT: I think the way we use the phone is to stay in touch as much as
possible. You know, you are really busy when you're in the field. I mean,
you have downtime, but the truth is you're working a good 18 hours a day, and
you tend to be sleeping in very strange places, like on the floor of the
commander's house or in the back of your truck somewhere, or whatever. Just
one day turns into another, and it's very easy to lose touch. But in my case,
my wife, who was a TV producer for "MacNeil-Lehrer," was pretty sophisticated
about how I would call.

And because we have the four boys who really didn't understand why I was away
that long, what Julie did is she rigged a speakerphone in their bedroom, and I
would say every third night, if I had the time--and I worked very hard to find
the time--I could actually tell them a story. And that was something in this
war that made me love this modern communication. It was a great way to stay
in touch with the family and also a very subtle way that I was able to let
them know what I was doing, and I was basically making up these fantastic
stories out of whole cloth about this kingdom and these two kings and how
there was a bad king and a good king, and trying to keep them sheltered from
the war but, at the same time, understand that I was there for a pretty
important reason, and that I wanted them to try their best to be patient and
that I'd be home soon. And I think it worked. I think it kept us in touch
and it allowed us to have this family moment from a distance. It was very
unique and I think one of the things about modern communication with satellite
phones in a war zone that makes it a little bit easier to be out there doing
your job.

GROSS: Wow. You know, once you realized that it was time to get out--and,
you know, this happened after your brother was nearly killed by a member of
the Fedayeen, the Saddam Hussein militia. When you realized it was time to
get out, then you had to figure out how to get out. It wasn't that easy to
leave. You weren't embedded. You were on your own. Is it hard to get out of
northern Iraq as an American journalist?

Mr. SENNOTT: It is. It's very hard, for the reason that Syria is a
closed-off option because of the borders--you know, it's just very difficult
to get across. If you're lucky, if you have connections into the Syrian
government, you might be able to get out that way; very unlikely, though, and
also very dangerous because there were a lot of retreating Ba'athists going
through these different, you know, exits, and so you had to be very careful in
that area.

Turkey had proven to be a very surly and difficult ally in this war, if we can
still call them an ally. And for those of us who came in through Turkey with
the promise that we would return in three days, which I did, we were
blacklisted. We were not allowed to go out because they felt we had kind of
tricked them, which I guess you could argue we did in saying, `You have to let
us go cover this opposition conference,' if everyone remembers that way back
before the war started. That got us in, and because we didn't return the day
we were supposed to, we were banned from getting out that way.

Going to the east, you had the possibility of Iran, but you needed to have a
visa for Iran in order to get out. Or you could cross Iran through the
international crossing, but that was still under kind of not control of the
Iraqi remnants, but it had the Mujaheddin el-Khalq, this particularly vicious
fighting group that is part of the Iranian opposition that was inside Iraq,
very complicated group to understand, but they're bad guys, and they were
still in that zone.

So the last option we had was to think about driving to Baghdad and out
through Amman, and that certainly will become possible in the next week or so
as those roads become secured and you can get out that way. But we found
ourselves kind of throwing ourselves on the mercy of the American military
that was based there, and we went in to get to know some of the people at this
military fort, where the Special Forces were staying, and there was a medical
unit--it's called a FAST or a Forward Surgical Team--that was attached to the
Special Forces. And they didn't have quite the intensity of the Special
Forces and we actually were able to gain entry to them, and we stayed with
them for two days while we tried to wait very patiently to see if there would
be room on a military cargo plane. And miraculously and spectacularly,
suddenly, a plane did come and we were able to get on it. And it was a hell
of a ride, but it felt so great to get out. I don't think any of us cared.
We just flew out and we're thankful to be out.

GROSS: What do you mean, a hell of a ride?

Mr. SENNOTT: I have never been on a C-130 cargo plane, but they are amazing
to be in because you are bouncing around. You're being jostled. You're
constantly going up and down. You're on the floor, a cold steel floor, and
you're constantly just bouncing off that floor. And I remember looking
around at one point at all of these soldiers who had accompanied us out--it
was a unit out of Alabama, a chemical weapons response team actually that was
flying out--and all of them were sound asleep perfectly on this cold steel
floor, and I realized, you know, I'm really not a soldier, man. I just could
not get comfortable, and the plane is heaving and bouncing.

And, of course, none of it mattered because you knew within a few hours, we
were going to be out. And for us, out meant getting into the airfield in
Romania, where the US military has most of its cargo planes. So we flew into
Romania near the Black Sea and then drove on to Bucharest and then flew out
from there.

GROSS: My guest is Charles Sennott of The Boston Globe. We'll talk more
after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Charles Sennott of The Boston Globe. He just returned
home after covering northern Iraq for over two months.

You know what I've been thinking? There are literally hundreds of journalists
who've covered the war in Iraq, most of them embedded, and probably for many
of them, part of what they were thinking is they'll write a book about it
afterwards. But, of course, if every journalist who was covering the war
wrote a book, that we would just be flooded with books about the war in Iraq.
Do you think about that a lot, too, about like how many journalists were
there, and did you plan to write a book, and how many books are there going to
be?

Mr. SENNOTT: Well, for one thing, I've just finished writing a book about the
Middle East, and as my wife put it very well, she said, `Your next book may be
with your next wife.' So I have ruled out writing a book about this war. I
think there will be a lot of books written about this war, and I think there
should be a lot of books written about this war. I think it's a huge turning
point in the Middle East. I think it's a very important change in the way
America carries itself in the world, and I very much felt part of the new
empire while I was there.

And I think it's a very discomforting feeling to Americans to be seen by the
world as an empire, and I think they should know that that is the way much of
the world is viewing us. And I think that is one of the big turning points in
this story, that we were the aggressors; we went against the will of the
international community. I think we did it for some very powerful and
convincing reasons. But I think we did a horrible job explaining it to the
world. This was essentially the right war carried out for many of the wrong
reasons. And I think there's a lot to be learned from this war, about the
future, about the larger war on terrorism and the way in which this war might
end up undercutting it. I think there's a lot to be learned about how America
carries itself in the world and about an emergence of the new imperium, and we
should be very aware of that, and hopefully, there will be great storytellers
who come out of this war who can help us become aware of all of those issues.

GROSS: Did you have any fundamental changes in your opinion of the war from
the time you left to go to Iraq to now when you've returned home?

Mr. SENNOTT: I did. I mean, I went from Iraq--literally I left the day after
the enormous march here in London, where there were a million people in the
street. A million people, you know, twice the size of Woodstock, all of whom
were out there for deeply personal reasons, and I don't think that was an easy
demonstration to quantify, and there was this sense of being against the war
as a very popular thing in Europe. I felt like these people didn't know Iraq,
had not had the United States explain why this war was the right thing to do
very well. I felt like all of those reasons for this war became crystal clear
when we got to northern Iraq.

Meeting the Kurds for the first time in my life--I had been a reporter many
times in Baghdad and been lied to around the clock, like every reporter there
who tried to do reporting under the regime or met the fear that people had in
which they could never tell you the truth. In northern Iraq, I experienced
the worst of this, you know, kind of--I was able to experience the effects of
the worst of this regime, and all of this idea of taking down Saddam made
great sense when you hear the voices of the Kurdish people who have been
tortured, who were attacked with chemical weapons, who were imprisoned. There
is not a person who doesn't have a family member who was killed by the regime.
Every corner you turn, every restaurant waiter you strike up a conversation
with, every person you meet waiting for something to happen, every soldier who
you get to know has this very intense story.

So I came from Europe, where this was this torturous discussion of the war, to
the crystal clarity understanding of why it's the right thing, and then I come
out of it feeling America failed in not doing a good job in the diplomacy of
convincing the world why this was the right thing to do. That's where we
failed, and that's where I come out of this war thinking we have a lot of work
to do in explaining our position to the world and becoming much more fair in
the way we carry ourselves. If we're going to be this tough on Iraq, we need
to be equally tough on other allies who are also violating UN resolutions or
who are also carrying themselves as dictatorships in this world. And I would
say those include many countries that go beyond the, quote, "axis of evil."
They include Saudi Arabia, for example, or Egypt or, in some cases, Israel. I
think we really need to pay attention to how we're going to carry out our
policy in the Middle East if we want this war ultimately to be a success.

GROSS: So that we're not perceived as having a double standard.

Mr. SENNOTT: Exactly.

GROSS: Charles, I thought I'd end with an incredibly trivial question, and
that is what is the best and what is the worst food that you ate while
covering the war?

Mr. SENNOTT: The best and the worst are the same because it was one long,
tedious continuum of eating the exact same thing every day.

GROSS: Which was?

Mr. SENNOTT: This is one boiled egg for breakfast every morning; tea
periodically in 45-minute intervals throughout the day. These are these short
sugar-packed little glasses of tea that every meeting you go into, at least
three are served, and you become very wired on this tea, and you don't eat
lunch because you're working too hard, and you're just too wired from the tea,
and sadly the cigarettes as well. And then at night, you have the exact same
thing every night, which is rice and chicken kabobs. And I don't think I ever
want to see another chicken kabob as long as I live. We began to loathe this
stuff. And everyone would just basically joke about the fact that you've
eaten chicken for every night of your life for two months, which is not bad.
We have the money to afford chicken. We should be very thankful. There are a
lot of people in Iraq not eating anywhere near that, but the tedium of the
experience left us really longing to get home. And that is certainly a truth.
But, of course, these little inconveniences are pretty minor, you know, in the
grander scheme of what's going on around you.

GROSS: So you're not having chicken for dinner tonight?

Mr. SENNOTT: Definitely not.

GROSS: Charles Sennott, thank you so much for sharing some of your
experiences covering the war with us and your perceptions. Thank you so very
much.

Mr. SENNOTT: Thank you.

GROSS: And I'm glad you're home and safe.

Mr. SENNOTT: Well, thanks. Glad to be home.

GROSS: Charles Sennott spoke to us from London. He's a foreign correspondent
for The Boston Globe. And he's the author of the book "The Body and the
Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Turn of the Century." It's about
the dwindling Christian population in the Middle East.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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