by Jo Wilding

The clocks changed yesterday. Or the day before. Or possibly tomorrow. They went forward an hour. Probably. It depended on which newspaper you read. That more or less sums up Iraq in spring 2004, even time only staggering forward, no one knowing what hour we’re on because there’s no one to tell them.

Yesterday was a day of goodbyes for the rest of the clowns: the Mother Teresa orphanage, the camp at Shuala, the boys in the Kurdish house, Mama and Damia and Happy Family, the kids on our street, in the falafel shop, in the juice shop.

Their last meetings -for now anyway- coincided with Jenny’s first, introduced in a single day to several crowds of kids who know that the word “Boomchucka” means colour and laughter and any friend of the circus is a friend of theirs.

Because I almost lost my own life in December 2001 I take a special interest in journalists - and their fate

By Robert Fisk - 03 April 2004

Yesterday morning, I sat down in a Baghdad home with a poor old man and his daughter who were mourning their adored son and brother who was killed by American soldiers. Now, you may ask why I do not write about Fallujah and the atrocities which occurred there three days ago: the cruel and atrocious murder of four Americans who were hauled, begging for their lives, from their two sports utility vehicles, burned, mutilated, dragged through the streets and then hanged naked - what was left of their bodies - from a decaying British railway bridge over the Euphrates river. The answer is simple. US proconsul Paul Bremer called their deaths “barbaric and inexcusable”. Paul Bremer was right. But their deaths were not inexplicable.

The old man was Abdul-Aziz al-Amairi - his daughter’s name is Sundus - and their son and brother was a journalist, a news cameraman whose brains I saw lying on the back seat of the car in which he, Ali Abdul Aziz, and his reporter colleague, Ali al-Khatib, were shot dead by US troops just over two weeks ago. Because I almost lost my own life on the Afghan border in December 2001, I take a special interest in such people - and their fate. They were journalists.

So here are a few facts. Two Thursdays ago, a rocket smashed into a hotel in southern Baghdad. The spanking new Arab news channel Arabia sent its crew to cover the story. The two Alis arrived with their driver, Abu Mariam, at the scene of the attack, parked their car 250m away and went up to speak to the US troops guarding the road. They were told they could film, but could do no “stand-uppers” - face-to-camera shots in front of the building. They completed their report, returned to their car and prepared to leave.