Iraqi Journalist Working for the Washington Post Killed

15 October 2007

by Jeff Severns Guntzel

An Iraqi journalist employed by the Washington Post has been killed.

From the Post's article on his death:

On Sunday afternoon, Salih Saif Aldin set out for one of Baghdad's most dangerous neighborhoods. He knew exactly where to go. He nodded, smiled, grabbed his camera. There was nothing he needed to say.

Saif Aldin always came back -- from death threats, from beatings, from kidnappings, from detentions by American soldiers, from the country's most notorious and deadly terrain -- but on Sunday he didn't. The 32-year-old Iraqi reporter in The Washington Post's Baghdad bureau was shot once in the forehead in the southwestern neighborhood of Sadiyah. He was the latest in a long line of reporters, most of them Iraqis, to be killed while covering the Iraq war. He was the first for The Washington Post.

Iraqi police officers said they believed Saif Aldin was killed by Sunni men belonging to the nascent organization known as the Awakening Council, a tribal organization aligned with the U.S. military that started in the western province of Anbar and has spread to parts of Baghdad. Iraqi government officials have accused these Sunni tribesmen of abusing their partnership with the Americans to kill and kidnap residents.

Saif Aldin's death adds to a list of at least 118 journalists who have been killed in Iraq while on duty, nearly 100 of whom were Iraqis, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Michael Kelly, a columnist for The Post, was killed in April 2003 in Iraq when a Humvee he was traveling in drove into a canal.