by Sridhar Pappu
The New York Times has quietly ended its relationship with Sarah Khalil, who helped set up the paper's Kuwait bureau for the war-and who is also the niece of Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress.
Mr. Chalabi, an international businessman and perhaps Iraq's most famous émigré, is the odds-on favorite to serve as the next leader in a new Iraq and, even before the war, served as the inspiration for many neoconservative pundits' arguments in favor of a Halliburton-friendly post-Saddam Iraq.
Ms. Khalil, who lives in Kuwait, could not be reached for comment.
In an e-mail exchange with Off the Record, chief Washington correspondent Patrick Tyler-currently reporting from Baghdad-explained that he hired Ms. Khalil, a former staffer with the AFP news agency in Cairo, in January, while setting up the Kuwait bureau for the war.
Mr. Tyler said he met Ms. Khalil, the wife of a Kuwaiti-based businessman and the mother of two small children, while working for The Washington Post in the 1980's and hired her as an assistant "whose work was confined to Kuwait." This, Mr. Tyler said, included arranging visas for war correspondents and directing supplies into war zones.
"The politics of postwar Iraq were not even on the horizon," Mr. Tyler said. "I certainly didn't expect to be covering them. Chalabi was not in the news or even in the region. When he came across the horizon after the war, Sarah and I had a discussion about Chalabi's rising profile and the appearance of conflict."
According to sources at The Times, editors and senior writers in The Times' Washington bureau objected to Ms. Khalil's presence and demanded that Mr. Tyler relieve her of her duties.
Mr. Tyler dismissed the idea that there was rancor in the exchange.
"The discussions with editors about Sarah Khalil also began after Chalabi came into the news in the postwar period," he wrote in an e-mail, "and they related solely to a decent and amiable termination of the relationship and the recognition that we all wanted to avoid the appearance of conflict."
Mr. Tyler said it was always the understanding that when things wound down in Kuwait, so would Ms. Khalil's job with The Times.
"She was always extremely open and understanding about it," Mr. Tyler said, "and was a very capable news assistant."
Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said Ms. Khalil's last day with The Times was May 20. She said the paper "does not have a policy on employment of relatives of news figures.
"Circumstances vary infinitely," Ms. Mathis said, "and judgments must also."