Hartfort [CT] Courant:
Private E-Mail Portrays Iraq Headed For Disaster By LIZ HALLORAN Courant Staff Writer http://www.ctnow.com/hc-email.artoct02,0,4258333.story October 2 2004
A Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent's revealing e-mail to friends, in which she details deteriorating conditions in Iraq and the growing danger for journalists, has become an Internet phenomenon, driving home stark facts familiar to reporters in the war-riven country.
When Farnaz Fassihi wrote her personal 2½-page e-mail from Baghdad she never imagined it would be launched into cyberspace - but by week's end it had become the subject of online discussions and newspaper stories, and even merited a mention in a speech by former "60 Minutes" producer Don Hewitt.
The Iraq that Fassihi describes is a barbaric place where young men openly mine roads with explosives, Westerners are abducted from their homes and beheaded and reconstruction has largely ground to a halt.
"For those of us on the ground," she wrote, "it's hard to imagine what if anything could salvage [Iraq] from its violent downward spiral."
Contacted Friday by e-mail in Iraq, Fassihi, upset that her personal missive has become public fodder, declined to comment on reaction to her assessment of Iraq as "a disaster," and her life as a reporter there as akin to being under "virtual house arrest" because of threats to Westerners.
But Fassihi's colleagues in Baghdad say her analysis of the situation is dead-on: from the increasing inability of reporters to move around safely to do their job, to the dangers of assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings, to the growing strength of an insurgency that appears more organized every day.
"From my perspective, her e-mail was entirely accurate in its description of reporting conditions," said The New York Times' Alex Berenson, just back from Iraq. "As a reporter there, you have to be incredibly conscious of the fact that there are a lot of people looking for Westerners to kidnap and kill."
"It colors every decision that you make," he said. "It's a bad situation over there right now and anyone who says otherwise hasn't been there." snip~~~~~~~~~~~~ http://www.ctnow.com/hc-email.artoct02,0,4258333.story ===========================
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Leigh Meyers leighcmeyers at yahoo.com