Terrorist “insurgents” have claimed another innocent victim in Iraq — this time freelance American journalist and blogger Steven Vincent.
He had dared to criticize Shiite clerks. His fate: kidnapped, shot to death, his body dumped. The BBC reports:
A US freelance reporter, Steven Vincent, has been shot dead by unknown gunmen in Basra, southern Iraq, police have said.
Mr Vincent was abducted with his female Iraqi translator at gun point by men in a police car on Tuesday.
His bullet-riddled body was found on the side of a highway south of the city a few hours later.
He had been writing a book about the city, where insurgents have recently stepped up their attacks.
The pair were kidnapped by five gunmen in a police car as they left a currency exchange shop, Lt Col Karim al-Zaidi said.
“Both were later shot, but Vincent was killed, while the girl [translator] is alive,” said Mr Zaidi.
Mr Vincent was shot several times in the head and body, said Mr Zaidi. The translator, Nour Weidi, was seriously wounded.
The AP has this:
Police said Vincent, a writer who had been living in New York, had been staying in Basra for several months working on a book about the history of the city.
In an opinion column published July 31 in The New York Times, Vincent wrote that Basra’s police force had been heavily infiltrated by members of Shiite political groups, including those loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Vincent quoted an unidentified Iraqi police lieutenant as saying that some police were behind many of the assassinations of former Baath Party members that have taken place in Basra.
“He told me that there is even a sort of “death car” a white Toyota Mark II that glides through the city streets, carrying off-duty police officers in the pay of extremist religious groups to their next assignment,” he wrote.
Vincent was also critical of the British military, which is responsible for security in Basra, for turning a blind eye to abuses of power by Shiite extremists in the city.
And the New York Times reports that he simply did his thing, without protection:
Mr. Vincent was married and lived in the East Village of Manhattan. A short, wiry man with a penchant for cigars, he had been staying in the Merbid Hotel in downtown Basra for much of the summer. He was a fixture in the dining room, where he often had conversations with other journalists who were passing through.
Unlike most reporters working in Iraq, Mr. Vincent traveled without any security guards. He and Ms. Khal often took taxis to do interviews. But he also said he was reluctant to spend too much time in public areas such as restaurants or the Corniche, the city’s popular riverside promenade.
He told this reporter in mid-June that he had worked as an art critic in New York until the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. That and the Iraq war prompted him to travel to Baghdad in 2003, a trip that resulted in a book called “In the Red Zone” and a Web log about his experiences. Mr. Vincent had been writing in his blog the entire time while he was in Basra.
Mr. Vincent was particularly incensed about the sharp divide between men and women in the Islamic world, and about the increasingly religious mores in Basra that forced women to wear full-length black robes in public. He said he fully supported the Iraq war, believing it was part of a much larger campaign being waged by the United States against “Islamo-fascism.” But Mr. Vincent said he was also disappointed by the failure of the United States and Great Britain to enforce their visions of democracy here in Iraq, instead allowing religious politicians to seize power across the south.
A post on Vincent’s blog by Mitchell Muncy titled “Steven Vincent RIP” says, in part:”As most of the world knows, Steven is dead in Iraq, murdered, it seems likely, by those he criticized in his New York Times piece last Sunday. It was a privilege to work with Steven, a brave journalist and a man of integrity…”
What more can we add? Not much. Vincent clearly upset some folks. And, in the backs of their minds, reporters/bloggers who are in dangerous areas always know some folks who are mad might not respond with letters to the editor or comments on blogs.
It’s the old, idea of: if you don’t like the message, kill the messanger.
Except that doesn’t work.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.