JORDAN - IRAQI TV JOURNALISTS SENDING FAMILIES ABROAD

Iraqi journalists working for NBC News (and presumably for other Western news organizations) are increasingly sending their families to Syria or Jordan fearing they may be attacked as a reprisal for working for western media, an NBC News producer wrote Monday on NBC's Blogging Iraq website. Michele Neubert quoted one local NBC journalist as telling her, "I sometimes just sit in my children's bedroom and cry ... wondering what happened to our dreams. Our dreams are all destroyed here in Iraq. I just wonder, [what] has happened to us?" Many journalists, Neubert wrote, have joined their families abroad. "Even our list of experts whom we turn to for comment on the latest bomb attack or political maneuver has shrunk. Each time I return to Baghdad, I am struck by how many more of them have been crossed off our list. Most have moved to neighboring countries for safety; others have been killed, caught up in the violence here."

11/04/2006