Running towards the explosion: Reporting from war in Iraq

My first exposure to storytelling came long before I ever held a press credential. My father was a writer, but also a diplomat. I grew up watching how he observed the world, how he paid attention not just to events, but to their deeper meaning, and how those reflections shaped his life and work.

From him, I learned that words carry responsibility, and that how you tell a story can influence how people understand the world around them. That perspective stayed with me, and ultimately inspired my own path into journalism.

Working as a journalist in Iraq during some of the country’s most turbulent years meant reporting on events that were not distant headlines, but immediate, lived reality. War was not something you deployed to cover, it was what surrounded you the moment you stepped outside. Streets you knew by heart could transform in seconds, and the line between observer and participant was always razor thin.

My work alongside international media, including The New York Times, placed me at the intersection of global storytelling and local truth. The role required translation of context-culture, history, urgency, and risk-often under intense pressure and with little margin for error.

By the time I arrived, authorities had sealed off the area. The nearest hospital became the only place left to report the story. What I found there felt like a collective funeral. Hallways filled with cries. Families searching faces for anyone familiar. Blood-stained clothes. Silence punctuated by grief.

And in those moments, you confront one of the most difficult questions in journalism: What do you do now?

Do you ask someone minutes after losing a loved one how they feel? Or do you step back, observe, listen, and describe what words will never fully capture?

No matter how carefully you write it, language cannot translate that level of pain. But that does not remove the responsibility to try. In those moments, your purpose becomes clear: to show the world what is truly happening on the ground, with honesty, restraint, and humanity.

Covering war in Iraq required constant negotiation between urgency and accuracy, courage and caution. Every assignment began with an unspoken question: Is this story worth the risk today? Often, the answer only revealed itself afterward.

What stayed with me most was the weight of witnessing. Journalists in conflict zones do not report from a distance, we report while living the story ourselves. Fear becomes familiar. Loss becomes routine. And that normalization is one of the quiet dangers of prolonged conflict.

Working with international newsrooms reinforced journalism’s responsibility beyond speed or visibility. Editors relied on local journalists not only for access, but for judgment, knowing when to push back against incomplete narratives or oversimplified explanations. Iraq was never a single story, and war was never just numbers.

There is an emotional cost that rarely appears in print. What lingers most is not fear, but the effort required to remain human, to resist becoming numb, to continue seeing individuals instead of statistics.

Those years left a permanent mark on how I understand storytelling and responsibility. They taught me that clarity matters most in moments of chaos, that words can either humanize or distance, and that journalism, especially in times of conflict is not about speed or visibility, but about integrity. It is about resisting simplification and honoring the lives behind the headlines.

Writing this today has brought many of those memories rushing back. I can still feel the pain of what people went through. I can still hear the screams of a mother who lost her son right in front of her eyes. Some moments never fade; they live quietly within you, resurfacing when you least expect them.