An Iraqi correspondent for a U.S. news agency survives a routine Baghdad traffic stop

mcclatchy offers several iraq blogs on its website, all interesting and informative... a post yesterday on the inside iraq blog details the horrifying possibility that, on any given day, the "authorities" might just shoot you dead on your way to work...

Terror at a traffic stop. If any digging was to take place into my identity and my profession, then I was dead. NOT a doctor, no, a correspondent for an AMERICAN news agency! I was left there waiting to hear my sentence for more than 20 of the longest minutes of my life.

imagine any resident of any u.s. city having to face something similar...

[UPDATE]

oops... i didn't realize that an iraqi journalist working for the nyt had indeed been killed on friday... i guess that puts the above into an immediate and concrete perspective...

the circumstances are particularly tragic...

Gunmen killed an Iraqi journalist from The New York Times as he drove to work Friday, the third staffer of a Western news organization to be killed in the past two days. In his last moments, Khalid W. Hassan called his mother on his cell phone and told her he had been shot.

as i said above, can you imagine living like that on, not just a daily basis, but an hour-to-hour basis, dreading every time the phone rings, every time there's a knock at the door, every time you leave your house...? horrible...

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