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Sept. 26: Paying the price for Journalists.

By James Rupert | Staff Correspondent

September 26, 2003

Baghdad - Someone planted a bomb outside the NBC News bureau here yesterday. All journalists in Baghdad have to worry about their security, so I stopped by today to see just how it had happened.

The side of the Aike Hotel, where NBC was based, was shattered - all the windows and some of a masonry wall blown in. The bomb had been placed on the sidewalk, near the hotel's generator.

This morning, workers had swept up the glass, wires, insulation, and other debris of an urban bombing. And the NBC crew was moving out. As most news stories noted, one NBC technician was slightly injured in the attack - took a few stitches for a nasty cut. - and the NBC crew otherwise got out of it intact. Thank heaven.

But you may have noticed, in just a phrase or a sentence in most stories, that someone was killed - a hotel attendant who was sleeping downstairs close to the generator. There wasn't much news about him yesterday, but I think it's worth taking note: His name was Awais. He was a Somali who had emigrated from that wretched land to Iraq in search of a better chance at life. He was managing it, with a low-status but steady job in an elite hotel. He had married and with his wife was expecting their fourth child, according to Saad Jawad, a co-owner of the Aike Hotel.

"The killing of this nice gentleman is very upsetting," said Jawad. "I don't know how his family is going to manage now." If there ever was a war in which most of the people killed were the ones being targeted, it has not been any of those I've covered in the past 20 years.

As often than not, it seems, your risk in human warfare is determined by matters of status - in this case, whether you sleep downstairs by the generator, or a couple of floors up, in a junior suite.