Dexter Filkins on War Zone Realities

“I expected the cheering crowd,” journalist Dexter Filkins told Boston University students about his visit to Safwan, Iraq, at the beginning of the American invasion in March 2003. Instead, the people were eerily silent. “It was like we’d pried the doors off of a mental institution,” whose inmates were traumatized after 30 years of cruel treatment, he said.

Recently returned to the United States after three and a half years in Iraq, the New York Times Baghdad correspondent was addressing a crowd of about 50 students, mostly from the College of Communication journalism program, on November 15 as part of the college’s  Distinguished Lecture Series. In opening remarks, Robert Zelnick, a professor of national and international affairs at COM, called Filkins among the best in the business.

“I know war correspondents,” said Zelnick, a former ABC News Pentagon correspondent. Filkins “stands tall even in that crowd.” Zelnick has written several books, including the forthcoming After Gaza, a firsthand account of Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

Filkins also covered the war in Afghanistan. “It was an amazing time,” he told students. “Women were taking their burkas off; people were digging up their television sets that had been buried for five years; men were going to barber shops to shave their beards off.

“That’s what I was expecting” in Iraq, he said. “I guess I was Dick Cheney in that sense.”

On the first day of the invasion, Filkins rented a car in Kuwait, assuring the nervous agent that he wasn’t a reporter driving into Iraq, and drove into Iraq. “That’s the best all-terrain vehicle in the world: a rental car,” he joked.

In Safwan, he found a totally different kind of crowd. “People’s mouths were hanging open. Some laughed, some cried,” he said. When American soldiers, “gigantic, tall, flush-faced troops,” tore down posters of Saddam Hussein, people were horrified.

“As soon as you leave, the secret police will come in and kill us,” an Iraqi told Filkins, and pointed out a man he said belonged to the Mukhabarat, Saddam’s secret police. With a crowd trailing behind him “like a Greek chorus,” Filkins approached and asked the man if it was true. “He said, ‘God willing, the Mukhabarat will return,’ and walked away.”

“I’ve thought about Safwan a lot since that day,” Filkins said. “The whole war is like that.”

Filkins, who holds a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Oxford and has written for the New York Times since 2000, fielded pointed questions from the audience about the challenges of reporting from a place racked by what he called “the weirdest insurgency ever.”

“It’s not easy to be a woman there,” he noted. “They won’t take you seriously, although that can work in your favor because you’re seen as less of a threat.” Western women can draw less attention in public by covering themselves with traditional Muslim garb.

As for Filkins himself, he said, “I look like a CIA agent. As soon as I step out of a car over there, I attract a crowd. I’ve been beaten, detained, and held at gunpoint.”

Students also asked about journalists’ difficulty truly reporting, and reporting objectively, when forced by necessity to live in walled-off compounds and travel with troops. “I can’t help but wonder,” said Abram Trosky (GRS’09), “whether the New York Times, which is seen as a left-leaning publication — and I read it every day — isn’t still issuing an apologia for the invasion.”

Filkins acknowledged the difficulty, but pointed out the difference between himself and “Ollie North, who was whisked around in a helicopter and given the red carpet treatment” as a correspondent for Fox News.

“It is always nice to hear a firsthand perspective,” Trosky conceded after the event. The political science grad student also attended a lecture recently at the BU School of Law by Aaron Glantz, an unembedded reporter for Pacifica Radio. Both journalists “told gruesome stories, but perhaps drew different lessons,” he said.

Patrick Kennedy can be reached at plk@bu.edu.