You need to watch this film on those nurses trapped in Iraq
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Power intoxicates. So does a world exclusive. When scribes from the Middle East, the subcontinent and international TV networks were groping in the dark,
Khaleej Times managed to break through barricades and lay a “hotline” to a key source among the 46 Indian nurses held captive in 2014 by the world’s most brutal terrorists at the Tikrit Teaching Hospital in Iraq. The world took notice. But that heady feeling dissipated in a couple of hours as we realised the responsibility we had taken on ourselves. It was a painful dilemma for a reporter who calls people trapped in a war zone. On one side are your ethics, and your hunger to milk the source to the last tiny drop of information. On the other is the hapless victims’ expectations of you to lend a helping hand. “Let’s be with them till they walk to freedom” was an editorial decision. It was an agonising ‘Take Off ’ for journalism on a humanitarian mission.
Away from Tikrit, new channels of communications were opened. We talked to their impoverished families back home with words of comfort and headlined the debt trap they were in. When the ministry of external affairs parroted to the Press in New Delhi that the nurses were safe, we brought out the plight of the shell-shocked victims day-by-day and convinced the then Kerala chief minister (CM) Oommen Chandy that every second mattered.
We were in touch with the ICRC in Ibril discussing the level of their food stocks and possible safe passage. To the outside world, our reports were the barometer of their emotions and requirements. There were crucial nights when the CM’s office “scrambled” Delhi on life-threatening situations which were first conveyed to
Khaleej Times by the nurses. I had sleepless nights. Their faith in us was so immense that they started to generate calls whenever they were in distress. I could hear bombs slamming into their compound. I could hear their screams of despair and prayers. I knew more than anyone else what was on their dinner plate. How many days they subsisted on cookies. How many kilos of rice were left in the store. They were on a razor’s edge as gun-toting terrorists forced them to attend to their comrades. They cried on my shoulders. I consoled them. I texted them prayers. They thanked me even when they were running out of phone credit. I then became one among them, living with them in the confines of war stories.
I never succumbed — neither did the nurses — when the embassy and special emissary stonewalled us, and when the state piled pressure on me to stop writing, and on the nurses to stop talking. I never knew bureaucracy could be so intimidating. For New Delhi, there were no bombs, no blasts, no terrorists, no nothing. But real photos and videos of burning hospital buildings, and a black-clad Daesh terrorist talking to nurses in their living quarters froze my blood.
Armed with an order to board a bus to “nowhere,” my source, Marina Joseph, gave a call which she said could be the last. “I am going. I have kept an SMS ready for you. If they take us, we will press the send before they snatch the phones.”
The war had already made Marina a woman of steel. Midway to Mosul, sitting in the bus piloted by terrorists, she texted “all is fine”. She warned me not to generate calls. A night passed — probably the worst in the whole episode — as there was absolutely no contact.
Pestered to death the next day by TV channels, I gathered up the courage to call Marina. We talked for a few minutes, about the geography, the architecture of the room, the Ramadan food etc. Then there was this call that everyone wanted to hear. “We probably are on our way to freedom.”
“Please, keep me in your prayers,” she said before hanging up.
The next five hours were harrowing. The CM’s office called to ask why they were not in contact. I too wondered why the woman, who displayed the guts to message me while travelling with terrorists, was not responding on her way to freedom? I had kept space for this as the lead story on the front page. Out of desperation, I rang and the call landed the moment they crossed the Irbil checkpoint. It opened the floodgate of emotions. “This is a second birth,” she said emotionally.
I was overwhelmed. This was a journey I undertook without the pretensions of a scribe. Journalism is not always the proverbial ‘another night, another dollar’. We too have hearts, and will walk that extra mile when it’s a matter of life and death.
But Marina’s cracking voice before she boarded the bus still rings in my ears: “I am going.” I am glad she could leave.
The war had already made nurse Marina Joseph a woman of steel... she had kept an SMS ready lest they (the terrorists) snatch their phones... Midway to Mosul, sitting in the bus piloted by terrorists, she texted “all is fine”.