Canadian reporter a leader in field
German colleague, a photographer, killed after Afghan police officer fired at their car in convoy
Canadian reporter Kathy Gannon, who was shot and wounded Friday in Afghanistan, is no cowboy, as they say in the war-reporting trade.
Gannon, 60, is prudent but also unusually keen to go deep into the field to chase down stories. By the sound of it, she was taking a reasonable risk as part of a convoy, protected by Afghan security forces, that was conveying ballot boxes near Khost, an eastern town where U.S. and Afghan forces have battled the Taliban for years.
The Associated Press reporter was shot three times in the wrists and shoulder and her good friend, Anja Niedringhaus, 48, a Pulitzer Prize-winning German photographer for AP, died instantly Friday when an Afghan police officer fired an AK-47 at the women as they sat in a car.
Witnesses said they were with a freelancer and a driver waiting for the convoy to move when the unit commander walked up and opened fire. The 25-year-old commander surrendered and was arrested.
According to the provincial chief of police, the shooter said his impromptu attack was revenge for the deaths of family members in a NATO bombing.
There have been repeated instances in recent years of Afghan police or military personnel killing inter- national troops working with the country’s security forces, but this was the first known case of an insider attack on journalists.
Afghanistan’s violence has touched several other Canadian journalists:
Calgary Herald reporter Michelle Lang was killed when the troop carrier she was in rolled over a roadside bomb in December 2009.
Toronto Star reporter Kathleen Kenna was badly hurt in a grenade attack in 2002.
Radio-Canada reporters Patrice Roy and Charles Dubois were seriously wounded by an improvised explosive device in 2007.
I first met Gannon in 2001. We had dinner a few times, including a memorable evening with a posse of U.S. journalists on the roof of the Intercontinental Hotel in Peshawar, Pakistan, before that city became too dangerous to openly report from.
She is tenacious, courageous, fairminded and intensely interested in chronicling the tragic story of South Asia. While others at AP concentrated on the military conflict, she took a broader view of the war, although her work inevitably took her to some of the most dangerous places in the world.
Although happy to reminisce about her youth in Timmins, Ont., Gannon does not wear a Maple Leaf on her sleeve. While willing to help the legion of usually unprepared compatriots reporting from Afghanistan during Canada’s 12-year military presence there, she was a citizen of the world. She has proved that in spades during three decades of reporting, almost exclusively from South Asia.
Gannon arrived in Peshawar in 1986. Shortly after the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban allowed her and a colleague into the country — the only journalists let in.
She has said she knew early in her career that she wanted to travel abroad, but realized her options were limited with Canadian media. “I sold everything I owned, which wasn’t much, and set out to become the foreign correspondent I’d always wanted to be,” she wrote in her 2006 book, I is for Infidel, From Holy War to Holy Terror: 18 Years Inside Afghanistan.
Despite the hostility that female reporters sometimes attract from ultra-chauvinist Afghans and Pakistanis, women have done much of the best reporting from the region. The most experienced of these have been Gannon; Lyse Doucet, her brilliant Canadian colleague from the BBC; and Carlotta Gall of The New York Times, whose fine new book, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, points the finger at Pakistan.
Other women who have made important contributions include Laura King of the Los Angeles Times and Postmedia columnist Christie Blatchford, whose book, Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death From Inside the New Canadian Army, examined the war’s impact on a group of Canadian soldiers in Kandahar.
Gannon has been a leading member of this impressive group. Despite the perils, my guess is that she will return to that rough neighbourhood again the moment she feels well enough to do so.