Robert Fisk: No wonder al-Jazeera was a target

Published: 26 November 2005

On 4 April 2003, I was standing on the roof of al-Jazeera's office in Baghdad. The horizon was a towering epic of oil fires and burning buildings. Anti-aircraft guns in a public park close to the bureau were pumping shells into the sky and the howl of jets echoed across the city. I was about to start a two-way interview with al-Jazeera's head office in Qatar when an American rocket came racing up the Tigris river behind me. Its rail-train "swish" brought a cry from the Qatar technician who picked up the sound on his earphones.

"Was that what I think it was?" he asked. I fear so, I replied, as the white-painted cruise missile zipped beneath one of the Tigris's bridges and disappeared upstream. After finishing my "stand-upper" - television demands rooftop scenes from Baghdad even to this day, when most of the reporters are confined to their offices and hotels by teams of hired mercenaries - I descended to the al-Jazeera newsroom where the Jordanian-Palestinian bureau chief, Tareq Ayoub, was trying to put together his next report. You, I told him, have the most dangerous television office in the history of the world.

Article Length: 958 words (approx.)