Commuting to Libya's front line

22 September 2011 Last updated at 11:08 GMT By Alastair Leithead BBC News, Libya The television images of the war in Libya show a ramshackle bunch of rebels, firing off their guns and missiles in what seems an almost haphazard fashion, but what is it like being on the front line and reporting on the war?

It was too late to buy lamb, so camel pasta it had to be and it was not bad.

I guess the little villa on the Mediterranean would count as luxury in normal times, but Libyans are still waiting to find out what normal is going to be.

It is luxury for us - hot water, electricity, even some air-conditioning. Luxury in an oil-workers compound.

An oasis and nightly retreat from the ever-advancing front lines closing in on Sirte, where Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was born and where what is left of his army is still holding out.

We are commuting to war. For an hour and a half every morning and evening, we drive the long desert road to collect the video footage we need to put a television news report together.

Anti-Gaddafi forces have been closing in on Col Gaddafi's home town of Sirte

We dodge the potholes and sand drifts, burned-out trucks, wandering camels and erratic rebel drivers - or now I suppose, former rebels.

They are the same rag-tag band of engineers and teachers, civilians who welded guns to their pick-up trucks and took on a standing army.

But they are soldiers now. Some bring fearless, almost foolhardy bravery. The professionals among them provide planning and strategy. The advance on Sirte we are documenting has been logical, cautious, well organised and well supplied.

They have troops, tanks, artillery, air power - courtesy of Nato - and rockets. Lots of rockets. And rockets make good television.

In a long-running war, finding different or dramatic footage keeps the story in the news. Outgoing fire shows the ferocity and aggression of war.

We filmed 30m (100ft) in front of the the rockets as they were fired over our heads with a roar and trailing fire - the only warning, a quick chorus of "Allahu Akbar".

Continue reading the main story From Our Own Correspondent is on Thursdays at 1100 BST and Saturdays at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4 and weekdays on BBC World ServiceThey were bombarding the pro-Gaddafi positions. The effect on screen was dramatic.

What we could not show was their impact 30km (19 miles) away, where these terrifying weapons were landing, tearing holes in the defensive lines - lines, that is, of other people.

The Colonel's army have the same weapons, without the air power.

So, like the troops, we experience and try to record incoming fire. The only reassurance while on the receiving end of rockets is the trick of sound - if you hear a bang, it has already missed you.

But it is an occupational hazard rather than good television. At best it is no more than a whizz, a puff of smoke and a wobbly camera shot as we race for cover.

Drama of war

In a world of Hollywood war films, there is something almost disappointing about how real war looks on screen. The desire for better pictures can lure you into increasingly dangerous places.

Continue reading the main story

The further forward you go, the more powerful the pictures, but the greater the chances of being killed or injured”

End Quote This war is being fought in two ways - through the precise and remote science of long-distance artillery, whose angles, bearings and logarithms are familiar to the engineers now firing them, and the up-close, car-to-car, gun-to-gun graft where bullets and shrapnel fill the air.

We film the consequences through the steady flow of dead and injured arriving at the field hospital, pools of rich crimson seeping out of them.

They are shocking images which people do not necessarily want to see close-up. The temptation is to be out at the very front with them - where the fighting is more dramatic, more filmic.

The pictures might lever the story onto a busy news bulletin, but what soldiers do is madness. It is hard, brutal, bloody, deadly war.

Front-line reporting - capturing and communicating the essence of war - is always a gamble, but one where we think we can set the odds.

Finding the strongest images while staying safe is a difficult balance

It is a balance of risk and access.

The further forward you go, the more powerful the pictures, but the greater the chances of being killed or injured.

Our flak jackets and helmets are far from invincible. As a cub reporter I was always told never to become the story.

This week, a friend of mine misjudged that balance.

On the other side of Sirte, dressed as a rebel, he tore through the desert with his camera.

As a freelance photographer there is more pressure to take risks just to make a living.

He was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. He survived, but is badly injured. I suppose I have thought more about risk in the days since.

It is dark now and I am glad to be commuting home. We will head back up to the front again tomorrow and again hopefully get that balance just right.

The men fighting will head there too. They do it because it is their future, their country, their revolution.

We will be there searching for an image you have not seen yet, something to keep you following a war far away which is not any less deadly or significant just because it goes on every day.

How to listen to From Our Own Correspondent:

BBC Radio 4:

A 30-minute programme on Saturdays, 1130.

Second 30-minute programme on Thursdays, 1100 (some weeks only).

Listen online or download the podcast

BBC World Service:

Hear daily 10-minute editions Monday to Friday, repeated through the day, also available to listen online.

Read more or explore the archive at the programme website.

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New Yorker, Pakistani converge on 9/11's front lines

COMBAT OUTPOST PASHMUL SOUTH, Afghanistan/NORAK, Pakistan — New Yorker Danny Sjursen's Afghanistan war ought to be personal. It's anything but.

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The U.S. Army cavalry captain, from a family three generations deep in the New York City Fire Department, needs two hands to count the friends who died rescuing people from the wreckage of al Qaeda's attack on the World Trade Center's twin towers on September 11, 2001.

But too much time and two wars have passed between the day Sjursen, now 28, saw the towers fall while he was a cadet at the West Point U.S. Military Academy.

Story: Muslim travelers say they're still saddled with 9/11 baggage

"When I see this place, I don't see the towers," he said, sitting inside the wooden walls of the B troop, 4-4 Cavalry Regiment's operations center in Pashmul South. Near the birthplace of the Taliban in Kandahar province, it is still one of Afghanistan's most violent areas for U.S. soldiers.

For him, there is little connection anymore between the war he is fighting and the retribution against the Taliban for harboring al Qaeda that was the original casus belli.

"My family sees it more than I do. They see it dead-on, direct. I'm a professional soldier. It's not about writing the firehouse number on the bullet. I'm not one for gimmicks."

A few hundred kilometers away, his enemy rests by a roadside, just across the Pakistani border. Fida Mohammed's seminal moment in jihad came when he was only 10 years old, from a man he was too young to know much about.

Osama bin Laden's deadly handiwork created excitement in his village in Pakistan. Mohammed, now 20 and a Taliban fighter, recalls people crowding around a man with a newspaper telling of the attacks in New York and Washington.

"Most of them were cursing America," Mohammed told Reuters in his village of Norak, 20 km (12 miles) from the Afghan border. "Very few people said it was not good because innocent people were killed."

Video: 9/11 firefighter: Pride in his heart, dust in his lungs (on this page)

Earlier that day at his madrasa, or religious school, the lesson was simple: the 9/11 attacks were America's punishment "for its crimes," and the beginning of its destruction.

'Jihad, and only jihad'
Over his parents' objections, Mohammed soon began collecting clothes and food from people to help the Taliban.

"My aim is jihad and only jihad, and to defeat the infidels and drive them out of Afghanistan," said the strongly built, bearded Pakistani, who commutes to the war from his village.

Seven years passed before he was old enough to join up as a mujahideen. Even then, he had to sneak away, feigning plans to visit relatives, and his parents caught and tried to stop him.

"I told them in plain terms that jihad has become obligatory on all Muslims and I cannot give it up at any cost. Now I often go to Afghanistan for the jihad," he said.

Sjursen's call to war, too, came from school. He was sparring in boxing class, as a first-year cadet, when someone burst in shouting that the World Trade Center was on fire.

Only the second in his family to get a university degree, he excelled in his high school studies and followed "the old romantic reasons for wanting to be a soldier" to West Point. Suddenly those reasons become more personal.

His father worked across the street, but evacuated quickly. His Uncle Steve went missing for 24 hours, surfaced briefly and then went back into the ruins for five days, Sjursen said.

"He was digging the rubble for Marty," Sjursen said, referring to firefighter Marty Egan, his uncle's best friend who was discovered dead days later.

'Most emotional event'
Cadet Sjursen knew eight firefighters from one station who had died, and even today he can recite the casualty numbers: 343 of New York's 11,000 firefighters, or about 3 percent.

"It was the single most emotional event. You know how it is in a blue-collar neighborhood. I was almost hoping the war would still be going on when I graduated in 2005," he said.

Mohammed took to jihad in Afghanistan in 2008, migrating across the border for attacks and sometimes into Helmand province to pick poppies for pocket money, with the bulk of the profits from the opium sales going to finance the Taliban.

Story: How should we remember the tragedy of  9/11?

Barely a year after he joined jihad, he took two bullets in the arm during a firefight with Afghan troops that killed three of his comrades. That was barely a taste of the war.

"Talk of war is very sweet, but the situation on the battlefield is very bitter," Mohammed said, sipping from a glass of water as he recalled how an American helicopter rained death on his comrades a year ago.

He and about 60 other fighters were heading to attack a military post in southern Uruzgan province, when the chopper spotted them and unleashed its cannon. Mohammed and 20 others, lagging behind, dashed for life-saving cover in the bushes.

"There were many childhood friends among the 40 killed and that saddened me. I cried a lot that in just a few seconds so many Taliban mujahideen had been martyred. We collected their body parts with our hands and buried them there," he said.

Sjursen met death in the cauldron of Baghdad in 2006, where he took command of his first platoon during the U.S. surge to stabilize Iraq as it boiled in a bloody sectarian civil war.

"It was a bad time," Sjursen recalled, sitting in front of a bank of three computers inside his command center. "This place has nothing on that. The madness is lacking here."

Three of his men were killed and eight were wounded within the first 90 days of deployment. The wish for vengeance for 9/11 was swallowed by a greater violence.

"I never thought about 9/11 at all because I was too busy dealing with the day-to-day of fighting the civil war," Sjursen said. "It drove that gap between 9/11."

'Farmboys picking up guns'
The troop he commands, one of three in the area, spends its days fending off attacks from the Taliban, who merge into the scrubby farmlands just outside the concrete walls of his camp.

"It's farmboys picking up guns. How do you hate that? What do you do when you turn 15 or 18 here? You fight. Imagine if our country was at war since 1979?" Sjursen said, referring to Afghanistan's almost-constant state of conflict since mujahideen started attacking the occupying Soviet forces.

Marijuana, opium and grape crops and a deeply conservative attitude prevail outside, where Sjursen's troops work to stand up Afghan police and soldiers, a school and local government.

B Troop's base is smack in the middle of the original recruiting grounds of Taliban founder Mullah Omar, and miles further south than Soviet troops ever got.

Like many other Taliban leaders, Mohammed's commander comes from Kandahar. The war is turning in their favor, after a time when foreign troops inflicted heavy casualties, Mohammed said.

"We have restricted Americans and their forces to their bases," Mohammed said. "There is no dearth of Taliban, in whatever number we need. We get them easily."

With the end of 2014 the deadline for all foreign combat troops to pull out of Afghanistan, Sjursen can see an end to his wars. He will enrol for a master's degree later this year.

"We're tourists here. We're going home, but this is their life," Sjursen said.

Mohammed said he has had little time to think about his plans after the war, although he intends eventually to teach -- if the war ever ends. If foreign troops don't leave, Mohammed said: "I will keep up my jihad as long as I'm alive and until I embrace martyrdom."

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

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