The Arabist

The Arabist

By Issandr El Amrani and friends.

The Iraq not shown

The LA Times reports on how pictures of US soldiers killed in Iraq are largely absent from American press coverage:

A review of six prominent U.S. newspapers and the nation's two most popular newsmagazines during a recent six-month period found almost no pictures from the war zone of Americans killed in action. During that time, 559 Americans and Western allies died. The same publications ran 44 photos from Iraq to represent the thousands of Westerners wounded during that same time.


Many photographers and editors believe they are delivering Americans an incomplete portrait of the violence that has killed 1,797 U.S. service members and their Western allies and wounded 12,516 Americans.


Worth mentioning in passing that, in my discussions with people who work there, it seems the situation in Iraq is veering towards those two taboo words that are also largely absent from Western reporting on the country: "civil" and "war." Al Ahram Weekly's Omayma Abdel Latif ponders that question.