Like the American public, the media’s war fatigue relegates Afghanistan and Iraq to a remote region of the radar screen of news.
It’s further reason to take note of the shock expressed Friday by Liz Sly of The Washington Post, an intrepid foreign correspondent who has seen just about every depravity humans can visit upon one another.
Or so one would have thought.
This is one of the most deeply disturbing stories I have ever reported. I knew it was bad but I had no idea how bad. https://t.co/Jgg59jq9Yy
— Liz Sly (@LizSly) April 8, 2016
“For her to be shocked, well, something’s got to be pretty bad,” said Jim O’Shea, former editor of The Los Angeles Times and a former boss of hers at The Chicago Tribune.
Sly’s tweet was alluding to a suicide bombing at a youth soccer game in Asriya, Iraq on March 25. It got some coverage in the United States, including in USA TODAY and Yahoo, but it was very modest, to put it mildly. Those wars aren’t even much of a subject at all in the presidential campaign.
In fact, 43 people were killed and, of them, 29 were boys younger than the age of 17 who were either playing in the game or watching their chums. The bomber himself was a teenager, as best one could discern from a photo released by ISIS, which took credit for the bombing.
Sly has spent many years overseas, mostly for The Chicago Tribune and The Post. At The Tribune, she was a colleague of mine and O’Shea’s who, in the early 1990s, covered Africa, including the Rwandan genocide. She also served as the South Asian correspondent based in New Delhi, our Beijing chief and the Middle East correspondent based in Beirut, as she is now for The Post. She’s fearless.
Sly spent some time reporting in Chicago and Washington, D.C., but it wasn’t really her thing. She’s part of a certain journalism species that disdains the sedentary and reflexively prefers being out and about, even if it means being faraway and at times very isolated, despite the inherent dangers of much of what she does.
To her, covering Washington press conferences and background briefs is professional death by a thousand cuts (or press releases). A journalism career that heralds access to the powerful is a sham compared to a life dissecting the plights of the powerless and afflicted.
So she’s seen about everything one can see when it comes to awful places and crises. She noted Friday in an email that she’s been doing foreign reporting for more than 30 years “and this was truly one of the most upsetting stories ever.”
Soccer turns out to be a passion bordering on obsession for kids in the mixed Sunni-Shiite village south of Baghdad. It presents fleeting escapes from monotony and the danger-ridden conflict surrounding them, and is filled with dreams of famous faraway players like charismatic superstar Cristiano Ronaldo of the Spanish powerhouse Real Madrid.
During the match, Sly reports, nobody seemed to notice a boy wearing a thick jacket on a warm night, even as most everybody else opted for T-shirts. He spoke to some around him and said, “It’s a good game, isn’t it?”
When the game was over, he was among the throng that scrambled toward the area where the winning trophy and medals would be presented. “Then he blew himself up, and I felt a fire hit my face,” recalls a 12-year-old who was nearby.
Sly’s reporting, two weeks after the stunning event, found a village in shock, with a wall near the bombing “turned into a shrine, strung with photos of the dead boys, the bloodied remnants of their shirts and soccer balls. Black banners announcing the deaths hang not he walls of the many homes that lost sons.”
It explains another Sly tweet early Friday: “Just stepping onto the soccer field & seeing this memorial to the boys who died was overwhelming.”
Sly concluded with an anecdote that, in its own simple way, succinctly underscores how the collective memory of the village has been reshaped by the tragedy.
Forgotten by almost all of those who survived the carnage was the outcome of the match. Among those interviewed, only Ahmed remembered the score. The team called Peace won, he said, by a score of 1-0.
Just stepping onto the soccer field & seeing this memorial to the boys who died was overwhelming. pic.twitter.com/2Vg7f43UDv
— Liz Sly (@LizSly) April 8, 2016
