How to Avoid Being Killed in a War Zone

by Rosie Garthwaite

  ‘The obvious lesson to draw from this is to think very carefully and really weigh the costs and benefits before you overrule local knowledge. It is, unfortunately, a lesson that I have learnt a few times.’

  Zeina Khodr had the opposite struggle. It was sticking to her instincts and overriding the local advice that saved her life, she says.

  ‘Your life should be in your hands, no one else’s. Take advice, but also follow your instincts. My team and I were travelling to Helmand from Kandahar in late 2009 along a single-track road. We passed an area that was in the middle of an attack by the Taliban, and continued as far as we could until we came to a bridge that they blew up. There were three choices: go back on the single track; go off-road through the Taliban-controlled villages; or stay put. I said we should head back along the single track – we were all disguised, so there was no reason for them to suspect us. But after 500 metres, we saw Taliban fighters coming out of civilian homes. They were approaching the highway. A bus was stuck and there was a traffic jam. I said, “Don’t panic. Go forward.” The last thing I wanted was to go back and be a sitting duck. The rest of the team disagreed with me, reversing backwards until we had a police checkpoint full of drugged-up officers on one side, the bridge in front of us and the Taliban all around. We were stuck there for seven hours. We hadn’t brought water, so dehydration alone could have killed us. Reversing had been the wrong decision.

  ‘We called the office to ask for help from the US and British military. Then the NATO helicopters came and we realized we were at risk of being bombed. We looked the same as everyone else in our disguise. So we decided we had to leave. We waited for two or three cars from the village to come through and we followed them.’

  /DRIVING

  I am a terrible driver. However, I have been on a few of the courses – driving in a hostile environment (mud) and driving on a skid board – and will tell you that under pressure I am sure we all become better drivers. The key is to remember just a few simple things.

  • If you skid, turn the steering wheel into the skid rather than against it and this will bring it under control.

  • Lower gears give you more control going up and down hills, and along muddy tracks.

  • Listen to your car. It will tell you when to change gear and when to give up.

  That’s it, really, the basics of driving in extreme conditions. Oh, and don’t drink and drive – that is one extreme condition that will not make you a better driver.

  /PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES

  When you are in a dangerous country there are several important matters you must address before you make a journey anywhere.

  Decide whether to drive yourself or let others do it for you. This means choosing between hiring a car, employing a driver, or using buses and taxis. This needs to be thought about before arrival (see Local Transport).

  If you opt for taxis, use the hotel’s service if possible, and build up a happy mutual relationship with tips. That way there is a limited number of people who know your movements and where you are staying. Also, the hotel will already have trusted drivers and know where they live.

  If you opt for a local driver, make sure you choose the right one. An MSF volunteer told me about the checks they tried to make before hiring in Yemen: ‘Did they have any revenge issues? Were they from the right tribe for crossing the area? Would anyone take against one of them?’

  Even if you have a driver you trust, you can never be sure about their friends. Shadi Alkasim, a freelance radio producer and journalist, recommends: ‘If you have an interpreter or driver, never give him accurate information about where you will be on the following day. For example, tell him you want to go tomorrow to such-and-such a place to cover the news there in the morning. But the next day tell him you have changed your mind and want to go to another place. Also change your route every day. Someone may be following you, and then you will be a very easy target.’

  But even if you are using a local driver and relying on their know-how, you need to stay in control of your situation. If there is something you are not sure of or do not understand, always ask. As Ian Mackinnon told me:

  ‘When it all goes quiet you’re probably between the front lines in no man’s land. If the local populace has shut up shop, abandoned streets and there are no cars around, take heed. With colleagues from the Daily Telegraph and Independent, I was approaching the southern Gaza town of Rafah, surrounded by Israeli troops and tanks who were waging ferocious battles with Palestinian militants down the road that had already left more than a score dead. Our fixer, accompanied by a driver new to us, blithely announced that he knew how to thread a way through the tank cordon down some back roads through the sand dunes. To our dismay, he then proceeded to yack away on his mobile as we proceeded down ever-quieter roads, without even bothering to ask the one car coming the other way what lay down the lane ahead. Only then did my Telegraph colleague scream at our fixer to get off the phone and stop the car. He rightly expressed reservations despite the fixer’s none-too-reassuring assurances that he knew the way and all would be fine. But, spooked, the Telegraph man asked to be taken back to the main road and life, where he would find a taxi back to Gaza City. After lunch the rest of us decided we’d give Rafah a miss for that day too.

  ‘The Telegraph man’s decision illustrated, for me, the importance of being in control and doing what you feel comfortable with. Easier said than done when in a group of competitors each under their own pressures to reach the story. He made it back to Rafah without incident, as did we the following morning.’

  It’s very important to choose the right car – one that fits into the local area. Tom Coghlan tells you how to do that in Afghanistan:

  ‘Don’t use SUVs unless absolutely necessary. Toyota Corollas in Afghanistan are almost as durable as SUVs, a fraction of their cost to run and maintain, and the parts are available everywhere. They also attract a fraction of the attention. If you go somewhere dangerous, make sure you are the driver (if you are male). Nobody ever looks at the driver in Afghanistan because he has the lowest status in the car. Make sure the car is dirty. Girls should all wear burkas. Put all your identity documents in the back of the cover of the front seat. Play Afghan music on the stereo. Get a grubby look going and don’t wash your hair. To be honest, if people look in the car, they will probably identify you as foreign, but Afghans are quite polite and won’t harass you.

  ‘In extremis the best thing to do is pretend to be physically disabled or mentally disturbed. It probably won’t help much, but there are lots of mentally disturbed people in Afghanistan, so you stand a chance of getting away with it. Because of the high instance of very close intermarriage, deaf and dumb people are quite frequent, and that’s an obvious option for the non-Pashto speaker.’

  If you must drive yourself, learn how to drive in the local way. Nick Toksvig remembers: ‘We did a lot of our own driving during the 2006 war. What worked best was adapting to the way locals drove, whether through the use of lights or hand gestures or whatever. Adapt and you won’t stand out so much.’

  According to journalist Sebastian Junger, though, your driving should be local in all but one way: ‘Wear a seatbelt! Every reporter I’ve ever met is cavalier about wearing a belt in a war zone, which is crazy.’

  If you are driving in a war zone, you need to have a plan, make it known to everyone who needs to know, and stick to it. As one MSF volunteer told me, even small deviations from it can get you killed:

  CHOOSING YOUR CAR

  ‘In Yemen we had strict laws on movement. It would take 4–8 hours to get from one town to another. To avoid tribal checkpoints, we would leave at four in the morning. On one occasion we decided to stop for a cup of coffee – a stupid, simple cup of coffee – so our driver pulled over at the nearest café. We then found we were in one of the most dangerous places we could be…it was a tribal zone with the highest risk ever. About 40–50 armed men surrounded us and they looked at us like we had dropped from heaven. As th
ey were getting their weapons ready, one approached us to say we could leave if they could keep the car. We explained it was an ambulance, but they said they didn’t care – that we were working with another tribe and weren’t curing their people and they wanted it. The local driver told us to go back to the car and he would negotiate. He told them he would race them in the car and if they managed to catch us, they could keep the car. Thankfully, ours was better than theirs and we got away.’

  HOW TO HOT-WIRE A CAR

  /CRIMINAL ATTACKS

  The threat of criminal attack obviously applies to places such as South Africa, where there is a high level of crime directed at homes and cars. But it also applies to places such as Mexico City, and Colombo in Sri Lanka, where kidnappers may be staking out your house. The information given here is not just for war zones.

  The most fundamental piece of advice is never take the same route to work two days in a row. Never let your pattern become predictable. Leave at different times of the day if you can. One day have breakfast at work, the next have it at home. Have dinner out and return home late, but not every night. Look for any unusual cars outside your accommodation. Note down number plates so you can see if someone is returning again and again out of the blue. And if your instincts tell you to be scared, go to a hotel, or stay with a friend for a few nights.

  Mary O’Shea had some interesting experiences as a new driver: ‘I moved to South Africa having driven for all of two weeks of my life. I landed in Johannesburg, bought a beat-up Ford Fiesta Flite (a tin can on wheels, specially manufactured for the African market) and had it kitted out with shatterproof windows, a tracking system and so forth, which ended up costing more than the actual car itself. Having diplomatic plates and being instructed never to stop at traffic lights is perhaps not the ideal starting point as a first-time driver. We were always reminded that most “incidents” take place as you get home, so the idea was to speed into the garage and get the gate shut behind you asap. Perhaps it’s not surprising that I managed to ram into my garage wall twice. Always keep an eye on cars around you to check if you are being followed. And if you see people lurking outside your house, drive past.’

  /CAR-JACKING

  The threat of being car-jacked is not confined just to those times of going into and out of your driveway, or to and from work. It could happen along the road too.

  Qatar, where my Al Jazeera colleagues and I now live, is the kind of place where you can leave your keys in the car for days on end and no one will even think of stealing it. But back at her home in South Africa, senior news presenter Jane Dutton lives in a different world, where a simple trip to the shops can mean risking an attack from violent criminals. She explains the everyday precautions her colleagues, friends and neighbours take in order to minimize the risk:

  ‘I live next to the beautiful Vall River outside Johannesburg. The road heading there is one of the worst in the area for hijackings. The police have cut all the trees right back. And my family all drive very defensively, hyper-aware of the rear-view mirror – looking for cars that might be following, driving too close, or just behaving in a threatening way. Attackers used to put bricks out on the road to slow you down, so you have to watch for that too.

  PRECAUTIONS AGAINST CAR BOMBS

  ‘Everyone knows not to stop at traffic lights, and never to pick up hitch-hikers. You must put your bag on the floor of the car and lock the doors and windows before you leave. In some areas further north from where I live, near Pretoria, they actually have signs warning passing drivers of a “Hijack Corner” coming up ahead.

  ‘Once I had a flat tyre while driving past the edge of a township with a particularly bad reputation. There I was in my high heels, vulnerable as anything. It was the fastest wheel change in history. You hear alarming stories all the time. Just last week my brother was driving home and a car rounded off on him to slow him down. He followed his instincts and sped onto the wrong side of the road until he came to a police car parked nearby. The policeman kicked a girl out of his car, popped his siren on and gave chase. That’s what it’s like in South Africa – more often than not you have to rely on yourself rather than the law.’

  /CONVOYS

  If the roads are dangerous, it’s a good idea to move in carefully organized convoys. Nick Toksvig has worked with teams carrying valuable camera equipment and potential hostages around all sorts of hostile environments. He explains how it’s done:

  PRECAUTIONS AGAINST CAR-JACKING

  ‘During Israel’s war on Lebanon in 2006, Sky News and Fox News teamed up when moving by car. We always travelled in a five-car convoy with radio contact between the vehicles. We kept the vehicles spaced about half a kilometre apart in case of bombing from the air. It meant that in all likelihood we would lose only one car.

  ‘Driving from Beirut to the south we had one car filled with 250 litres of fuel, another filled with personal belongings, and a third with technical equipment. We let the fuel vehicle go in front – if a car was attacked, that would be the least valuable cargo – and the rest of us kept well back on the journey down.’

  That said, a convoy can also be a target. On my way out of Baghdad for the last time I was looking for a cheap ride home. A group of gorgeous Italians offered me a seat in their car and told me to meet them at 4.30 a.m. outside our hotel the next day. (We always left before curfew as the streets were safest then.) I woke up at 4.25, my alarm having failed to go off for the first and only time in my life. As I huffed and puffed with my bag to the front door downstairs, the Italians were shutting their doors and about to head off. They shouted at me to jump into the car behind them and the whole convoy left on time. Instead of being surrounded by beautiful men, I found myself alone with a Canadian human shield, clicking on her knitting needles over murmured stitch counts.

  We drove safely through the pitch-black, empty streets of Baghdad and onto the main road to Jordan. Dawn was breaking, and through the fudge of the grey morning I saw something that looked like a tank pull up onto the side of the road. It was still curfew and these were US forces, so our driver began to slow down. The Italians’ car, though, was still heading fast towards the tank when it was pumped full of bullets and came to a screeching halt. We slowed to a crawl and I leant out my window to wave to the soldiers as we approached the vehicle that was now more of a sieve than a taxi. The driver was dead – I could see that. The others, I have no idea, because the US soldiers shouted at us to move on as we were driving through the middle of an operation. We had broken curfew, as almost everyone did, in order to make it out of the city safely, and that car of happy men on their way home had borne the brunt of that calculated risk. It was a shocking day.

  At times like that you realize nowhere is safe. Technology is never as advanced as it needs to be when it comes to identifying one person from another – the ‘enemy’ from the Red Cross or Red Crescent; the press van following an exit plan from a van full of fighters heading to the border; the refugees huddled around a fire from the locater flare for an artillery bombardment.

  Historically, one-third of all deaths during war are from so-called ‘friendly fire’, and that statistic is getting no better. John Simpson, a BBC news correspondent, remembers one terrible occasion:

  ‘In 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, I thought it would be safe if my team and I tacked ourselves onto a convoy of American and Kurdish special forces. I remember saying to the others, “The Americans aren’t going to attack us if we’re with them.” But they did. A US Navy plane dropped a 1000-lb bomb right in the middle of our group. Eighteen people died, most of them burnt to death. My translator, who was standing close to me, had his legs blown off and died of blood loss. The rest of us were injured in different ways, none seriously. The fault was mine, and I still feel the guilt strongly.’

  Apart from that occasion, John had always avoided travelling with the military for protection. It’s known as embedding and carries its own risks. You are travelling with the military and subject to their whims.
You are, to all intents and purposes, enlisted in the army for those days and must forfeit your independence of movement and choice. The people the army are fighting regard you as just another soldier. Embedding can provide you access to a fight or an area you would never otherwise have seen, but it keeps you away from what is really going on. And John believes (rightly in my view) that it destroys the objectivity of your position as a journalist.

  /CHECKPOINTS

  You’ll come across checkpoints along the road, at border crossings, or even in an airport. The road checks are the ones that pose the most danger, but being aware of your body language and using a skilled approach to people during any meeting will help ease your journey anywhere you travel.

  Authority breeds arrogance, and that can be dangerous in a place where laws mean little. Before travelling through Yemen as tourists in 2005, my friends and I had a pile of travel passes printed off to give out to each checkpoint along the way. There were maybe 60 stops over four days of driving through the Hadramaut valley. At each one we were asked for a different level of search or bribe, even though our papers were in order. As frustration grew with the sticky heat of the day, it was difficult to approach each new checkpoint as a new conversation. When our car radiator fizzled out in the middle of a scrubby desert on day three, we looked ahead and saw a well-manned checkpoint about a kilometre away through the desert heat. They saw us and didn’t help. We wanted to scream and shout, but we eventually started the car again and chugged to their barrier, where they handed us water with big smiles and waved us through – no bribe, no search. It’s difficult to avoid judging one experience by your last, but you must.