Baghdad, Iraq – A journalist known to millions of Americans was among the casualties Sunday in Iraq, a stark reminder of the everyday dangers that people face in the war zone.
Newly installed ABC “World News Tonight” co-anchor Bob Woodruff and a cameraman were in serious but stable condition after being wounded when the vehicle in which they were traveling was hit by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad.
The pair were embedded with the 4th Infantry Division and were on a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol near the town of Taji when the explosion occurred, the U.S. military said. An Iraqi soldier also was reported injured in the attack.
Woodruff and Doug Vogt sustained shrapnel wounds to the head, and Woodruff’s upper body also was injured. They underwent surgery at the U.S. military hospital in Balad and were flown to Landstuhl, Germany, for further treatment, the network said.
After they came out of surgery, ABC News president David Westin said in a statement: “We take this as good news. But the next few days will be critical.”
The journalists’ injuries came in the kind of attack that has been a frequent killer of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers.
Roadside bombs – IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, as the military calls them – accounted for about 60 percent of all U.S. casualties in the last six months of 2005.
In January, the number of fatalities in roadside bombings appears to have fallen sharply, with 23 deaths accounting for 37 percent of the casualties, the lowest number since last May, according to statistics compiled by the website icasualties.org.
“The IED risk is real in this country,” said Lt. Col. Jonathan Withington, spokesman for the multinational force in Baghdad. “The terrorists keep putting them out there.”
Joint U.S.-Iraqi patrols, like the one in which Woodruff and Vogt were traveling with two other ABC News crew members, are becoming more common in Iraq as the U.S. military embarks on a major effort to train the Iraqi army in preparation for drawing down its own forces later in the year.
The two journalists, who were said to be wearing protective body armor, helmets and ballistic goggles at the time of the blast, were in the top hatch of an Iraqi vehicle, which left them more exposed.
Small-arms fire reportedly followed the explosion.
Though Woodruff and Vogt were traveling in an Iraqi armored vehicle, most Iraqi army units travel in open pickups, making them much easier targets than the U.S. military.
“If you’re going to cover the Iraqi military forces, you have to be with them,” ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz said on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” “You have to see how they live. I will tell you one thing: A few months ago when I was there and we wanted to get into an Iraqi pickup truck, one of the American soldiers said: ‘You can’t do that. It’s way too dangerous.”‘
Coming so soon after the abduction of U.S. journalist Jill Carroll, 28, a freelance correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, Woodruff’s and Vogt’s injuries demonstrate the continued dangers with which the dwindling foreign media corps operating in Iraq must contend.
A former lawyer, Woodruff, 44, was bitten by the journalism bug and chose to forgo a legal career for a $12,000-a- year TV job in 1991, shortly before the birth of the first of his four children.
Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas officially became co-anchors of “World News Tonight” on Jan. 3. They replaced Peter Jennings, who died of lung cancer last year.
Part of the appeal of the job for Wood ruff was that it didn’t tether him to the news desk and increased ABC’s ability to showcase stories, some of which he hoped to cover.
Since the war began in March 2003, 61 journalists have been killed, 42 of them Iraqi, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The dead include two Americans and nine Europeans.
The press corps also has been reduced in less lethal ways, as news outlets pull back from Iraq. Hundreds of Western journalists converged on the country after the U.S. invasion, but only a few dozen remain.
Embedding with the U.S. military is widely considered safer for Western journalists than operating independently in the hazardous streets of Baghdad, where the threat of bombings is compounded by the danger of being kidnapped or assassinated.
But embedded journalists share the same risks faced by the American soldiers who are being killed by insurgents daily.
