For BBC World News correspondent Yalda Hakim, interacting with people at grassroots level and understanding their lives and stories is often crucial to her work as a journalist.
Take the time when she interviewed a man in Yemen whose 8-year-old daughter had been killed in an apparent US drone strike. “He wept throughout most of that interview,” she tells Weekend Review. “He was heartbroken by his daughter’s death. It was very difficult to watch a grown man break down multiple times like that.”
Hakim had gone to Yemen to cover America’s drone warfare in the country for a BBC “Newsnight” report titled “Do US drone strikes create more enemies than they kill?” For a part of the video, she interviewed different people whose lives had been affected by the strikes.
Mohammad Ahmad Bagash had been outside a clinic with his two children when it was hit. The trio ran to a school and hid in the basement but then the school was hit too. Eventually he managed to bring his children out. His son survived, but his 8-year-old daughter died. He told Hakim how his daughter turned yellow as she bled and started to shrink in his arms.
Bagash’s tragic story is just one of many Hakim has encountered in some of the most dangerous corners of the world. The Afghan-born Australian journalist joined the BBC last year in December, having previously spent four years reporting for SBS “Dateline” in Australia. The move to London has been a different experience to the small media environment Hakim was used to in Australia. “To come to such a large organisation that has so many layers, just in this building there are language service programmes, there are experts on any issue that exists worldwide,” she says. “So when I am presenting, something happens in Tunisia, for example.
There is an expert in the building who has worked for a number of years in the region, speaks the language, understands the people, knows what is going on and we can bring them in and get them to brief our audience about what is going on.”
When I met her, she had very recently returned from Australia, and was off to Afghanistan the week after. The interview with Hakim took place inside a meeting room at the BBC News Broadcasting House in central London. There, I listened to Hakim talk about another apparent victim of the CIA’s drone attacks, Ahmad Al Sabooly, whom she met during that trip to Yemen.
“He had this vacant look about him where almost like he couldn’t believe what had happened,” she says. Al Sabooly lost his mother, father and sister in the strike. In the video the man displayed a striking lack of emotions. “He hadn’t come to terms with it but he couldn’t cry any more,” she says.“It really felt like his tears had dried up. And you just get a real sense of actually the impact of something like this and how it affects normal people on the ground.”
His family, who were supposed to be visiting a local clinic that day, had been in a car when they were hit. Al Sabooly had been working in the fields. When he arrived on the scene and looked inside the car, the bodies of his loved ones were so badly burnt he could see the bones. His sister was still in his mother’s arms. “He said, ‘Look, I am a simple man I don’t know the politics of these things. This bomb was dropped and I lost my family members.’”
And so you know these are really simple people, they are farmers, and they are people who just don’t understand. He said, ‘I am not Al Qaida, I am not a terrorist. Nor was my mother, nor was my sister, nor was my father.’ What the government was saying, and what the line that the United States had said is that you know: Yemen has become the next front line for the war on terror.”
The grim nature of Hakim’s report contrasts starkly with the eye-catching beauty of Yemen’s landscape and architecture, including the capital city. “I actually have said that Sana’a is one of the most beautiful cities that I have been to,” she says. “It really feels like the original high-rise city. You can even see that parts that had been damaged. They try and rebuild these in that original structure.”
But Yemen is only one of the many places Hakim has reported from, including Afghanistan, Libya, Tunisia, India, Bangladesh, United States and South Sudan. She made her debut at the BBC in March with a three-part series for “Our World” reporting from Iraq to mark ten years of the US-led invasion. It was her first trip to the country.
While Hakim had done a lot of work in Kabul and other parts of Afghanistan and is no stranger to checkpoints, Baghdad actually felt like a city under siege. “When we went up north to Mosul, which is considered Iraq’s most dangerous city, I encountered 50 checkpoints on one road,” she says. “People there are literally locked into some of these areas. Some places are completely shut, closed off. You need permits to enter and exit places such as Fallujah.
But then you find within this city which feels quite tense all the time that ten bombs went off in one day, for example, and one was just outside our compound. You are constantly on high alert, tense and stressed out but you find incredible people amid all this, real survivors. Strong people who are fighting to make, you know, a life for themselves.”
One of the stories she worked on was the staggering rise in the number of babies born with birth defects and cancer. “The story of birth defects was quite heartbreaking,” she says. “I often read reports about it, and I was quite keen to do the story. So that was quite a difficult story to do, to see children and their families suffering. And a lot of very poor families having to deal with disabled children. Or you know, stillborn babies, because they had so many birth defects.”
Yet her report on birth defects did not come up with a definite conclusion on the disturbing phenomenon, which is alleged to be linked to ammunitions used by coalition forces. “There are studies still being conducted, there are people still trying to access the country, get on the ground and try to understand the situation,” she says. “There were doctors who we were convinced that it was the ammunitions used in modern warfare that had caused it. There were others we spoke to who said they didn’t know. I don’t think we can really find a real link.”
Others however have already made up their minds. “There were some who were showing us teeth samples and saying that they had conducted all this research and shared samples with doctors overseas to get to the bottom of this,” she says. “They said in comparison with the other parts of the world, there were high levels of uranium, for example, in the teeth. And the Health Ministry was similarly concerned that there might potentially be links, but our job is to highlight the issue and not necessarily come up with a conclusion for the audience.”
A more conclusive investigation was a report on the deteriorating situation of Iraq’s women since the invasion. It said there were an estimated one million widows and rising prostitution. One of the women she interviewed was Dr Ibtihal Al Zaidi, the only woman in the Iraqi Cabinet. A strange thing happened after the meeting. As she was leaving her office, someone walked up to Hakim and handed a note stating they didn’t have enough resources and it was all propaganda.
“It was someone within that department who felt quite upset about the running of the department,” she says. “She felt that women’s issues were not properly being handled and tackled, and that women were still being seen as second-class citizens. The minister herself said to me that she didn’t feel that a woman could run Iraq, ‘not now. Maybe it will take 10 years, maybe 15 years, maybe 20 years.’ So it was surprising to hear a woman minister say she couldn’t see a woman running the country any time in the near future.”
While Iraq was dangerous, among all the war zones Hakim goes to, Afghanistan concerns her parents the most. She believes it is because they understand it the most. Hakim, who was born in Afghanistan in 1983, left the country with her family when she was still an infant. “They often wonder why I return to a situation they fled from,” she says. Hakim first went back in 2008 to do a report for SBS “Dateline”. “It was difficult to go back when I knew I had a personal connection with the country,” she says.
“Of course it is completely different now because I have been there so many times, and I travel to other parts of the world facing similar turmoil.” But the first time was very difficult since “Dateline” wanted it to be a personal journey. “I was grappling with my understanding of the country,” she says. “I romanticised the country in my head from what my parents had told me. And so to get there and find a people so tired of three decades of war was really difficult for me to actually witness.”
She met her grandparents for the first time. “That was again very difficult because I didn’t understand,” she says. “I was meeting my grandparents as an adult. I didn’t have any prior relationship with them, so it was a different relationship as a journalist.”
Yet it was her 2012 report “Anatomy of a Massacre” for “Dateline” which would make headlines around the world, with extensive coverage across major news networks such as CNN and NBC. It was an investigation into a massacre of Afghan villagers, for which US Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales recently was given a life sentence for killing 16 people, although locals have claimed many US soldiers were present.
Hakim told me the story of how the report came to be. “I was in Australia, watching the coverage of the massacre unfold,” she says. She noticed the reports were being done from within Kabul, and no one was going to Kandahar where the incident had actually taken place, security being a huge problem for journalists based there. “I heard through some news reports that the families of the victims had been invited to the presidential palace for a press conference and to just meet the president,” she says. “And so I sent my local producer, without a camera, without a notepad, to meet the locals and talk to them and understand their story. And so he built a rapport with them. And then literally within 24 hours I boarded a flight with my crew, and we went to Kandahar. First, we interviewed the chief investigator, General Karimi, in Kabul. And then he arranged for the military to assist us in Kandahar, to offer us protection and to give us access to the village and safe passage to the crime scene.”
The majority of witnesses were children. However, one of the locals told her there was a woman who had seen the incident take place. She lived 20 minutes outside of town, and Hakim was told if she filmed her, she would be taken there. She had to go in the dead of the night, on her own with a man, to meet the woman. It was a bit of a security risk travelling to a mud-brick house deep inside of a village in Kandahar. But Hakim had built a rapport with the locals and managed to reach there safely.
“This woman would never speak to anyone ever again, and she probably never will,” Hakim says. “And you know I filmed it, I interviewed her, and being able to connect with the people in the local language really broke down the barriers.” (Hakim speaks six foreign languages, and has also been learning Mandarin.)
But she also managed to interview some of the child witnesses, which required some special measures. One 8-year-old girl was shot in the leg, and had watched her mother being dragged by the hair and her father shot. Similarly a young boy’s father also had been shot, while a bullet just missed his own ear. Hakim tells me how she had to spend time winning the trust of the children, getting approval from their guardians, and using her knowledge of the local language to interact with them. “It wasn’t just we are there, switch on the camera, start talking,” she says. “I spent days building trust with the families, and the children. I spent days in Kandahar. It wasn’t a quick in and out.”
Her knowledge of foreign languages has come in handy when she is out reporting. “I certainly find it is useful for me,” she says. “When I travel to India, I speak Hindi, or when I travel to Pakistan I speak Urdu. When I meet Iranians, I speak to them in Farsi or to Afghans in Dari and Pashto. And so I find the person I am interviewing feels at ease and comfortable.” How did she end up learning all these languages? “Bollywood,” she laughs. “Of course my parents sent me off to Saturday school in Australia and I learnt the local Afghan languages.” My query about her favourite actors is greeted with more laughter. “You have got to say the obvious — the Shah Rukh Khans of the world.”
For her trip to Afghanistan in the week after our meeting, she was scheduled to interview President Hamid Karzai, whom she had interviewed previously for SBS “Dateline” and even travelled with him to Pakistan, where he held talks with then president Asif Ali Zardari and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. She describes Karzai as a man grappling with a number of competing forces. “The expectation of the Afghan people, the pressures from the international community and Nato and the ongoing battles with the Taliban,” she says. “And so it is a thankless job to be the president of that country.”
Hakim believes there is a certain advantage to being a woman reporter, in terms of gaining access to hard-to-reach places. “It is almost like the local men underestimate me and the women are quite happy to welcome me into their homes,” she says. “So actually I benefit from both ends. For example, we went deep into Al Qaida territory in southern Yemen, and I had the niqab and everything on, and at every checkpoint they were just waving us through. Because they look at the back seat and see a woman. So there are a lot of benefits — women feel comfortable with you, they want to let you in to their homes.”
Her report on drone attacks in Yemen aired in August, raising vital questions about their impact on ordinary peoples. Yet, in general, there remains a glaring lack of media coverage of the civilian deaths caused by US drones, with many news outlets content with reporting the deaths as “suspected” militants. “
I think that is one of the unfortunate things,” she says. Hakim reckons the nature of daily news is such that not everyone affected can be covered due to time constraints, which is why it is important to have these in-depth, long-form video reports. “That is what we try to do is give them a face, a voice, a name, an age, a person who is affected,” she says. “I think that is one of the major aims of what we do: we go out to make them real rather just a part of a statistic.”
Having that human touch is important. “I would stop doing what I am doing if it stopped affecting me,” she says. However, she likes to keep her work separate from family life. When she is with siblings and friends, for example, she goes into their world. “I play with my nieces and that gives me an escape,” she says. “I like to switch off but I never completely forget these people and they will always have an impact in my life. You keep those people with you no matter where you go.”
Syed Hamad Ali is a writer based in London.
