At war over Iraq coverage

Three years ago Rageh Omaar, aka the Scud Stud, was nearly killed by American bombs as he reported from the roof of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. Now he is under fire again but this time the missiles are verbal and come from his erstwhile boss, the BBC's World Affair editor, John Simpson.

Simpson is livid because Omaar has criticised Western reporting on Iraq. The 38-year-old pretty boy of news he of the dewy eyes and long eyelashes has said that broadcasters should "fess up" to the "fraud" they are perpetrating by staying within the protected Green Zone and passing off footage taken by Iraqi freelances as their own.

After two British journalists were killed last week, Simpson, currently in Iraq, fumed on Radio 4's Today programme that journalists are risking their lives daily. Omaar, he suggested later, was ignorant of the facts, or possibly out to denigrate Western media now that he has a new job with Arab broadcaster Al Jazeera.

Omaar, who arrives wearing his trademark red fleece, looks as if this flak is as uncomfortable as anything he experienced in Iraq. Simpson seems to be the last person he would wish to antagonise. The older news-hand is an admired colleague with whom he entered Kabul during the Afghan war; he also spent time with him in Baghdad at the end of the Iraq war.

Omaar's defence is that he was misreported.

"I know, of course, that journalists are not operating from the Green Zone. What I said was 'the Green Zone and such areas', meaning they can only operate from protected areas. The BBC's bureau in Baghdad, for example, is in a normal street behind the Palestine Hotel but it is protected by concrete blocks and security guards. You cannot go out and report without security clearance and meticulous preparation because journalists are being hunted down."

He says he understands why Simpson was angry. "He has to argue with accountants to keep the bureau open in Baghdad. It costs mountains of cash: each security guard is paid £500 (Dh3,428) a day and insurance is astronomical."

But even though he believes reporters are virtually imprisoned there, he doesn't think the bureau should be closed. "This is the most important news story of our time. Iraq is a fundamental and deeply divisive political issue, one that transcends all socio-economic boundaries, so I couldn't argue, as a consumer of news, that we pull out.

"I am much more worried about what Iraq is doing to journalism than what journalists are doing in Iraq. Since November, no journalist has been to investigate the massacre in Haditha [where US marines are accused of murdering civilians].

"That's not because they can't be bothered but because it is in the heart of the Sunni Triangle. All I am saying is that reports ought to carry health warnings explaining the restrictions, because if we don't we risk losing faith with the public."

So he wasn't running down the BBC to boost Al Jazeera?

"I don't even know if they have a bureau there," he says with impressive vagueness about his new employers. Besides, he points out, Al Jazeera is not the radical Islamist mouthpiece that it appears when relaying Osama Bin Laden's broadcasts.

"Any day you will find a spokesman from the US State Department being interviewed by them."

After this tricky topic, Omaar's new unofficial role as a spokesman for Somalis in Britain seems comparatively safe ground. Three years ago, when reporting from Iraq, his country of origin was not a source of great interest. It was enough that he was easy on the eye and good at shouting over the shooting. But in the past year being the only high-profile Somali out of the 200,000 in Britain, it has become a job description.

"It began with the July 21 bombings," he says, when Yassin Hassan Omar, a Somali, was arrested on suspicion of attempting a second round of suicide bombings on the London Underground. "After that, I kept being asked: 'What can we do? How can we help?'" Since then, a small number of Somalis have made headlines.

A Somali man is wanted for the murder last of PC Sharon Beshenivski in Bradford in November while, two weeks ago, a Somali youth was charged with the murder of schoolboy Kiyan Prince.

So it has fallen to Omaar off-screen he is larger and jollier than when earnestly doing his job to explain why some young men whose families come from Anglophile Somalia appear prone to violence and fanaticism when living in Britain.

"I don't know what to do," he admits, "but it is certainly a battle that I am up for."

So between documentaries for Al Jazeera, he's been trying to understand why some young Somali men find themselves on the fringes of criminality.

He left the BBC because he "wanted more control over my career", he says. But he is plainly getting restless. "I can definitely see myself going back to news reporting", he says. "It would mean putting my family through terrible worry, so I would have to feel I was really making a difference."

Under present reporting restrictions, he couldn't justify the risk of a return to Iraq, but he has been applying for a visa to Iran. So it may not be long before we see him in the news again.

Short take
The family man behind the news

Rageh Omaar's parents arrived in Britain in 1972, when he was 5, because they wanted to be close to their children who were all at private schools in England (Omaar was educated at Cheltenham College and Oxford). His took up British citizenship in 1993.

His father's tractor business had made them richer than most immigrants, but Omaar claims to be less of an exception than he appears: "Emigrees are their countries' best and brightest. They move because they want education and a better future for their children."

He shares his west London house with his wife, Nina Cuninghame daughter of a Berkshire baronet and their children: Loula, five, Sami, three, and two-month-old Zachary, who is keeping him awake even more effectively than his row with John Simpson.