Iraq unveils tribute to “Guardians of Truth,” including 2 of CBS News’ own

Sulaymaniyah, Iraq — Officials, family members and journalists gathered Saturday in Freedom Park, in the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah, for the unveiling of a new monument to the “Guardians of Truth.” The monument commemorates the lives of journalists killed covering the more than two decades of warfare that have plagued Iraq since 2003.

The monument features the names of 551 Iraqi and foreign journalists, in alphabetical order under the year in which they were killed, set on massive metal plates. Among guardians of truth memorialized on the monoliths are two of CBS News’ own heroes.

On May 29, 2006, CBS News sound engineer James Brolan and cameraman Paul Douglas were killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad. Correspondent Kimberly Dozier was badly wounded in the same explosion.

“The shock was so deep and the loss so great that no amount of time could really diminish it,” correspondent Mark Phillips said of his fallen friends and colleagues 10 years after the blast tore a hole in the CBS News family.

CBS News’ London bureau has continued to pay tribute to Brolan and Douglas since they were killed, including through support of the The Rory Peck Trust and Reporters Without Borders, two charities that work to protect and support journalists and their families around the world.

Brolan’s and Douglas’ names are also etched on a memorial to fallen journalists in Bayeux, northern France, which three of their colleagues cycled to from London in 2009, covering 200 miles in five days to raise money for those charities in their honor. 

The man behind the new monument in Iraq is the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Deputy Prime Minister, Qubad Talabani, who told the audience it was “a recognition of those fallen journalists’ courage and commitment to tell the truth. It is an attempt to preserve and keep their names, their memories, alive. They are our heroes.”

The vast majority of the names on the monument belong to Iraqi journalists who died covering the calamity in their own country. Journalism has remained one of the most dangerous jobs in Iraq since 2003.

“We saw more than 530 journalists sacrificed since 2003,” Mouaid al-Lami, who leads the Iraqi Journalists Syndicate, said at the monument’s unveiling. “It is an unprecedented number of fallen journalists in one single war.”

Most of the journalists at the ceremony weren’t there to cover the ceremony, but to pay their respects to fallen friends and colleagues.

That includes Yassir Ismael, 43, who lost his father and his older brother in 2006, when they were both working as journalists for The Associated Press in Baghdad.

“It is emotionally overwhelming to see such recognition for fallen journalists,” he said, noting that the monument is “the first of its kind in Iraq.” 

“We are in debt to all those heroes,” Ismael added, “especially to foreign journalists who came and helped to tell the stories of our suffering to the world.”