Posted on 12/08/2005 11:04:12 AM PST by Crush T Velour
On August 2th Steven Vincent, reporter, blogger, and author of "In The Red Zone", was abducted in broad daylight in Basra and murdered by four men in police uniforms driving a police vehicle. His translator and guide, Nour (who had become a central character in his articles and posts) was also shot four times but survived.
After his death, certain commentators who considered him too pro-Iraq Liberation, and some others whom Vincent had criticized for inaccuracies, gleefully speculated that "ignorant" Vincent had let himself be seen too close to Nour in public or was having an affair with her and thus got himself murdered in an honor killing.
In this interview, his wife lays out the facts of his murder that makes reveals that vicious speculation to be totally implausible and provides another stunning insight into the complex politics and murderous intrigue of the New Iraq.
The following is an excerpt, but check out the whole thing:
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Q: Did you get Steven's laptop back? If yes, are you going to publish his project about Basra?
A: I have not yet gotten it back, nor have I gotten his notebooks. They are being held by the FBI as evidence in his murder case. However, I have asked for copies of everything in both the computer and the books, and once I have access to them, then yes, I will try and write the book in his stead. I want to call it “Basra: The Final Journey of Steven Vincent.”
Q: Have you heard from Nour after she left the hospital? If yes, how she's doing?
A: Nour is still incommunicado. Despite my repeated requests to speak to her, the FBI and military are not allowing her to talk to anyone except the investigators trying to determine the facts of what happened the night of August 2, when she and Steven were abducted and shot. I have asked them to relay messages to her, such as that I hope she is doing better, and that if she wants asylum in the United States to get word to me, so I can sponsor her or get her a visa.
Q: How is Steven's murder investigation going?
A: Unfortunately, I have no indication as to how it’s going, if it’s going, where it’s going. I am not in the loop as far as the information process is concerned.
Q: Who do you believe killed Steven and why?
A: I believe radical Shia militiamen, possibly with Iranian influence, killed Steven and shot Nour. This was not a random killing, nor, as has been suggested, an “honor” killing. Steven was targeted for what he had written. The men who abducted him did not even want Nour, but she kept trying to prevent them from taking Steven, so they threw her in the truck with him. They wanted Steven, and they wanted him so they could kill him and thus turn off the spotlight he was shining into too many dark corners. There is a link your readers may want to click on, it’s a very short piece that came up on Yahoo Alerts on November 25, mentioning who may have killed him:
IRAQ: IRANIAN INFILTRATORS REPORTED IN BASRA
Actually, I will go further, and state publicly and for the record that I believe members of SCIRI, under the direction of Bayad Jabr, the Interior Minister, were responsible for Steven's execution and Nour's near-death. An eyewitness to their abduction has been quoted as saying that he recognized at least one of the men who grabbed them as being a member of the Ministry of the Interior, and more and more articles are being written suggesting that uniformed men from the Interior Ministry are responsible for the current wave of abductions, tortures, imprisonment and murders of Sunni Iraqis.
At one point about halfway through his final trip, Steven interviewed some of the local SCIRI goons in Basra, and told me in an email that the whole time he was there he felt very uneasy due to a real sense of menace he felt from them, and he thought the only thing which had saved him was the fact that for the moment he was their guest, and ironbound rules of Arab hospitality kept him, for the moment, safe. Once he was no longer their guest, of course, it was a different story altogether, as the world saw on August 2nd.
Q: Could you clarify the nature of the relationship between Nour and Steven? I ask this because of the rumors on the internet and news reports.
A: Steven loved Nour. Please note that I did not say Steven was IN love with Nour. There is a big difference there semantically. He loved her as a good friend, as an intrepid translator, as someone who made it possible for him to meet and interview the people he needed to, and who could take him into places that otherwise he would not have gotten into. Given that he wanted to go to all sorts of weird locales in order to make his second book as interesting and as varied as possible, she was of vital importance to his goal. And she took him everywhere, both in 2004, thus adding several chapters to his book 'In the Red Zone', and in 2005, while he researched 'Basra'.
And Nour was a symbol to Steven. To him she represented the Iraq that he hoped would be put into place after Saddam fell - curious, opinionated, independent, courageous, secular, Westernized. As he himself said in 'Red Zone', if you could have taken a thousand Nours and set them loose across Iraq, the country would have been transformed overnight.
He was also hyper-aware of how much he owed her. One time, when she and Steven were first working together during his 2004 trip, two men came to the hotel he was staying in and, without identifying themselves, ordered them to come with him. Nour confronted them, demanding to know who they were and what they wanted, and telling Steven under no circumstances to go with them. She then brought the hotel manager over to stand with them for further reinforcement. To this day there is no way of knowing what would have happened had she not been there. This trip, when Steven began investigating the rise of Shia fundamentalism in the south, and the growing influence of the Iranians, she went with him fearlessly wherever he asked to go, to the point where someone walked up to her on the street one day and asked her why she was 'helping that American who was asking all those questions'.
And then came the day Steven was approached by a man who told him bluntly that, once he left Basra, Nour's life would be worthless, so he knew he had put her in such jeopardy that she might actually be killed. That was the day he called me at 3 AM in a panic, asking me what I thought he should do, knowing he could not leave her behind to face her fate. Between the two of us we came up with the idea of him converting to Islam, marrying her after getting her family's okay, and then taking her to England so she could take a job at The Guardian that she'd been offered. Nour's family is extremely traditional, and would not let her leave Iraq as an unmarried woman; however, they agreed to Steven's plan to convert, marry her and take her to London. He was a week away from converting and marrying when he was killed.
But he was not going to marry her because he loved her romantically (I doubt he and I would have co-planned their marriage had that been the case), he was going to do so so he could get her out of Iraq, take her to a country where she could start a new life, and last but certainly not least, probably save her life as well. There have been snide insinuations in some blog comments about the situation, but those who snigger and suggest that I was about to be dumped so Steven could run off with Nour are, quite simply, wrong. The truth is, Steven's intentions were strictly honorable. My husband was nothing if not a gentleman; he had put his translator, fixer, helper and most importantly friend, in a dangerous situation and, not knowing how else to extricate her from it, tried to do what he thought was right. It obviously was not the perfect answer, but given the circumstances, it was the only one we could come up with. If any of the snide commenters (all total strangers to me) had a better idea, they never bothered to mention it; they were too busy making slimy remarks about Steven, my intelligence (or lack thereof), a situation they knew nothing about, and/or the state of my and Steven's 23-year relationship.
So to reiterate what I said in an earlier answer, this was not an honor killing. Nour's family had no problem with her marrying Steven, and they were the ones whose honor we're talking about here. Again, the men who abducted him did not even want her initially, but just like in the hotel incident in 2004, she came to Steven's defense and was swept up with him. She was not killed; in honor killings it is the woman who dies, not the man. No, this was an execution carried out by men who had the brazenness and ability, in broad daylight, while wearing police uniforms and driving a marked police truck, to snatch two people off the street, two people who fought and screamed to no avail, throw them in a truck, bind and gag them, hold them for 5 hours while people in surrounding houses heard them being screamed at and threatened, throw them back in the truck, drive them to the outskirts of town, throw them out of the truck, tell them to run, and then shoot them at almost point-blank range. They obviously had no fear of exposure, of pursuit, of capture, of punishment - which suggests to me that they were in positions of power and status, and knew nothing was going to happen to them as a result of their killing an American journalist and attempting to kill his translator and friend.
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