Grade the News Interview with Anna Badkhen, foreign correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle

How did you get started in journalism? I got hired as a secretary at a biweekly English-language newspaper in St. Petersburg, Russia. That was in 1996. And I was such a horrible secretary that one of the editors there … asked me if I wanted to be a journalist instead. And I said sure. That’s how it started. My first story was about stray dogs. My second story was about a morgue in St. Petersburg, where either their refrigerators broke or they stopped getting electricity for some post-Soviet reason. Anyway, it was very smelly. It was certainly very interesting. I worked at The St. Petersburg Times for almost four years before I moved to Moscow. I moved to Moscow in 2000, and spent almost a year working at The Moscow Times, which is a daily English-language paper here.

How did you master English as a native Russian?

Well, if I tell you that I went to spy school you’d believe me, but it’s not true. I went to college for one year in the States, in upstate New York, in ’94. Hamilton College, it’s a small liberal arts school. And my husband’s American. We speak English at home.

I guess you have no ties to the Bay Area particularly?

No, none whatsoever. The Chronicle is one of the most popular papers for free-lancers, both in the States and overseas. Pretty much every other foreign-based correspondent I know here at one point free-lanced for the Chronicle, including my husband.

Why is that?

They don’t have foreign staff. I’m their only foreign correspondent on staff. And they do have a world news section, which is very large and gives stories written by stringers very good play. So I liked working them very much, and I still do. They’ve been very good to me.

What went into your decision to go to Afghanistan?

I sort of just went. It was sort of obvious.

You had reported from abroad before?

From the former Soviet republics, yes. Never from a place so foreign as Afghanistan.

Did it take some getting used to?

A little bit. But, you know, there were other things that took some getting used to, like getting bombed. And getting shot at, and riding a horse across a rapid, muddy river every day to get the front line. While you’re trying to do that without a saddle you kind of forget about being in a foreign country for awhile.

What was going through your mind when you were doing that?

I hated it. Mostly I was thinking, dumb horses! Because, you know, you don’t have a saddle, you don’t have anything to hold onto, and the river is really, really fast, and you can’t see the bottom because it’s brown, muddy water. And then your horse stops in the middle of the river and starts drinking, and you’re sort of sliding down the horse’s neck, and thinking, oh my God, this is my last — this is how I’m going to die, in this awful, stinking river.

One time, the Americans were bombing maybe a mile away from where we were crossing the river on horseback, and I thought, so, what’s the horse going to do when they start bombing? Because they were dropping those thousand-pound bombs. Windows break two or three miles away from where the bomb is dropped. And we were much closer than that, and I thought, what, are you going to throw me? And he turned around and looked up to me as if to say, “What? I’m used to this.” And just walked on.

In the last two and a half years you’ve reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, the Kurdish territories, Russia, Chechnya, Belarus, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Israel, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, India, Kashmir, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Turkey and Georgia. Does that take a toll on your family?

Yes, of course it does.

How often do you get to see your son?

Not enough. I think he’s used to it, the fact that both David and I travel a lot, but you can never get used to the fact that Mommy can go away for three weeks or months and you won’t see her. So yeah, it’s difficult, and I feel guilty. He’s six, he starts school in September. And it’s exhausting to travel so much, and the things I see sometimes make me very upset.

Does it make you more protective of him, when you see children dying of curable illnesses and violence?

I don’t think it makes me more protective of him. I tell him a little bit of what I see. I don’t like to tell him a lot because I know that he worries about me very much. When he was 4 and I was in Afghanistan he called me on my satellite phone and he said, “Mamma, you know there are tanks where you are and you better be careful.” He probably knows and worries more than he lets on. He knows that I go to war zones. He doesn’t watch the news, normally, and I don’t tell him all the horrible stories, but he’s aware of where I go, and what I do. I show him on the map every time I travel, where I’m going to go.

Is this something you think you can do for a long time, or is it a limited-time venture for you?

I’m not stopping.

How old are you?

I’m 27.

You’ve been doing this for how long?

I’ve been doing this at this crazy pace for the last two years.

Was the U.S. government or the Iraqi government more of a hindrance in terms of setting limits on reporters?

I was in Kurdistan before the war. The Iraqi regime did not allow me into their country on the basis that my last name was Jewish. As far as more restrictive, that should probably answer your question.

Also, my husband was kicked out of Iraq because he used his satellite phone in his hotel room, which was illegal, according to Iraqi government rules. The Americans did not kick me out or ban me based on my Jewish last name from anyplace I’ve ever been, so obviously the Iraqi government was much more restrictive.

I was aware that all the journalists in Kurdistan had a price tag on their heads because Saddam didn’t want any foreign journalists in Kurdistan, even though he didn’t really control it. But when Baghdad fell, CNN reported how two of Saddam’s henchmen were planning to blow up a hotel where CNN was staying in Erbil, in northern Iraq. The hotel was about 50 yards away from my hotel. The amount of explosives they were going to bring in and set off was enough to blow up half of that entire city. That was kind of freaky.

But that was in retrospect. It already didn’t happen. And for me anyway, that usually is how I perceive danger in was zones. Usually you realize how stupid and dangerous it was, what you just did, in retrospect. You think, oh my God! That was so stupid. I could have gotten killed.

Like once, in Afghanistan, I lost my translator. He went to the bazaar and never came back. And so I had to hire a driver, because I had to get out of Afghanistan, and I spoke very, very basic Farsi, using my 1969 English-Dari phrasebook.

I hired the taxi driver. So I could speak to him in sort of pidgin Farsi. He could speak to me, but I couldn’t understand him.

So he was saying something to me, and he was very agitated, and sort of making strange gestures with his hands, and pointing to his tummy, so I kept nodding and handing him crackers. And then when we got to a place where there were English speakers, they said, “We can’t believe you just drove across that road. It was completely mined. There were 600 mines there.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s what they guy was telling me about! That we’re all going to blow up!”

But it was all over. I’d already crossed that road. I’d already driven across that minefield.

Did you ever consider becoming embedded with the U.S. military, or would that have made it impossible for you to do the kind of stories you wanted to do?

No, I never considered being embedded with the U.S. military for precisely the reason you just mentioned. I think that the concept of having journalists embedded with the U.S. military is a good idea. I think that it’s great that we got that side of reporting. I would not want to do that because that’s not what I like to do. I like to be able to move freely and report from all sorts of sides, unhindered.

I spoke to people who were embedded, and it was certainly the experience of a lifetime, but it was very restrictive. They couldn’t even tell their locations to their editors. They were with the enemy, which meant they were targets. Had they strayed away from whatever they were in, tanks or Humvees, they would have been killed because they were with the “bad guys.” Or captured and tortured. So they wouldn’t have been able to, after they rolled through a city or as they’re approaching a city, go out and interview people in that city.

I’ve been embedded with the Russian military. That’s the only legal way of getting into Chechnya. There are stories you can write from that experience. Really fascinating stories you can write. But you can’t really go out and talk to real Chechens while you’re embedded with the Russians, because they don’t really let you.

It’s not what I wanted to do. I don’t think it’s boring, it’s just not what I do best, I think. But I’ve seen really good stories from people who were embedded. They weren’t necessarily just boom-bang stories, shock and awe. There were people in those Humvees, you know, young boys and girls making this war happen. They were scared, they had all their emotions, they had their families that they left behind. They had thoughts.

I like to write about people in those situations, and this is one of the stories you can do being embedded, write about the people you’re embedded with.

You focus mostly on the conditions on the ground for average people stuck in these situations. Do you make a deliberate effort to do that? And how do you think reporting like yours informs geopolitics?

I believe that a war is not an abstract concept. A war is something that affects people on the ground, and that’s why wars are terrible. By writing about people that wars affect, I believe that that’s probably the easiest and most direct way to explain war to people. A woman who died because she couldn’t get her dialysis treatment on time because the nearest dialysis machine was on the other side of the front line. Or a girl from a middle-class family, who grew up among books and riding her scooter on an upscale street in Ramallah, and suddenly life as she knows it is destroyed because her house is riddled with bullets and there are people in tanks outside.

There are real people who are experiencing wars out there, and I think that in order to understand what wars do, we have to know how these people feel and what happens to them.

You have a particular eye for detail. You recently described a police colonel’s looted office by telling readers that the pictures were missing from the walls, and so were the nails. How do you feel that painting that kind of word picture helps readers understand the situation?

It puts you there. I want to tell people what I saw. And this is what I saw. I want to help my readers imagine what it feels like, or what it looks like. “Fifty-three killed in a bus crash” doesn’t describe what really happened. “Somebody’s house was looted” doesn’t really describe that everything was taken. There aren’t any nails in the walls. There aren’t even doors to lock. I hope that it helps my readers see those people and be there with the people about whom I write, and understand how they feel, and why the feel the way they feel.

You also don’t shy away from ironies or contradictions. Like the police who don’t have any guns, and just let crime happen in the streets. Or women who are better off under Saddam’s repressive but relatively women-friendly rule. What’s the best example of stories you’ve written of unintended consequences?

The increased flow of heroin from liberated Afghanistan. You name it. The women who have to wrap themselves up in Iraq. It’s always easy to paint everything black and white. Because we painted the Taliban black, for example, there were many reports in the beginning of the war in Afghanistan — I think partially because we knew so little about Afghanistan, it was very much off limits to foreign journalists during the time it was controlled by the Taliban — that I remember, and I may have even written in my stories, about how the Taliban made women wear burqas. So there was this false idea that the Taliban were bad, therefore all the bad things that were happening in Afghanistan were because of the Taliban. And as soon as the Taliban is gone, drugs will be gone, and the burqas will be gone. But in fact burqas are a cultural thing in rural Afghanistan. They’ve always been.

And we couldn’t just close our eyes to the fact that where we were reporting from, the territories controlled by the Northern Alliance, all the women were wearing burqas, even though that was “free territory.”

The fact that much of the heroin was produced in the Panjir area, which was controlled by Ahmad Shah Masood, the leader of the Northern Alliance, we also closed our eyes to that. Masood was eulogized to no end in the U.S. press.

Oh, absolutely, because he was the “good guy.” American foreign policy frequently falls into those good guy-bad guy traps, and creates unlikely allies among people like Osama bin Laden or General Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose soldiers raped Pashtun women just to terrorize them in the Mazar-e-Sharif area. I think there was a case of rape of a foreign humanitarian aid worker by these same friends of ours.

Do you think the American media falls into the same traps that U.S. foreign policy does?

Everybody does, and everybody should, because it’s human nature. That’s how we like to see our world. We like the bad guys to be completely bad, and we like the good guys to be completely good. But it doesn’t really work that way. There are no angels and devils. There was even something good about Saddam, like the way women had pretty much equal status with men in Iraq. That was probably the only thing that was good about Saddam. But you know, he was a monster.

But we can’t allow ourselves to fall into this trap of believing that everything bad will disappear as soon as the bad guy’s gone. Because not all bad things come from the bad guy, and not all good guys are completely good. That’s why a lot of people say journalists are very cynical and tend to exaggerate, because we go and warn people about those traps.

Do you think there are stories that are harder for a female reporter to do, and do you think there are stories that are easier?

In Muslim countries it’s easier for a female reporter to report about women, because women are more likely to talk to a woman openly than to a stranger who is also a male.
Is it more difficult? Well certainly I wouldn’t spend the night in a trench with a bunch of soldiers from, say, they Northern Alliance or Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers, because I think it would be unnecessarily risking getting assaulted.

But that hasn’t hindered your ability to report the story?

Well, OK, I’m not a marathon runner, and that hinders my ability to report some stories. I’m not an ace swimmer, and that hinders my ability to report certain stories. There are a lot of things I can’t do. I’m also fairly small, and not particularly healthy. I can’t carry loads and loads of stuff on my back or walk thousands of miles. Every person is different, and I think that everyone’s biological differences affect the way they report a story one way or another. …

There are people who have serious health problems. There are correspondents, for example, who need a walking stick to move around. These people do it. They go all the places I go and they do a great job. People, if they’re driven, don’t allow their limitations to limit what they do. Unfortunately, in Russia these people would probably be working at a post office or handling some simple machinery while they’re sitting down, because here everything is so un-encouraging to people with disabilities. But I don’t think that being a woman is that much of a limitation.

How much time does it take to get access to the people you need to talk to, and how many people’s help do you need in order to get that kind of access?

I had horrible translators. The first person I worked with in Afghanistan, I actually worked with him for … almost three months. He’s a wonderful person. His English was horrible. Looking back, I have no idea how I reported all those stories and got all that color and all that conversation in, because his English was not mediocre, it was really bad. But somehow you just get there and it just happens. You go to a place and suddenly you start understanding Arabic or Farsi. This translator whose English was so bad was a wonderful helper, and a very reliable person who helped me a lot and would go anywhere I would go and just be there to protect me. Which is sometimes more important than somebody’s English.

Of course I depend on the people I work with, always, and sometimes their limitations reflect on what I can and cannot do. I had a translator who was a writer and a scientist in northern Iraq. But his English was very studied, and he’s very slow, and he took a lot of time, and so we couldn’t get anywhere fast, because every translation took a long time. I had to explain things several times before he understood what I meant. I probably didn’t get places as fast as some other people did, but, you know, he gave me insight that no other people got because he was a dissident who spent several months in Saddam’s prisons. Other people’s translators hadn’t. So I got stories about what that was like from him that other people didn’t get.

All people are different and everybody has their values. You just have to try to get the most out of every person you work with.

There were people who weren’t willing to go where I needed them to go, and I had to let several drivers go because of that. They just were afraid or their wives wouldn’t let them, stuff like that. I would never force anyone to travel to a war zone or to the front line with me because I value their lives, and people should be able to decide for themselves what they’re willing to do.

Losing a translator in a bazaar and having to travel across Afghanistan for two days by myself was not something that I would have chosen, but I had to do it.

How often did you move, and were you under pressure to file stories when you were on the move? How tiresome was it?

In Afghanistan I was always on the move. When the first phase of the war ended, After the Taliban fell, I would file stories almost every day, and usually each day I would file from a different place. So I’m used to that. I don’t write very well in cars, so we’d get someplace and then I would start writing. Being 11 or 12 hours ahead of San Francisco helps, because by the time you’re done with your story, your editors are just coming into work.

Did you ever collapse from exhaustion from that kind of pace?

Yes. It can be very exhausting. Getting up very early, driving on nonexistent roads, reporting, driving back for many hours, or driving on for many hours and then trying to find a place to sleep. The place to sleep can be a hotel with satellite TV and a shower, or it can be a mud-brick house made with donkey dung. And that’s where you write. And if that’s where you’re sleeping, you’re most likely sitting on the floor and writing your story. It’s most likely not heated, and if it’s winter it could be very, very cold.

So you were worried a lot about logistics, where you’re going to get the electricity to power your laptop?

Definitely, yes. In Afghanistan I traveled with a generator. When I went to Kurdistan in northern Iraq, I brought a generator with me, because I thought there would be power surges, and I also had very little concept of what Kurdistan was like. It’s a modern state with Internet cafes. But I didn’t know that, so I brought my generator.

So you could carry all this stuff by yourself?

I never carry all my stuff by myself. I have way too much stuff. I always have people who help me. There’s the driver or the translator. I need these people to help me. I have way too many things. In some places you need to carry a month’s worth of food supplies. In Afghanistan I would have a separate bag stuffed with just food and medicine. Because you couldn’t eat often in Afghanistan what they served locally because it was so dangerous. And then the generator, and the bag with clothes, and then the bag with computer, and then the satellite phone. No, it’s impossible to carry all that by yourself. It cannot be done. You can do it in an airport, maybe, but in places that have no roads you absolutely need helpers.

Did you ever get fatigued by all the suffering that you saw? Has that affected you mentally? Or can you rest up and forget about it and do your job?

Yes I get pained, yes it affects me mentally. I can’t forget about it. Sometimes it gets very miserable and depressing. Usually in the winter.

And what do you do to combat that?

Cry. Talk to my dad, who is a therapist. Cry some more. Inevitably the next assignment comes up and I have to come out of it. When I went to Israel and Palestine, I cried every night, because what I saw was so devastating. Every night I would come home and before writing my story I would do my daily cry. Because there were things that saddened me immensely.

I think what helps is that I tell this to people by writing stories about this. So, even though I am the filter for all this pain and misery, I give some of it away, and that’s very therapeutic.

Your stories are extraordinarily personal.

Well, thank you. They’re meant to be.

What draws you to war? Did you plan to be a war correspondent. What is it that makes this your chosen field?

I never planned to be a war correspondent. I do this because it’s my job. I do this because I think I can do this. And I do this because I think that these stories are important and somebody needs to tell them. And also I meet wonderful people when I travel, I go places I would otherwise never go. People can be so gracious in crisis. It’s quite incredible how people behave in war zones.

Also because it’s something that people will read. It gets me on page one. There’s also just vanity. It’s nice that people know your name and call you up for interviews.

Seeing all that you do in wars, do you ever find yourself taking sides in conflicts?

Yes. Of course. But it’s not like Fox Television: “Our troops! The Iraqi military is crumbling under our pressure!” No, not those kinds of things. I don’t think you can ever take sides in a war, because both sides are always bad, in that sense. I’m not pro-Chechen, or pro-Russian, or pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian. In this last war I wasn’t pro-Iraqi or pro-American.

So you were anti-both?

I’m anti-war. I don’t like wars. I think wars are bad. I see a lot of people suffer. It’s like if you are a married couple, and you have an argument, but you also have five kids, while you’re having an argument you start hitting your children on the head with chairs. If one government doesn’t like the other government and they go to war, or if one regime doesn’t like the separatists, and they go to war, then the people who suffer are not just the government and the separatists. The people who suffer are the people in between, just people who are living their lives. I’m on their side.

Did you ever feel yourself in danger from combat? And how did that threat compare with the threat from random crime in a war zone or a post-war zone?

Last time I was in Iraq, in May, I went to this hospital that had nothing — they had like a dozen syringes and some sterilized gauze to help their patients, and I thought they were all going to die. People died because they got stabbed or shot at accidentally in the street, and by the time they got to the hospital they’d be already almost dead. And then they’d die because they’d lost so much blood, or there was no equipment to treat them or no medicines to treat them. And I thought, oh my God, I’d better not get wounded in this, because that’s where I’ll come, and this will be my end. I will expire on this tile floor soaked in blood.

Getting bombed is scary, getting shot at is scary. The idea that somebody may shoot you is scary. The fear that anywhere you step may be a minefield is scary. There are a lot of scary things out there.

I gather there are some reporters who seek out danger. A few have acknowledged that they take unnecessary risks, and like to go into war zones just for the adrenaline rush. Have you ever done that?

I like to think I don’t do that. I have family. I need to live. It’s dangerous enough what I do. I’ve never had a reporter tell me, “You know, I just like to go and get shot at.” I don’t know anybody like that. I don’t like to get shot at. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to get wounded in a bad place where nobody has any concept of what medicine is.

I got sick many times in Afghanistan. Once I had to be Medivacked. I got out of Afganistan, and two days later I was taken to London on a chartered plane because I was very, very ill. I wasn’t wounded, I just got a nasty disease, and they thought I might not survive it. It’s called hepatitis E, a rare tropical disease.

That’s bad enough, but if I had been in Afghanistan I probably would not have lived, because they don’t have medicine, they don’t have the doctors to treat that kind of thing.

The transportation’s really bad?

There is no such thing as transportation. So no, I don’t need that. I get shot at not because I go someplace where I think ooh, they’re shooting there and I’ve got to go there because they might shoot me. I go someplace and I think: I’ve got to be careful because there may be shooting there and they might shoot me. I want to live.

You feel no compulsion to get close to the battle scenes to describe the battle?

I think there is a place between where they’ll definitely shoot you and the place from which you can’t see anything. In between those two places there is a spot for me.

If I get shot, I won’t be able to write that story. I need to be able to come back to my room and write what I saw, so I need to be healthy for that. A dead reporter is no use to anyone. I can’t write stories. So I always try to find a compromise between being someplace where I most certainly will get killed and being someplace, like, safe in San Francisco. Someplace where I will see what I need to see, and then be able to come back and report it and write it.

Did you keep your editors apprised of your whereabouts at all times? Do you have the understanding that if you get into a tricky situation they’ll automatically get on the phone to the embassy and start hunting you down if you get arrested? How close contact do you keep with them?

First of all, which embassy? I’m not an American citizen; I’m a Russian citizen. I don’t think the Russian embassy in any country will do anything for me. Don’t tell them that, but I don’t think they care. As far as they’re concerned, they think I’m just some journalist who doesn’t even work for a Russian newspaper. I don’t think they’d care much for me. I’m not a Russian journalist, I’m just a Russian citizen. As far as the Americans are concerned, I don’t know. I mean, I’m an American journalist theoretically.

I don’t know what the Chronicle would do if there were an unpleasant situation involving me. I know that they have been very helpful in the times that I have gotten ill, like for example they paid for my evacuation, and that was a very expensive thing to do when I got ill.
I know that they care about me, I know that they worry about me, I know that they want me to report my whereabouts at all times, and I think that’s not just because they don’t want to get in trouble. I think it’s because I work for them and we have a friendly relationship and they worry about me.

I guess that makes it hard for a lot of newspapers to have foreign correspondents, because not all of them can provide the logistical, emotional and monetary support.

It’s very important to have emotional support while you’re out there. I know journalists who work for major U.S. publications whose editors say, “Well, you should just be proud that you’re working for us.” And that’s as far as their emotional support goes. Not in terms of saying the journalists are so bad, but the publications are so important.

Luckily my editors are very understanding of what I go through. Some of them have never been in situations that I’ve been in, I think, but they’re all very concerned, and I can always call and swear and threaten to kill people because I’m angry, or be upset and tell them that I’m upset. I can always count on their emotional support.

You’re now the only staff foreign correspondent? John Koopman and Robert Collier go intermittently?

They’re not based abroad. Rob spent months in the Middle East for us during the war. I think he left in November or December and has just returned.

Do your editors ever urge you to pull out of a dangerous situation?

I was not in Baghdad, and we did have a correspondent who was in Baghdad. My editors have told me on a number of occasions, if you feel like you need to pull out, pull out. If you feel like it’s too dangerous, don’t go. I’m here and they’re in San Francisco, and the understanding is pretty much that I know the situation a little better than they do because I’m actually where it’s all happening. So they rely on my intuition, which I appreciate. I know that if I said, “I can’t go there, it’s too dangerous,” they would understand.

There was a story I reported from Mazar-e-Sharif, after which I had to urgently leave Mazar-e-Sharif because I felt threatened. And they understood that. They didn’t say, “No, we think you better stick around.” It was a rape story I reported about Dostum’s militia raping Pashtun women. My editors didn’t say, “No we think you should stick around for awhile, get an interview with that Dostum character.”

My driver and translator were intimidated by local people who would come up to them and tell them that we should get out. I told them that, and I said that I don’t feel comfortable here, I think we have to leave. They said leave. So I left.

Do your stories appear anywhere but the Chronicle?

No.

Does that frustrate you?

Well, they may appear in newspapers that buy our newswire service. I don’t keep track of that. Other Hearst papers take my stuff, like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Houston Chronicle, the Albany Times-Union. Is it frustrating I’m not on the L.A. Times wire? No, I really don’t think about it that way.

Who is your competition? If you get a really good story, does it get picked up by other news services or publications? Or do foreign correspondents not read each other’s stuff?

Foreign correspondents definitely read each other’s stuff, and a lot of stories I report later somebody else reports. That’s inevitable. Yes I do see a lot of my stories picked up by other reporters. Aside from reading the wire, we have other ways of keeping track of what other people write. There are several online e-mail brochures compiled of stories written by people about Russia, for example, or the former Soviet Union. E-mail lists that get mass mailed to subscribers for no or very little money. That’s how I know what a lot of other people are doing.

Is the Chronicle read in Washington?

Most likely not. I’m sure it isn’t.

If you come across a really important story, something that might have bearing on public policy in the United States, do you think the people in a position to make a difference have access to your writing?

Yeah, I think so. Remember the story about Gen. Dostum murdering hundreds of Taliban prisoners as he took them to prison? There was a big Newsweek story about it last year. It was a major story about Dostum murdering these poor Taliban prisoners and burying them in the dessert. The San Francisco Chronicle and The Boston Globe were the first reporters to write that story, two days after it happened, in December 2001.

The Globe story was written by your husband?

Yeah, we were traveling together and we both wrote that story for our newspapers. The New York Times wrote that story two days later, but it — quote-unquote — was written finally by Newsweek nearly a year later. I don’t know if they read the San Francisco Chronicle, The Globe or The New York Times. They probably read the Times, but for some reason they reacted many months later. I don’t know.

Somebody wrote a letter to President Bush, telling him to stop being friends with Dostum based on that story. I don’t know if he reads letters written to him by millions of Americans every day.

What I care about is I hope that I help people understand the world a little better. Like the reader in San Francisco or Marin County, to understand Iraq, or Afghanistan, or the conflict in the Middle East or Chechnya, or Russia a little better because of what I wrote. That is what I hope.

It would be great if the White House based its foreign policy on what I write, but I think it’s a little far-fetched. Why would they read the San Francisco Chronicle if they have local papers?

But I hope that the people who read my stories, regardless of who they are — professors, housewives, drug dealers, store managers, masseuses, whoever — that their opinion of the world is influenced by what I write, and that their understanding of conflicts if influenced by what I write. And maybe that makes them a little more tolerant, and not see the world as much in black and white.

What’s the happiest story you’ve written? The one that gave you the most hope for humanity?

I don’t really write those.

What’s the saddest story?

The saddest story? I think I mostly write sad stories. I think a very sad story was a story I wrote about a woman who had just uncovered the bodies of her two sons in a mass grave in Hilla, in Iraq.

I think a very sad story was a story of a woman who died because she couldn’t get to her dialysis machine. She was born on the day that the Iraqi army celebrated their victory over a Kurdish uprising, inspired by Nixon. She died on the day that the Kurds celebrated their victory — or the American victory — over the Saddam Hussein regime. Her entire life was a factor of conflict.

She couldn’t get her kidney transplant because she couldn’t travel to Baghdad, because her brothers couldn’t take her there, because they would have gotten arrested. She couldn’t get to her dialysis machine because it was in Iraqi-controlled territory and she lived in Kurdistan. That was a very sad story.

Another very sad story I wrote from Gaza, about children who are taught to hate the Jews. Four-year-olds who are taught to chant, “We’ll all kill the Jews! The Jews are the enemy!” They were the same age as my son was, and I thought it was horrifying to see 4- to 5-year-old children chanting, “Kill the Jews! Kill the Jews!” It was just out of this world.

A story I wrote about a soothsayer in Chechnya, it was a very sad story. It was a story about desperate people looking for their disappeared loved ones. They looked everywhere, and now the only place left for them to go was to this clairvoyant. I don’t really believe in clairvoyants, but she says something to them, and they want to believe her because she’s the only place left for them to go.

The saddest thing I’ve ever seen while reporting? I was interviewing the mother of an Israeli girl who had been killed in a suicide attack in Jerusalem. The mother had a portrait of the girl in a frame. I picked it up, and it caught a ray of light from the window, and I saw, on the glass of the frame, a barely visible oily stain where the mother’s lipsticked lips had once kissed the picture of the girl s face. I still cry when I remember it.

Do you imagine your audience cares about the stories you write enough to take action, or to change their view of international politics?

I know that people care because they write me letters. Depending on what I write about. When I was in Israel, one day I got 27 letters for just one story. Most of it was hate mail, which is another very interesting thing. In Israel mostly I got hate mail, regardless of what I wrote about. There is nothing you can say about that conflict that will not inspire hate mail.
Somebody actually counted lines: “Ms Badkhen dedicated X lines to Palestinians but only X lines to the Israelis.” Or vice versa. I never count how many lines I write about Palestinians and how many I write about Israelis, but apparently it’s something people should do when they write about that. And it has to be even, or else somebody will find bias in that.
For stories in Iraq, about five a day. I don’t believe that everybody who reads my stories writes me a letter. I don’t usually write letters to people, so presumably most people don’t write in. Even if every second person writes me a letter, that means that 10 people read my story.

Do you write back?

I always write back. I think it’s polite to write back. The only letter I didn’t reply to was this horrible letter of praise from this very, very militant pro-Israeli person who, for some reason, decided that my story was illuminating how horrible the Palestinians were and they should all be exterminated. That was pretty much what the person wrote to me. “We need more reporters like you, Ms. Badkhen, because you alone understand that they’re animals and must be exterminated,” that was pretty much what the letter said. That was the worst letter I ever received in my life. That was not what I meant to say in my story.

Overall you’ve enjoyed these last two and a half years?

I like my job. It’s demanding, it’s emotionally demanding, but I like it, very much.