Addicted to the adrenaline of armed combat, he returned home to wage a longstanding personal battle against substance abuse. Shocking, violent, yet lyrical and ultimately redemptive, this book is a breathtaking feat of reportage and an uncompromising look at the terrifyingly seductive power of war.

“An extraordinary memoir of the Bosnian War… savage and mercilessly readable… deserves a place alongside George Orwell, James Cameron and Nicholas Tomalin. It is as good as war reporting gets. I have nowhere read a more vivid account of frontline fear and survival. Forget the strategic overview. All war is local. It is about the ditch in which the soldier crouches and the ground on which he fights and maybe dies. The same applies to the war reporter. Anthony Loyd has been there and knows it” – Martin Bell, The Times

Guests are encouraged to read the book before the event, although you are also welcome to join if you’ve just started your exploration. Previous experience has shown that members often gain insight and inspiration from discussions with the author, which enable them to continue reading the book in a new light.

This will be an in-depth discussion rather than a standard format Q&A. The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, following by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM. We will get to know one another over starters before the introduction of the evening’s guest author.

The event will be hosted by Frontline Club director, Pranvera Smith, and founding member and senior correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer, Ed Vulliamy.

Menu £25 per person excluding drinks.

The idea behind members’ BookNights is to have a thoroughly good time, encourage reading and discussion, and to end the night both merrier and wiser than when it began. For more information about membership and the other benefits on offer, please contact membership coordinator Sophie Kayes.

On Wednesday 4 November, the Frontline Club marked the twentieth anniversary of the Dayton Agreement – the peace agreement that marked the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina – by welcoming a panel of those who helped shape negotiations at the time, and who reported on the three year conflict.

The discussion was moderated by Allan Little who reported on the war for the BBC. Anthony Loyd, foreign correspondent for The Times who reported on the Bosnian war in 1993 and wrote about his experience in My War Gone By, I Miss It So, recently returned to Bosnia for the first time in 20 years and kicked off the discussion.

Describing Bosnia as two countries, Loyd said: “In most of the towns they seemed as depopulated as they had done in the war… Sectarian divisions were more glaring than ever before and had been entrenched by Dayton. It seemed a sad and zombified place.”

Kemal Pervanic survived the atrocities of the Omarska concentration camp and has since dedicated his work to education and reconciliation in Bosnia. He painted a picture of a country whose youth are seeking to heal the wounds of the past and look to the future. “There’s a crop of new people, born towards the end of the war, a small group of people who want to see real change.”

Describing the often tortuous reconciliation process, Pervanic told of a fellow volunteer who had tried to kill him during the war. “We reached a point where he kind of apologised to me,” he said. He also blamed the government for the country’s division, saying: “Politicians are driving a wedge between us and young people.”

Zrinka Bralo was a radio journalist in Sarajevo and came to London in 1993 where she has fought for social justice and refugees’ rights. She described how “consumerism and capitalism [had] moved in and glossed over” many of the country’s issues, particularly the lack of democracy in the Bosnian constitution which reserves the highest political positions, including the Presidency, to three “constituent peoples” – Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats.

Paddy Ashdown served as high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina and the European Union special representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina from May 2002 until January 2006. He was instrumental in ensuring the success of Dayton in the early years. His outlook for the country’s future was bleak. “The sky is darkening in Bosnia, by the day, by the month and by the year,” he said.

Ashdown was particularly critical of the international community for failing maintain peace and stability in the country. “It takes a long time to wash away the aftermath of conflict. You need strategic patience to see it through and the international community has failed to see it through.”

He described the first ten years after the Dayton agreement as “brilliant” but through neglect, the progress of the country “has been allowed to unravel.”

"The international community is going to do f*ck all for us," @KemalPervanic on Bosnia's problems @frontlineclub pic.twitter.com/gZZM92W2Uw

— Harriet Agerholm (@HarrietAgerholm) November 4, 2015

Bralo and Ashdown both spoke of a country returning to a “three mono-ethnic state” – Bosniak, Serb and Croat – in which multi-ethnicity is in “severe danger.” Bralo lamented the fact that Jews and Protestants are blocked from standing for president.

Among the audience questioners was Clive Baldwin, a lawyer for Jakob Finci, a Bosnian Jew who successfully launched an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights on the basis that Bosnia’s Constitution violates the European Convention on Human Rights. Baldwin pointed out that six years later nothing has been done and the constitution has not been changed. “It’s because Europe has given up on Bosnia,” Ashdown said.

Bralo agreed, saying: “Bosnia wanted to become more like Europe but Europe is becoming more like Bosnia.”

Pervanic, to the agreement of the panel, identified the youth and grassroots level initiatives as the key to the country’s development. Ashdown added: “They need time and need to get rid of generation that ran the war. The people in charge are exactly the same people at Dayton and they use peace for the same purposes of the war. They need to create a state were younger people can break through.”

A compelling Frontline Club event on Wednesday 25 June showcased film and photographic work from across the globe that revealed both the depth of suffering and the strength of human spirit in some of the world’s most devastating internal conflicts.

Featured at the event was a series of photographs from Tim Freccia in South Sudan, Alvaro Ybarra Zavala in Venezuela, Eman Mohammed in Gaza and Daniel Berehulak in Afghanistan, curated by multimedia photojournalist and filmmaker John D McHugh.

The event culminated in a screening of Ground Zero Syria, a dramatic film by Robert King featuring unprecedented footage of the brutal conflict in Syria, and an impassioned interview with King by The Times journalist Anthony Loyd that offered some chilling conclusions about the future of the conflict.

Robert King and Anthony Loyd at the Frontline Club.

All of the showcased work shared a common theme: that of the determination of each journalist to bring to light the plight of people facing oppression or armed struggle in their home countries, and to reveal the characters of those individuals caught up in some of the world’s most dangerous conflicts.

Among Freccia’s work was a set of portraits of soldiers from the White Army, a ruthless militia group fighting alongside former Vice President Riek Machar in his campaign against the government of South Sudan.

In Freccia’s unique portraits, presented against a white background, he aimed to show through the expressions and postures of his subjects the “humanity present in these characters, for good or bad, which is often neglected”.

Zavala’s photographs were captured in Caracas and San Cristobal in February and March this year as the protests against Venezuela’s government escalated.

A picture of a woman slumped over the coffin of a lost loved one revealed the sacrifices made by the protestors, while another featured a combatant in plastic protective glasses making Molotov cocktails to take into the fray.

Mohammed took up photojournalism at the age of 19. In a narration of her photographs, she explained how she had to overcome cultural barriers to a woman pursuing such a career.

“I thought I had what it took to be a career photographer,” she said. “I was wrong. To gain acceptance in a male dominated field was next to impossible.”

Covering the war in Gaza in 2008-09 and under fire from aerial bomb attacks, the ground “shaking like a swing beneath us”, Mohammed was abandoned by the two male journalists with whom she was travelling. “Terrified, humiliated and feeling sorry for myself”, she learned a valuable lesson.

Mohammed‘s career has been characterised by a constant tension between capturing her own agony and that of others:

“You can freeze, but your camera cannot. If you don’t document history, it never happened.”

Her work included touching portraits of Mohamed Hodr, who along with 22 members of his family lived for several years beneath the rubble of what was once his home.

The only surviving remnant of what was to be a retirement retreat was a jacuzzi, which he hauled up to the roof of his shattered home so that each morning he could give his children a bubble bath.

Berehulak’s work focused on the terrible impact that the rapidly rising use of heroin in Afghanistan is having on the local population. One in 10 urban households in the country has at least one drug user, and in rural areas heroin use is as high as 30 per cent.

A set of photographs of one hospital ward that was admitting 200 children a month for severe malnutrition featured pictures of young children so wrinkled with starvation that they looked more like the elderly than the newly born. At a year-and-a-half, Mohammed weighed just 10 pounds.

“Nearly every potential lifeline is strained or broken here,” said Berehulak in his narration. “Women are kept away from everyone except those in their immediate family.

“Farmers can’t grow crops because of mines, and doctors can’t get to children until the situation is already severe. Women can’t nourish their own children [because of the heroin use].”

At the country’s premier children’s hospital in Kabul, a five-year-old boy weighing just 20 pounds was being treated on a bench because the infusion line wouldn’t reach to a bed. The drug problem, said the director of demand reduction at the ministry of health, is a tsunami for his country.

Ground Zero Syria

Screened in the second half of the event, King’s film gave a unique insight into the fighters of the opposition Free Syrian Army (FSA) in their efforts to survive the brutal attacks of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

“For six to seven months we didn’t even think about picking up weapons,” said one.

“We started out with olive branches, but [in the end] the only option was to take up arms and put him [Assad] out of office.”

At a field hospital in Al-Qusayr, southwest of Homs near the border with Lebanon, a young boy looked forlornly up at the camera with a single streak of blood spilling from the corner of his mouth. Across the ward, another child’s guts were bursting through his sundered stomach.

“If I die when I help people it is good for me,” said a doctor at the hospital. “I’m a doctor, I must help people.”

At the Dar al-Shifa field hospital in Aleppo, Dr Osman, a physician at the hospital, explained how he had nightmares about amputating children’s limbs, but each day resisted the urge to return to normal life because there was no one else to help these people.

According to Osman, about 80 per cent of the patients at Dar al-Shifa are civilians. At the time of the interview, the hospital had already been bombed five times, with another 15 bombings nearby.

“The Syrian regime considers medical staff as a perfect target, as a military target,” he said.  “When you kill one doctor it is better than killing a thousand fighters.”

In November 2012, King was there when the hospital was hit yet again, but still hope was not vanquished.

“Dar al-Shifa is not a building, it’s not a machine; it’s people, it’s doctors, nurses,” said Osman, speaking amidst the rubble.

“We will continue. We will build this hospital again and we will work again.”

In one striking scene, Dr Abaman, a former veterinarian working as an assistant physician at the hospital, appealed directly to the camera, emotion cracking his voice:

“We have enough shown TV. Do something. Do something. We are suffering here alone.”

The film also featured the tragic burning of Aleppo’s market, a world heritage site and one of the world’s best-preserved souks.

King asked Ahmed Alhaji, who had witnessed the fire, to explain what he had seen.

“I saw a lot of things that make me cry,” he said. “I saw Assad destroy our history. My heart is broken, I was crying blood.”

Towards the end of the film, King asked an FSA fighter what he thought of the West’s Syria policy. The West’s inaction before – and even after – evidence came to light of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, he said, was a sign to Assad that:

“Whatever you want to do, go ahead and do it. You want to kill 100,000 people that’s okay; you want to drop 100,000 tonnes of bombs that’s fine. Chemical weapons? Just keep 20–30 per cent of them.”

Most of the characters featured in the film, said King, are now dead.

Beyond the obvious perils of filming during an almost constant artillery bombardment, King faced his own challenges in shooting the film, not least the very lack of engagement from the West and its media that was alluded to by the film’s characters.

“I had to reassess why I was risking my life to cover slaughter,” said King in the Q&A with Loyd.

“I’d been there for four months and had photographed 5,000 dead bodies and nobody cared. No one would buy my photographs, so I started shooting video.”

The politics within Syria were also a source of frustration for King. He saw a shipment of powdered milk he had helped facilitate first held up in customs and then less than welcomed by those who had been benefiting from the black market in the product.

Those people who had helped him gain access to the country started to try to influence his material and, when he refused, banned him from going back.

“In the first year I figured that their politics were holding up the medical needs of the community,” said King. “Then they wanted to control the message.”

Asked by members of the audience whether his work could be used to try the perpetrators of the violence, King expressed his frustration with the absence of a more effective international legal system:

“If there was an international court of law that could hold people accountable for their war crimes . . . but why give my stuff to some organisation that fantasises that it can prosecute people?”

Loyd and King agreed that the future for the country is bleak and the potential fallout dire.

“The war launched against Al Qaeda was one thing,” said Loyd, wearing a cast around his leg after sustaining gunshot injuries in the latest of many reporting trips to Syria.

“Now something far worse [Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS)] has taken up a huge block of the Middle East running almost to the Mediterranean, and the West is aghast as to how to deal with the situation.

“Syria has raised a huge question mark and nobody knows what to do.”

King is convinced that chemical weapons have been smuggled out of Syria and have already reached Western European capitals. Asked whether he was planning to go back to Syria, he said:

“I don’t have to go to Syria. It’s done. It’s here. It’s over. I’m going to sit and wait.”

Your wonderful and kind messages mean so much to us, as has your friendship, council and support over so many years. There is no prize in our trade that we could ever value as much as your belief in us.

– Vaughan and Pranvera Smith

 

Thank you to Stewart Purvis, Richard Gizbert, Tina Carr, Emma Beals, Allan Little, Mani, Stuart Hughes, Richard Sambrook, Jon Snow, Marina Litvinenko, Martin Bell, Tom Fenton, Anthony Loyd, Lyse Doucet, Bill Neely, Lindsey Hilsum, Charles Glass, John G Morris, Salim Amin, Liz Palmer Gary Knight, Jon Lee Anderson, Jeremy Bowen, Matt Frei and Jean-Jacques Gonfier.

A distinguished panel of journalists gathered at the Frontline Club on Wednesday 27 November to celebrate its tenth anniversary and to reflect, with great humility, on the past ten years of reporting from front lines around the world.

(L-R) Lyse Doucet, Shoaib Sharifi, Jon Snow, Bill Neely, Anthony Loyd

Bill Neely, international editor at ITV News, began on the sobering note that although we [journalists] “really try our best…in many respects I think we’ve failed:”

“I think we have to be damn humble about what we do and what we’ve failed to do… In 2001 in Afghanistan when the Taliban ‘fell’, we walked away and went to Iraq and somehow behind our backs the Taliban came back and we didn’t notice. Then in Iraq we covered a successful invasion, we risked our lives and did our best, and then somehow the Brits lost Basra…who was there? I certainly wasn’t – there were very few of us there.”

Similarly, he said, journalists were not in Benghazi when the American ambassador was assassinated:

“Where were the date lines from? Cairo, London, Washington… And as a result of us not being there, the policy was wrong.”

Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, talked about how, in preparation for a BBC Newshour’s 25th anniversary celebrations, she had come across pictures and memories of when she had been in Pakistan and Afghanistan 25 years ago:

“I was coming back to the very origins of the people who inspired the Frontline Club…the brave young men who inspired the club.”

“25 years ago, war was a war on children, it was a humanitarian war, a war when even women took up guns… As one French philosopher said ‘the only lessons of history that we learn is that we don’t learn the lessons of history.’”

Far from shying from the spotlight, mediator for the evening Channel 4 News presenter, Jon Snow, said the thing that sticks most with him is the same obsession he had in the decade before the Frontline Club – Iran:

“Although shots were not fired, Iran was a front line too. But, as Bill has said, we have fallen into the trap of believing what the outside powers tell us. The demonisation of Iran is easily done…but too simplistic… We’ve never wanted to do anything about it. All we want to talk about is nuclear, and nuclear is a completely bankrupt conversation. As journalists we fail to talk truth to power.”

Shoaib Sharifi, an Afghan journalist who has worked with national and international media outlets in Afghanistan for more than ten years, said that he thought the reporting by journalists in Afghanistan when the Taliban was in control was much better than reporting now:

“In the last ten years, I don’t think we as national and international journalists have learnt anything significant that has affected the war…. We could have done so much better if we hadn’t followed the line of ‘what makes the 6 o’clock news.’ I would pitch really human stories but then hear from a fellow correspondent ‘I don’t think it will make the 6 o’clock news.’ Who are these people making the news agenda, that flows all the way down to Kabul?”

Although Anthony Loyd, the award winning journalist and roving correspondent for The Times, disagreed that journalists shouldn’t be as humble as Neely made out, he too was shocked by some recent journalism:

“Although I haven’t seen the full Panorama [alleging the murder of civilians by British soldiers]…if I wrote a story as weak as that my editor would tell me to go out and fucking stand it up – do some proper journalism.”

Far from being a raucous celebration of the brilliance of journalists, the evening was a thoughtful reflection on the incredible bravery and selfless commitment of journalists and also on their ability to be mistaken, to fail to talk truth to power on occasion and to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The month of Ramadan is usually a time for festivities and celebration but in Syria there is little to rejoice about.  The United Nations has estimated around 93,000 Syrians have died since the civil war began in 2011 and the number of refugees fleeing the country recently exceeded 1.5 million.

On Wednesday 17 July, the Frontline Club hosted a discussion with four leading journalists to dissect recent developments on the ground in Syria, in the international community and to analyse the role the media has played in reporting the conflict. The event was chaired by the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet.

A consensus was made early on that the Syrian conflict has reached an impasse. James Harkin, director of think-tank Flockwatching and a journalist who has covered the Syrian conflict for numerous publications, argued that despite recent media analysis that President Assad is winning the war, the reality is a stalemate:

“On the ground the regime forces are regaining Homs. They may even be able to recapture the whole of Homs, but if they do their combined forces . . . won’t be able to hold the city for very long. There simply aren’t enough government forces to recapture the whole city. As for government forces marching on Aleppo, that is propaganda puff… ”

Patrick Cockburn, a Middle East correspondent for over forty years who has written for the Financial Times and The Independent, agreed with Harkin but focused on how poor reporting has led both governments and the public to have a skewed idea of what is happening on the ground:

“At the beginning of this conflict, the idea of the citizen journalist . . . was taken somehow as being neutral, but it’s not citizen journalists or citizen activists, it’s citizen propaganda. It gave an impression early on that the government was on the verge of defeat. . . . Giving the impression that Assad was going to go down at any time.”

He further argued that no side would gain any “conclusive victory” over the other which will mean no solution for Syria.

“Cutting to the chase, I don’t think there will be successful negotiations. There may be a ceasefire and maybe you can do it in two hops. Until you have a ceasefire you have what we called in Northern Ireland ‘the politics of the last atrocity’ where everyone is so het up about things that no one can really talk until the level of violence is reduced.”

Anthony Loyd, an award-winning writer and current roving foreign correspondent for The Times, concurred with the previous two speakers in that the north of the country has now reached a bloody stalemate, but recent successes by government forces will “make them even more intransigent to negotiations.”

For Dr Halla Diyab, an award-winning screenwriter, producer and broadcaster from Syria, the question of who will win is a relatively unimportant one. What is happening in Syria now is simply war:

“These people have killed what ordinary Syrians want… What we need to work on now is how to end this conflict… We need to strengthen the political opposition in Syria – where are the future Syrian leaders, ministers, MPs? Where are the people who will stand in future elections? The West has to order a ceasefire and bring Assad and the opposition to the negotiating table and find strategies to contain violence and extremism in the country.”

Diyab further opened up the debate by arguing that Syria has now become a proxy war for other countries – Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Russia and America – all weighing in and supporting their own national and ideological interests.

There was disagreement on various issues including on whether and how the rebels should be armed, with reference to the arming of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan as an example of how one can never be sure who one is arming and where the weapons may end up.

Diyab and Harkin also disagreed strongly on the role Salafism is playing in the country, especially with younger Syrians.

The debate finished with all parties predicting a gloomy near future for Syria.

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/syria-conflict-developments-on

As fierce fighting continues in Syria, the death toll according to the United Nations has now reached at least 93,000 and the number of refugees fleeing the country has exceeded 1.5 million.

On the ground, assaults are being conducted on all sides and we have seen increased intervention from other parties, such as Hezbollah. On the international stage efforts are being made to bring all parties to the table and the debate about arming rebels is still raging.

We will be joined by five journalists who have covered the situation in Syria extensively since the uprising began in early 2011. They will be discussing recent developments, on the ground and on the international stage, and asking what changes we could see in coming months.

Chaired by Lyse Doucet, BBC Chief International Correspondent.

The panel:

Dr Halla Diyab is an award-winning screen-writer, producer, broadcaster and the founder and the director of Liberty Media Productions.

Anthony Loyd is an award-winning war correspondent and writer. He is currently roving foreign correspondent for The Times. He has travelled to Syria eight times in the past 15 months to cover the conflict. A former army officer, he served in Northern Ireland and the First Gulf War. He left the army in 1991. He is the author of My War Gone By I Miss It So.

James Harkin has been covering the conflict in Syria from all sides for the last two years, from Damascus, Homs and Aleppo and for The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, The Nation, the Guardian and a range of papers throughout Europe. He is director of the think-tank analysing new media and social change, Flockwatching.

Patrick Cockburn has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979, first for the Financial Times, then for The Independent. He has covered the conflict in Syria extensively since protests began in 2011. He is author of several books including The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq and Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq.

What of the thousands killed in Mexico’s drug cartel battles or the fighting in Pakistan’s remote tribal areas?… Over the next 18 months in this new series of stories – ‘Forgotten Wars’ – The Times sends Loyd on assignment to report on some of today’s lesser known conflicts burning at the fringes of public awareness, as well as including archive material drawn from some of his past assignments. link

Unlike many of those who turned up looking for thrills and purpose, Loyd had talent and originality. He started out as a wannabe photographer. One day he took his turn as  pool journalist patrolling with the British army in central Bosnia and returned with a story that crystallised the peculiar sickness of the violence. Rather than simply recount the details he was encouraged to write it up himself.

As the result was passed around for the scrutiny of the professionals it was immediately clear that the new boy had something. Had it more than we did, in fact. His effort was published in toto and he has never looked back.

Loyd has never quite relinquished his aura of amateurism and he would be foolish to do so. It allows him to push into areas of feeling that that the pros have been programmed to steer clear of.

How very different from the approach taken by Kurt Schork, another who arrived at war corresponding by an unusual route and who in his totally-contrasted way was also a master of the genre.

This book is almost as much about Schork as it is Loyd. Anyone who ever heard a shot fired in anger is called a war correspondent these days. Most are foreign reporters who from time to time go to war zones. Loyd and Schork genuinely fit the description, in that it is only war that has held their professional interest. This is an unusual and dangerous condition, fatally so in the case of Schork who was killed along with another who shared his passion, the  Spanish cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno, in an ambush in Sierra Leone in 2000.

Schork’s work with an international news agency did not allow much scope for comment or emotion. Even if it did I doubt he would have made use of it. He had a holy reverence for facts, believing their power to be greater than anything he could say. He was, as Loyd says, the most famous war reporter you have never heard of. He liked it that way, believing anonymity kept you pure.

There were head-on differences of style and manner between the two men. Loyd  was a sybarite, Schork an ascetic work junkie. Yet the differences were easily swamped by what they shared. They recognised an integrity in each other that lead to admiration and a loving friendship that is one of the central themes of the book.

Foreign correspondents of my generation tend to steer clear of the vertical pronoun and are suspicious of those who overuse it.  It smacks of self-regard and rarely adds anything to the reader’s understanding of the story.

Loyd’s devastating honesty clears him of the charge. He is as hard on himself as he is on the gunmen, gangsters and freaks who stalk these pages. He is breathtakingly clear about his motivations and his own professional and personal steeliness.

On his way into Kabul in 2003 he came across a Talib fighter lying in a pool of blood. ‘We had no medicine and I needed to preserve my stock of dressings in case one of us was hit,’ he wrote. ‘He was all but through anyway. So we left him to die and moved forwards towards Kabul.’ Most reporters would have done the same thing but might have have tiptoed around their reasoning when describing such an incident. Loyd’s frankness shows a different kind of courage to that he demonstrates on the battlefield, but it’s courage none the less.

There are occasional excursions into thickets of verbal exoticism. But for most of the narrative Loyd shows himself to be the best guide through today’s wars working in the English language. He can be very funny. He can also be very moving. This is a book about love as much as war. His account of  the death of his mother is as powerful and affecting as anything he writes about the battlefield.

“Fucking hell,” a Marine corporal’s voice suddenly interjected over the intercom, “it’s kicked off already.”

Outside, from beyond the armoured plates of the moving Viking I could hear the explosions of rockets and the dulled chatter of automatic fire, just audible over the roar of engine. Seconds later the 12 ton vehicle lurched to a halt, the back door opened and out piled six Marines, straight into contact.

Leaping out with them into a bright, spinning world of total disorientation, hissing lead and cracking retort, I sprawled into the cover of an empty trench nearby. To my left I could see one of the Marines’ Land Rover weapon platforms blazing away with its machine-guns at Talib positions to our front and flank.

To my right the rest of ‘J’ Company, 42 Commando, were debussing along a ridge of shingle and sand, similarly in contact. En route to an overwatch position on high ground above the river, the Marines had been surprised by between 20 and 30 Taliban firing from close quarters.

It was to be the last and longest of several firefights I witnessed during nearly four weeks on an embed with the Royal Marines in Helmand. That particular fight juddered on at varying intensity for over three and half hours.

It began as a small arms and RPG struggle at fairly close range, until the Taliban were pushed back to a greater distance in the valley below, and jets, attack helicopters and artillery joined the fray to target the Taliban mortar and rocket positions.

And throughout it all, as with every other Marine operation I was on attended in February, I was free to watch the action from as close a vantage point as I wished.

Earlier in the month, just before the first significant engagement of the embed, a deliberate attack by two Marine companies on Taliban positions near Kajaki, 42 Commando’s Commanding Officer had asked me how close I had wanted to see the operation.

“With the fire support group or the assault troops?,” he offered. “Er, assault troops please,” I replied carelessly, certain that such a request would be quashed. It wasn’t.

Now, weeks later and in the final contact, as I ran forward with an assault section tasked to clear a group of Taliban from sand dunes to a flank, I found myself still incredulous. ‘Jesus’, I mused fretfully as we neared the objective, ‘access doesn’t come any better than this.’

Indeed, so far as embeds go, the Marines certainly knew how to rock’n’roll. Beginning with a stay in Kajaki, the embed finished with a 10 day mobile patrol throughout northern Helmand. I could ask whatever I wanted. I sat in on the orders. There was no press minder or escort. Latterly, during the long patrol, my only companions were the section of Marines whose Viking I shared.

Though I remain surprised at this platinum card access, I also regard it as my right. If democratic governments are prepared to send their young men and women to fight, kill and die in foreign lands, then I believe that their societies deserve to be informed of the realities of such deployments from journalists in frontline locations.

Post-combat briefings and press releases by official spokesmen are neither a valid nor credible alternative. Yet over the past six years the British government, the ministry of defence, and often the services themselves have proven themselves to be reluctant in the extreme to give reporters such freewheeling facility in the field, fearful that it may erode their control on the passage and content of information.

Last year in Afghanistan 16 Air Assault Brigade lost the initiative in its media war. With only a few exceptions, reporters found themselves denied access to areas of fighting. There was an understandable if flawed logic behind the media blockade: the brigade found the focus of its fighting centered on four isolated defensive locations.

Amidst fierce action, it was all they could do to resupply these positions with ammunition, food and water, let alone give much needed space on helicopters to journalists.

The result at home was confusion. British society appeared amazed that what had been billed as a reconstruction operation had suddenly transformed into a war. Senior commanders were of little help, drawing bogus analogies between the fighting in Helmand and the Korean war.

The real voice to emerge was that of soldiers, angry at having their experiences so silenced, who in a succession of emails and blogs railed at the lack of equipment and ammunition.

A year earlier, in Iraq in September 2005, I saw for myself the utter shambles of the military’s press operation. Two special forces soldiers had been captured by a renegade police unit in Basra. Warrior vehicles moving in on the police station to rescue them were at first halted by a rioting mob armed with petrol bombs.

Three of their crewmen were photographed ablaze as they jumped to escape their flaming APCs. Troops opened fire on the crowd. A negotiation team sent to secure the two prisoners’ release was taken hostage too, released only when Warriors rammed through the walls of the police station. Though I was in Baghdad at the time the British forces had no system in place in Iraq to authorise journalists to travel to Basra: all requests had to be put through London.

Meantime phone calls to press officers in Basra produced no information beyond the pathetic stock phrases issued to them on a printed sheet by the MoD.

When I did eventually reach Basra, a couple of days later, and met the Coldstream Guard Battle Group involved in the operation I found them to be typically friendly and informative, if a little surprised that it had taken me so long to arrive.

Yet despite their invitation to stay on and embed with them, I was ejected from Basra on the MoD’s instructions and flown back to Baghdad barely 12 hours later.

The positive change in Afghanistan which led to such good recent access seems not to be the result of some new MoD policy on the embed issue. Rather it appears to be on 3 Commando Brigade’s own initiative.

The Royal Marines were badly burned by their appalling press operation in Afghanistan in 2002, when some 1500 Marines deployed on Operation Jacana to fight Talibs and al Qaeda allegedly regrouping in the east of the country.

A combination of the Marines’ own hype, frantic press manipulation by the MoD, incompetent and antagonistic press officers, and the lack of any embed system, blew back upon them as in the mountains the Marines found no al Qaeda or Taliban.

Press officers claimed the Marines did locate and destroy a large insurgent weapons cache, the operation’s one success, only to have reporters point out that the munitions were not those of the Taliban, but belonged to friendly militias instead.

With this debacle in mind, the Marines arrived back in Afghanistan last autumn determined not to repeat their errors. Though my own request to embed went through the normal MoD channels, it was also submitted direct to 3 Commando Brigade in Helmand, and it seems that the telling decision of authority lay with them rather than London.

So how valid was the experience? Beyond witnessing a group of professional British fighters at work did I actually learn anything that I did not already know or could not have guessed at?

Yes – absolutely – but only because I had the experience of more than 20 non-embedded assignments in Afghanistan, each lasting between one and three months, stretching back as far as 1996. Without these to use as a sounding board, the embed ma
y otherwise have proved a very one-sided and one-dimensional exercise.

I saw that comparisons between Korea and Afghanistan’s on-off counter-insurgency were totally inaccurate, and that analogies between NATO’s chance of success and the failed Russian occupation were similarly inept.

Both sides, the British forces and the Taliban, have their strengths and weaknesses. The Marines are superb troops, well-versed in alternating between hearts-and-minds war-fighting. But they are compromised by an opaque political strategy and high level force-protection concerns.

The Taliban, though enduring, courageous and tactically-skilled, also seemed strategically flawed, were suffering a fearful rate of attrition and failing to capture the imagination of the Pashtun majority. Ultimately, I saw that the deciding card in the game lies not with either sides’ fighting skills, but in the ability of the Afghan government to represent itself as a legitimate and fair power in Helmand.

Until it does so the best efforts of the Marines and their successors in the province will be in vain. I can only dream that I will one day have similar access to British forces in combat. Yet when the embed was over and it was time to leave, I realised that I was in no hurry to apply for another.

We had eaten, slept, shat and been shot at together. As time progressed in a slow drip-drip of cultural osmosis, ‘them and me’ had slowly transformed to ‘we’. My outsider status, the essential platform for any reporter, was ultimately and inevitable
compromised.

Like the Marines, I was beginning to wake each morning wishing for another contact. And when you start to enjoy a war experience too much, then it’s definitely time to go home.

Anthony’s latest book ‘Another Bloody Love Letter’, published by Headline is on sale now.

Read Anthony’s Afghanistan diary here