IRAQ

ICH: Hotel journalism gives American troops a free hand by Robert Fisk

"Hotel journalism" is the only way to describe it. More and more, Western reporters in Baghdad are reporting from their hotels rather than the streets of Iraq's towns and cities.

Some are accompanied everywhere by hired and heavily armed Western mercenaries. A few live in local offices, from which their editors refuse them permission to leave.

Most use Iraqi "stringers" - part-time correspondents who risk their lives to conduct interviews for American or British journalists - and none can contemplate a journey outside the capital without days of preparation, unless they "embed" themselves with US or British forces.

Rarely, if ever, has a war been covered by reporters in so distant and restricted a way. Several Western journalists simply do not leave their rooms while on station in Baghdad.

So grave are the threats to Western journalists that some television stations are talking of withdrawing their reporters and crews altogether. Amid an insurgency where Westerners - and many Arabs as well as other foreigners - are kidnapped and killed, reporting on this war is becoming close to impossible.