Three journalists who have written about the war-torn Middle East - including a Wall Street Journal reporter who uncovered the poignant story of one Marine's heroism in Iraq - will share their experiences with University of Colorado at Boulder journalism students during a panel discussion this week.
The event will take place at 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 25, in the Armory building, room 206A on the CU-Boulder campus.
Panel participants will include Michael Phillips, a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal's Washington, D.C., bureau; Mariwan Hama-Saeed, a Kurdish editor for the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting and a CU-Boulder graduate student; and Tiare Rath, who has lived and worked in the Middle East for most of the last eight years.
Both Hama-Saeed and Rath work for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which promotes free and fair media in Iraq and other developing countries. Hama-Saeed, who is pursuing a master's degree in journalism at CU-Boulder, was the first Iraqi to be chosen for a journalism and democracy fellowship sponsored by Sweden's Institute for the Further Education of Journalists.
Rath is the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's international editor and is credited with managing and training more than 50 Iraqi journalists.
A Wall Street Journal reporter for the past 10 years, Phillips is visiting the CU-Boulder School of Journalism and Mass Communication as a Hearst Professional-in-Residence. He rode with a frontline Marine infantry squad from Kuwait to Baghdad during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and has covered the same battalion during four other tours.
While embedded with the Marines in the Iraqi desert Phillips discovered the heart-rending story of Marine Cpl. Jason Dunham and later penned "The Gift of Valor: A War Story," which chronicles Dunham's life and death.
Dunham, from Scio, N.Y., received the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously earlier this year, becoming the first Marine to receive the nation's highest military decoration since the Vietnam War era.
Only 22 years old, Dunham was manning a checkpoint in Karabilah, Iraq, near the Syrian border, on April 14, 2004, when he scuffled with an insurgent who had leapt from a car. Dunham placed his helmet over a grenade his attacker had dropped and saved the lives of two other Marines. He died eight days after the attack from serious injuries he received.
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