‘‘No, no, no, I am not an American. I am a Syrian journalist.’’ The assertion of identity in the face of the deep unknown must be the hallmark of a brave journalist. To go where few have gone before —in this case to southern Iraq — in search of the whole truth clearly calls for courage. Waiel S H Awwad, ‘‘Dr Awwad’’ to friends and acquaintances in New Delhi, reporting the Iraq war for Al-Arabiya television, has been missing for a week, since March 22. He was embedded with the 3rd unit of the US Marine Corps. Two other journalists, a photographer and a technician from Al-Arabiya, have also disappeared. It turns out Awwad had filed only a couple of stories from southern Iraq. The worrisome phrase, last shouted by him declaring his identity as a Syrian and not an American — he has very fair skin — was heard by an MBC colleague covering the war from northern Iraq last Saturday. That was when the phone went dead. For many journalists in the Capital, both foreign correspondents as well as Indians, Awwad has been really the face of the Arab world. They don’t know if he wore a bullet-proof flak jacket which said ‘PRESS’ in big, bold letters. All they can remember right now is his crackle of a laugh and his refusal to be dismissed as a mere ‘phirangi’ by the ancient tribe of South Asian hacks. Awwad certainly is no shrinking violet, consumed with the rage of a region that has still to make up its mind about its place in the new world disorder. Instead, Awwad always drove up in his rather beat-up car to the Shastri Bhavan briefings of the MEA, and collared anyone who cared to hear about his rather passionate defences about the rights and wrongs of what was happening in the Middle East. Really, he came to India some 15 years ago, to study medicine at the Safdarjung Medical College in the Capital. He stayed on to make information his business. Last year he was elected to the vice-presidentship of the Foreign Correspondents Club. Says Venkat Narayan, president of the FCC, ‘‘Awwad is a live-wire, very people-friendly, a lovely human being.’’ He also seems to have a monopoly on the Arab media in India. He works for MBC in Delhi, or is it Kuwait radio, or Al-Arabiya. He writes for half-a-dozen Arab papers based both in the Middle East and in the West, and covers South Asia for them. He has travelled back and forth, relentlessly across Pakistan and Afghanistan and back to his Anand Niketan house in South Delhi. There he lives with his wife and four children, three daughters and a son who has been born to them only some weeks ago. The Palestinian crisis obsessed him, as it does many other Arabs. Often, Awwad felt, India had voluntarily given up the right to be heard in the Middle East. Which is why he may have decided that he would ask at least one question at every press conference he attended. Often the question came packed with three different ideas, of which at least two were comments. ‘‘He is my guru. I learnt a lot from him. The fact that he’s missing is a tragedy for the Arab world,’’ said Khalid Al-Anzi of the Kuwait news agency. The fact that Kuwait and Syria, often at extreme ends of Arab opinion, on Iraq as well as most other issues, also didn’t really matter when it came to the matter of friendship between the two men. Awwad’s answering machine at home still bears witness to his larger-than-life personality. ‘‘Please leave a message and speak loudly after the long beep.’’
