In 2012, the US marine turned freelance foreign correspondent Austin Tice disappeared in Syria. If he’s still alive, he’ll be the second-longest detained journalist in the world. That, says Josh Baker (speaking to me from Wales), was the podcast he thought he was making: “We thought we were looking for a missing person, and what we fell into was almost like a Bourne novel, utterly extraordinary.
A world of espionage, spies, dictatorship.” It’s also a story of American exceptionalism – the way the US saw itself in relation to the rest of the world. Moreover, “I don’t mean this in a crass way,” Baker says, “but through Austin’s story, we also learn a lot about the last 14 years of the civil war in Syria. We really go inside the regime’s industrial complex of disappearance and torture.
As episode two begins, Assad is gone, and we enter into these facilities.” Ultimately, the hunt for the people who know the truth about Tice, and the hunt for those responsible for these atrocities, are one and the same. It is absolutely extraordinary.” This is Baker’s third series of I’m Not a Monster for the BBC. The first two – one about an American woman, Sam, who disappears into the Islamic State caliphate with her young children when her husband becomes a sniper, and the other one about Shamima Begum – are extraordinary pieces of journalism.
But just as extraordinary is the backstory of how they came about. Now 37, Baker started as a night editor on the foreign desk of the Times, and did “a little bit of reporting on the Serbian refugee crisis, and from the Middle East”. By the mid-10s, he was directing Battle for Iraq (a Guardian/PBS co-production), embedded with Iraqi special forces.
And the reality was quite different.” He got caught in the centre of Mosul and by nightfall had been offered a place to stay by a family, explosions and fighting happening all around. A radio operator woke the team with a warning, “and I could hear shooting”, he remembers, “but without wanting to sound like a war bro, it was all going one way and it was all American weaponry. The sound is different when it’s Isis.” What he didn’t hear until too late was a massive articulated lorry, trying to manoeuvre its way down the street to deliver a car bomb.
It detonated right outside our house and I was buried in the collapsing building, and broke my back.” As he was recovering in England after his evacuation, a source of his heard he’d been injured and got in touch. This wasn’t a propaganda video, it was a home video.” Matthew was Sam’s oldest son. But I thought: ‘I’m gonna find this kid,’ which sounds incredibly idealistic, but seven months later, I did.” The Begum season also came out of that suicide bombing – a Dutch IS bride had been in Mosul at the same time, and some years later privately messaged Baker on Twitter, saying she was in the same refugee camp as Shamima Begum and her children (all three of whom have now died).
Extract — continue reading at the source.
