Iraqis unveil monument to ‘Guardians of the Truth,’ including 2 CBS News journalists killed in Baghdad

Sulaymaniyah, Iraq — Officials, family members and journalists gathered in Freedom Park in the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah on Saturday for the unveiling of a new monument to the “Guardians of the Truth.” The monument commemorates the lives of journalists who died covering more than two decades of warfare that has ravaged Iraq since 2003.

The monument contains the names of 551 Iraqi and foreign journalists, listed alphabetically by the year they were killed, on giant metal plaques. Among the guardians of truth commemorated on the monoliths are two of CBS News’ own heroes.

On May 29, 2006, CBS News sound engineer James Brolan and cameraman Paul Douglas killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad. Correspondent Kimberly Dozier was seriously injured in the same explosion.

“The shock was so deep and the loss so great that no amount of time could soften it,” reporter Mark Phillips said of his deceased friends and colleagues, 10 years after the explosion tore a hole in the CBS News family.

The London CBS News office has continued to pay tribute to Brolan and Douglas since their deaths, including by supporting The Rory Peck Trust and Reporters Without Borders, two charities working to protect and support journalists and their families worldwide.

Brolan and Douglas’ names are also engraved on a memorial to the fallen journalists in Bayeux, northern France, which three of their colleagues cycled to from London in 2009, covering over 200 miles in five days to raise money for charities in their honor.

The man behind the new monument in Iraq is the deputy prime minister of the Kurdish regional government, Qubad Talabani, who told the audience that it was “a recognition of the courage and dedication of those fallen journalists to tell the truth. It is an attempt to keep their names, their memories, alive. They are our heroes.”

The vast majority of the names on the monument are of Iraqi journalists who died while covering the disaster in their own country. Journalism has remained one of the most dangerous professions in Iraq since 2003.

“We have seen more than 530 journalists sacrificed since 2003,” Mouaid al-Lami, who heads the Iraqi Journalists Syndicate, said at the unveiling of the monument. “It is an unprecedented number of journalists killed in a single war.”

Most of the journalists present at the ceremony were not there to cover the ceremony, but to pay their respects to their fallen friends and colleagues.

That includes Yassir Ismael, 43, who lost his father and older brother in 2006, when they were both working as journalists for The Associated Press in Baghdad.

“It is emotionally overwhelming to see so much recognition for fallen journalists,” he said, noting that the memorial is “the first of its kind in Iraq.”

“We owe thanks to all those heroes,” Ismael added, “especially to the foreign journalists who came and helped tell the stories of our suffering to the world.”