War zone

Kimberly Dozier stops in the middle of a sentence, interrupting memories of her time as a U.Va. graduate student.

“I’m sorry,” she tells a caller from halfway around the world. “There’s a little gunfire outside.”

For a flickering moment, Dozier is on high alert, and then she dismisses it as a nearby street fight. This is life in Baghdad, the latest stop in a journalism career that has kept Dozier (MA, Foreign Affairs ’93) in the Middle East and other notorious trouble spots for more than a decade.

Yet her work as a CBS News correspondent in Iraq became fundamentally different from similar experiences in Israel, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland and Afghanistan once insurgents began targeting Western journalists, no longer viewing them as neutral third parties.

Once able to travel freely by herself, Dozier now cannot risk leaving her hotel without the protection of a team of former British Special Forces officers. Aside from embeds with the U.S. military, she has come to rely largely on what she calls “ninja reporting: You sneak in, you get something, and you get out. Or you send your agents.

“This is a whole new way of covering a story for me,” she said. “Right now, I can’t go out and talk to Iraqis like I could a year ago. I can’t even go to their homes without endangering them.”

Not that it was a breeze before then. Dealing with verbal and physical harassment has long been “part of the job” for female foreign correspondents, Dozier said. Groped after wading into a riot or a demonstration, “I got really good at punching back,” she said. “Whirling, catching the culprit and punching him usually makes the other 10 guys around you kind of back off for a little bit.” Along the Nile River in Egypt, little girls in veils stared at her blonde hair and 5-foot-8 frame, threw rocks, and then ran off screaming after she shocked them by yelling at them in Arabic.

Three years ago in Afghanistan, she was headed to Kabul when the taxi she was riding in was stopped at an improvised checkpoint by a particularly threatening group of armed men. After a few tense moments, the driver glanced warily at the passenger across from him and floored it, barely escaping around a corner before the gunmen opened fire.

“I later find out that a TV convoy that came an hour after me, the one that didn’t have room for me — that was the one that was stopped and four journalists were killed,” Dozier said. “And it was apparently right around the area ... where we’d had to gun it through.”

Dozier, 38, was a few years out of Wellesley College when she put her reporting career on hold to get a master’s degree at U.Va., bartending at St. Maarten Café to pay the bills. She remains immensely grateful to R.K. Ramazani and Abdul-Aziz Sachedina, professors whose insight into the turmoil brewing in the Middle East “was like an anatomy of 9/11 years before it happened.”

Now on a daily basis, Dozier encounters “the boiling resentment of even very well educated Arabs, Iraqis, Palestinians, Lebanese” toward the U.S. and the West. She strives to communicate that reality to her American viewers.

“If I can make this place real for them, if I can make these people real for them, and explain their feelings, their motivations, their heartbreak, what drives them, then Americans will be better able to decide what their government should be doing to represent us worldwide,” she said.

“If Americans don’t understand what’s going on out here, if I don’t make it relatable to them, they’re going to turn off. They’re going to turn inward. They’re going to ignore the rest of the world to their peril.”