American Journalist (26) Death by Headshot in South Sudan

Loop1 · #1 ● 05-10-2019, 07:56 PM

On August 26, 2017, a 26-year-old American journalist named C.A. was killed in Kaya, South Sudan while covering the violent civil war in the newly formed country. C.A. worked as a freelance journalist for news organizations including Vice, The Telegraph, Al Jazeera, The Independent, Toronto Sun and the Pennsylvania Gazette.

C.A. had just relocated to Africa to report on the civil war in South Sudan. He was embedded with opposition forces when on his third week, they engaged in a battle with government soldiers at the small border-town of Kaya. While C.A. was photographing scenes of the battle, government soldiers shot him with five bullets from a large caliber machine-gun. One bullet pierced his head, causing a fatal blow. C.A. is the first and only foreign journalist to have been killed while reporting in South Sudan.

Before his time in South Sudan, C.A. spent most of his short career covering conflict in Ukraine by embedding himself with the Donbas Battalion. He was one of the first journalists to reach the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014 when Russian separatists shot down a commercial airliner. His article would be published in The Telegraph as a breaking news story.

C.A. wrote:

“I came here to get as close to the conflict as I could, to see how it was being fought and why, to better understand the lives of those fighting it and those affected by it, and to try to grasp the history unfolding here. I believed there was an important story to be told. What I found was a situation immune to the reductive efforts of media to define and describe it.”

By 2016, C.A.’s journalism career had stalled as conflict slowed down in Ukraine. In order to set a wider scope, C.A. would embed himself with Kurdish fighters in Turkey and had articles published about his time there.

After Turkey, C.A. had his eyes set on South Sudan. Freelance journalism for war correspondents was highly competitive, and C.A. wanted to leave a mark by creating a niche in a conflict that not many journalists had covered. C.A. was also fascinated by stories on Africa from famous explorers and had been the subject of his senior thesis in college.

By 2017, C.A. had reached out to opposition forces of the SPLA-IO in South Sudan and they agreed to allow C.A. to embed himself with their forces and report on their cause. C.A. would then travel to South Sudan and neighboring Uganda in August 2017 to meet with the SPLA-IO. There he would eat, live and sleep with the rebel forces and interview civilians and soldiers over the course of three weeks leading up to the Battle of Kaya.

But over time, he grew frustrated. C.A. wrote in his notebook on August 13, 2017:

Complete frustration with this uncivilized backwater … where even soldiers can’t get time distance & direction right. Where everything takes longer than people say by minutes or weeks. Fucking tired and frustrated. How much longer …

On the eve of the Battle of Kaya, C.A. learned from the rebels that two journalists from Reuters were joining in on the coverage of the battle. This infuriated C.A. as he thought he had an exclusive.

C.A. spoke to his parents that night:

“He said the communications person lied to him,” his mother recalled, “Reuters had made contact even before C.A. had, but he was never told that. He said, ‘So now that Reuters is here, we’re going out?’”

“He thought this was his exclusive,” said his father. “And these guys had creds—they weren’t even freelancers. We do wonder if he took more risk than he would have because of those guys.”

“C.A., he didn’t want rivals around, so he was not very happy when he saw [them],” the SPLA-IO told his mother “Their presence gave him that pressure, that he wanted to cover something more.”

The next morning, the two reporters from Reuters arrived and along with C.A., the rebel soldiers set out at 6 AM for the town of Kaya.

As the battle began, C.A. made two fatal mistakes. One, he did not wear a bullet proof vest or gear that identified him as part of the press. In fact, he would wear a red band around his arm that marked him as one of the rebels. Two, he separated from the Reuters reporters at a fork where the rebel soldiers separated into smaller groups.

At some point after separating from the other reporters, C.A. would sprint ahead of the rebels to take photographs of their approach head-on. His last five photographs on his camera were from this moment with the last photo time-stamped at 6:52 AM. Soon after taking his last photograph, C.A. was shot to death.

The battle itself only lasted 40 minutes, and not long after C.A. was shot, the rebels ran out of ammunition and were forced to retreat. Despite their defeat, the rebels would post a misleading statement declaring they had captured Kaya and that their offense had been a success.

The South Sudanese government initially labeled C.A. as a “White Rebel” that illegally crossed the border from Uganda. Stories and photos of his dead body would spread on social media. While the government now calls the event “unfortunate,” they have denied C.A. civilian status despite international laws protecting journalists, thereby absolving the soldiers of responsibility.

“We saw him taking photos, (we thought) he was a white rebel that was filming,” a sergeant with the government army who fought in the August attack said, “to us he was one of the rebels, even now we still think he’s a rebel.”

Another government soldier present during the attacks said he saw C.A. hiding in the bushes with a camera and thought he was a “white Congolese so they shot and killed him.” They were shocked when they went to check C.A.’s bullet-riddled body and “felt bad that they killed a white man.”

After the battle, C.A.’s body was flown by helicopter to South Sudan’s capital of Juba where he was stored in a mortuary (spelled locally as “Muatuary.”) He would then be transferred to American officials in public display.

In the end, C.A. was cremated, and his ashes were scattered at the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine. His name has been etched onto the Glass of Fallen Journalists in Washington, D.C.

C.A.’s cousin wrote in the New Statesman:

Today marks the first anniversary of the death of my cousin, the journalist C.A.

At the memorial gathering, local journalists and friends remembered how he cared about their stories and how that, in turn, helped them to feel that their voices would be heard.

It is profoundly sad to lose someone so young and promising, but even more devastating is the knowledge that C.A.’s killing has confirmed his own belief that Western media does not care about un-sexy conflicts like South Sudan’s brutal civil war. How few people were listening then, and how few are listening now.

C.A. had railed against ‘those assholes in the media' for a long time, and in his death they abandoned him. The Independent never made reference to the fact that C.A. had been writing for them in their reporting of the killing, or indeed mention the author of that article was embedded alongside C.A. when he was killed. Vice didn’t mention his killing at all and the Telegraph took days to note that he had been published by them too. Reuters continues to sell pictures of C.A. dead from the handover over to the US, despite family requests to stop. In fact, the macabre show of unveiling his body by the South Sudanese army for media to photograph was splashed on the Daily Mail and international news media.

Around the same time, the South Sudanese military released pictures of his body after they had killed him and another set after they had stripped him. Releasing such pictures is a tactic used to gain support for their actions at home and to intimidate the family from taking any actions against them for fear of what other photos may be deployed.

The media may have published these pictures to give the story an edge or get clicks. But the exposure to readers of such horrifying pictures only leads to desensitisation and shows a lack of empathy for the family of the dead. The Associated Press published pictures from the same handover event that wholly avoided pictures of C.A. on display.

C.A.’s life has seemed cheap to those who used him for his words and then abandoned him.

Forgetting him will mean that more such deaths will follow.

Because C.A. was the first foreign journalist to die in South Sudan, and he was killed by government forces with impunity, there are a lot of in-depth articles on this incident. Links to those articles are provided below:

— Detailed Article published in the Columbia Journalism Review (Mirror)

— Detailed Article by Family Friend published in the Pennsylvania Gazette (Mirror)

— Article by Cousin in the New Statesman (Mirror)

— Follow-up Article by South Africa’s Mail & Guardian (Mirror)

— Audio Report by Voice of America

Note: The first four photos in the set were taken when he was alive in South Sudan over the three weeks he was there. The fourth photo was most likely a selfie he took on the approach to Kaya. There wasn’t any information on this photo, but he is wearing the same clothes and red band around his arm that he had on at the time of his death.

TL;DR: A 26-year-old American journalist reporting on the South Sudanese Civil War was killed by government forces while embedded with rebel soldiers.

Jl06785 · #2 ● 05-10-2019, 07:59 PM

Man that's messed up so after he was dead they had to pull his pants down so they can what, compare his white penis?

Loop1 · #3 ● 05-10-2019, 08:02 PM

This is footage taken at the Battle of Kaya from the perspective of the Reuters journalists. While C.A. does not show up in the video, it will give you a better idea of what was going on at the time.

The first half of the video takes place right before the battle and shows the rebel forces doing war chants. You can notice the rebels are disorganized. C.A. would have been alive at this point somewhere off-screen.

The second half shows the assault on Kaya. At some point, C.A. would separate from the Reuters journalists to get his own exclusive images, a path that would ultimately lead to his death.

Loop1 · #4 ● 05-10-2019, 08:07 PM

These are C.A.’s last written words left in his field notebook recovered from the Battle of Kaya.

Also included in this post are the final five photographs C.A. took at the battle shortly before he was shot to death. The last photo time stamped 6:52 AM.

I arrived in South Sudan only a few days after flying from Ukraine, but it feels like ages ago. The contrast between the outside world and this place that I find myself in is stark—and makes Europe feel very far in time and space … This feeling … is magnified by the lack of activity here and the perpetual sense of waiting … I thought relationships with the soldiers would be easy here because most people speak some English, but in fact, I’ve found it somehow more difficult than Ukraine.

—From an unfinished letter to his girlfriend 
August 18–22, 2017.

March to attack

The air pressure in the town seems to drop the day the attack is announced in the morning. The vacuum which once existed has been broken but the spirit hasn’t yet rushed in to fill it. The parade is cancelled because of rain but in the late afternoon the attack becomes a reality. As the men distribute ammunition and red arm bands, as they gather together on the open field in front of one of the village’s abandoned schools, they chant and dance, talk excitedly.
Each man has only 20 rounds, 2 magazines. “We are rebels, we don’t have enough [ammunition],” says our roommate. “We will take them from the enemy.”

—From the final entry in Field Notes Notebook #3.
August 25, 2017

It went from daylight to darkness and soon a sliver of moon had risen amongst heavy clouds. From dancing to darkness had only taken an hour. Now, we followed the silhouettes in front of us through tall grass, down through the silent valleys with their heavy air and then up again where a cool breeze from the approaching storm made the grass sway. It was silent except for the footsteps of 20 men. Dark, except for the moon, hidden now by clouds.
There was just the silhouette of the man in front—dark and—

—Final words in C.A.’s  Field Notes Notebook #3
August 25, 2017.

Loop1 · #5 ● 05-10-2019, 08:28 PM

Following are links to a few of the articles written by C.A. over his career.

— “MH17: A scene of horror – death and the banalities of life together in a Ukrainian field” in the Telegraph

— “With the Donbas Battalion” in the Pennsylvania Gazette

— “Meet the European Fighters Who Have Gone to War in Ukraine” in Vice

— “Who Owns Ukraine’s Media?” in Al Jazeera

— “In Ukraine, an unlikely new battle line” in the Toronto Star

Also included are two video interviews with C.A. The first video is an interview on his experience being at the Malaysia Airlines crash site in Ukraine. Because the video's file size is too large to upload to this site, I've embedded it below from Youtube.

The second interview attached below is on his journalism career.

Loop1 · #6 ● 05-10-2019, 08:31 PM

This is the last part to this set. The following is a social media post by C.A.’s friend in Ukraine. It gives a glimpse into C.A.’s relationship with the media and how he may have viewed his own death.

He was writing about our war. From occupation of Donetsk til the front line with the right sector. He would explain, "I am a historian by education. I saw that history was happening at Maidan, and I came over.” With no journalism experience, he started pitching & publishing articles in the top world media. When the number of casualties in Donbas decreased, they started hesitating publishing his freelance work.

C.A. was always arguing journalists should unite to stop yellow rubbish from taking over the really important stories. He fought with the Guardian for paying less than 100 pounds for a story from the frontline, fought with the Washington Post for wrongly rewriting his article, with Al Jazeera for cutting out a piece of his story after 1+1 threatened to sue him. He was not afraid to stand up for himself and for what was right, not afraid to go straight to hell. He knew what he was doing and he knew the price.

Before going to South Sudan, he had that crazy look in his eyes: he was after The Big Story. "When I find myself in a truck with the rebels with Kalashnikovs all around, then I will calm down.” I hope I remember this quote correctly.

Had he read the headlines about his death, I know what his reaction would have been. "Well at least the death of an American journalist made them remember there's a civil war in South Sudan. I hate this hypocrisy!" he would yell, gesturing emotionally, and I would have been confident he would keep on fighting.

When we were saying goodbye, I wished him to get “The Story” in South Sudan. I don't remember if I told him to take care.

When once again he was sharing some of his crazy journalist adventures, I asked him to write memoirs. He laughed and dismissed it, but the only thing I wish now is that I could just keep on listening.