One thing I’ll always be proud of is that we provided Husham with the platform & resources to publish his work almost weekly. We had big plans, ideas for longterm projects & to publish more regularly. Others only used him for quotes, and ignored his published work.
He had so much to produce, he truly deserved a whole team dedicated to his work. You can find his work here cgpolicy.org/articles/isis-…
Apart from the consistent scoop-based work @CGPdc published, the first major project he had submitted will be the first of its kind on Iraq. Watch this space.
His murder is a tragedy for family & friends, but really for Iraq not in the cliche sense. I’m feeling this more after the initial shock because it’s impossible to think of someone of his caliber: the field experience, granular knowledge, while being objective & not sectarian.
Before Husham, I’m also proud I was part of a team (in The UAE, ironically) that was the first ever to publish Jamal Khashoggi’s work in English regularly. He would write in Arabic, his wife would translate. We went the extra mile.
Western media will never have the bandwidth for that kind of proper work. This has to be done locally, but unfortunately local media doesn’t always the right leadership, or tied to regimes not interested in proper journalism.
Since the Iraq war, we have a whole new generation of Arab writers or ones with roots in the region who know how to do proper journalism. Ready to do something big. But unfortunately that opportunity hasn’t been grasped. We can’t expect this to happen by others with limited focus
