Lindsay Addario

And so I stayed like nine months.

And that's where I did my first like published works.

Oh, yeah.

So this is while U.S.

forces were backing Kurdish Peshmerga to fight against al-Ansar in northern Iraq.

And so I was working with a group of journalists, international media, based in northern Iraq, so Erbil and Sulaymaniyah.

And things were getting very, very tense.

It was like kind of moving up to when the invasion of Iraq was going to happen.

The U.S.

forces were with Kurdish Peshmerga fighting al-Ansar.

Fighting was kind of really picking up.

And it was near this area of Halabja in northern Iraq.

And so I was working with a group of journalists and we heard that a lot of civilians started fleeing from the mountains where al-Ansar had their stronghold.

So we went out there and we were all kind of parked along this road.

It was like a T-junction and people were fleeing from the mountains coming toward us.

And at one point, it started getting pretty tense and a lot of the civilians were saying, get out of here, get out of here.

It's not safe.

And of course, the one lesson I've learned in all my many years covering war is you always have to listen to the locals.

And so I was standing with this other journalist and I suddenly got this like feeling in the pit of my stomach and I ran back to the car and shut the door and a huge mortar came like very close to us and our entire car was thrust forward and our driver just took off and sped like very, very fast and we drove for about 10 minutes to a safer area.

And we got out and we stopped at a hospital and they were all floating, the injured and there were people being treated and it was chaos.