‘They told me that they'd hunt me down': journalists on how they survive working in war zones

The Guardian

27-05-2025

Stephen*, 39, is a journalist in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The war between the DRC's army and the military faction known as M23 is one of Africa's longest conflicts [a potential truce was announced last month]. The escalation of violence has meant Stephen now forgoes bylines and a presence on social media.
I've covered pretty much all the conflicts in North Kivu [in the eastern part of the country] where I work as a reporter. The worst time was in 2013 [during the DRC's offensive against M23]. The bombardment was intense. I saw so many people – civilians and soldiers – injured and killed. I remember looking at the government soldiers' eyes: they were filled with death. Death was everywhere. I returned home after the fighting and I too had only death in my eyes.
I've been embedded alongside the government forces in the main conflict zones and this is why I've been targeted by the M23 rebels. I was at home in Goma [a city in the North Kivu region in eastern DRC] when I received anonymous phone calls from members of M23 who told me that they knew I had been reporting alongside the government forces. They told me that they'd hunt me down. I spent five days without leaving the house. They were passing my house, they were so close, we [my family] were terrified they'd find us.
The whole experience left us psychologically traumatised. It got to the point that my wife begged to be evacuated to a safe zone controlled by the government forces. I couldn't leave my family, I'd rather die than be separated from them. But trying to leave came to nothing anyway.
In Goma, the media landscape has been decimated. Since the rebels took over the local radio and TV stations, there are no journalists working with them. I know journalists who stay in their homes because they are so terrified for their personal security. The M23 forces also have a digital army that disseminate propaganda and attack anyone who contradicts their view of the world.
Journalism has become a clandestine activity. I've had to erase old articles that I published and hide my online presence. We cannot report publicly, post on social media or voice our opinion in public in any way. It's against the nature of a journalist. It's very, very frustrating.
Even though this war has severely impacted my life, journalism is a real passion. After university it's the only work I've ever done; I don't know how to do anything else. It's a vocation for me. I really hope for peace and the return of the rule of law and that we journalists can write about things other than war.As told to Elizia Volkmann
Daniel* has been a journalist for more than a decade in the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa – home to an ongoing and bloody drug war. The state is the heartland of one of the world's most powerful drug trafficking organisations, the Sinaloa cartel.
Mexico is already one of the world's most dangerous countries for journalists, but it has got particularly awful in the last six months. Seven or eight people are being 'disappeared' a day here, including women and children. I do my best to tell the honest story of the hundreds of people each year who are displaced, tortured or disappeared in the cartel wars.
I have asked myself why I keep doing what I do despite the risk, but it's complicated. I am still not entirely sure. It's not some pride thing. I don't think danger is cool. I actually find it really, really difficult and am still processing several incidents that have happened to me.
On one occasion, I was in Culiacán reporting on the arrest of Ovidio Guzmán, the son of the Sinaloa cartel drug lord El Chapo in January 2023. Armed men stopped me in my car, threatened me and confiscated everything I had. Knowing I was a journalist, they took photos and videos of me while pointing a gun to my head. I never saw my laptop and car again. I suppose they burned them.
After that last incident, I sought refuge in a hotel under the watch of the cartel until eventually a kind man helped me leave in the back of his truck. After a week at home, I decided to leave the state for the Yucatán peninsula under the advice of the national unit for the protection of journalists. They told me to lie low for a while.
I had to hug my wife and children – now three and six years old – and walk out the door in tears not knowing when I could go back. I spent three months away from them. It was brutal. It is really painful being told you have to leave your life behind because someone doesn't like what you are doing.
My family and friends pleaded with me to do something safer and more economically stable and I reflected on it a lot while I was away. In recent years I have moved away from covering narcos to their victims instead, as it's safer. The incident in Culiacán accelerated this change, but really the catalyst was the birth of my first child six years ago.
I want to be around to spend time with my children, wife and parents and for us all to be together for my kids' birthdays and to have BBQs and eat seafood together. At the same time I think it's very important to keep telling the truth. I believe in the power of memory and although it doesn't happen quickly, journalism helps bring about change.As told to Luke Taylor
Ammar Awad has been working as a fixer and reporter for international media outlets in Sudan since fighting broke out between the Sudanese armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary in April 2023.
I was visiting a camp for displaced people in Port Sudan [a city in eastern Sudan by the Red Sea] recently when a little girl clung to my leg and called me by my family name, Uncle Ammar. She brought me to her mother, who was a neighbour and a family friend from Omdurman, the city where I used to live. The camp was in a dreadful condition. She and her family had no housing or tent to protect them from the sun's heat. I remembered their condition before the war; they were not rich, but they had enough to make them always smiling and kind.
The life of the women and children I meet in the areas where we are allowed to work continues to convince my family, who now live in Egypt, that I should carry on returning to Sudan despite their fears and calls for me not to travel to war zones. If we did not take these risks, no one would hear about this war and the atrocities taking place in it. The free world would not move to save and aid the people of Sudan due to its preoccupation with the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
One of the most terrifying moments for me was when I entered the only hospital in Omdurman, which was crowded with wounded and sick people due to the random shelling carried out by the RSF on the city. I will never forget as long as I live how one of the wounded took his last breath in front of us while he was lying on the ground waiting to enter the operating room. We were trying to understand from his relatives how and where he was injured, but he left, and I don't think I will ever forget this tragic departure.
The gradual improvements in the conditions of my neighbour's family in the Port Sudan camp make me feel that what we are doing has a value – especially when that little girl comes up to me to tell me happily they finally have a tent to live in, or got food rations from international organisations. But it pains me that I am unable to answer her constant question, 'When will we return to our home and get our lives back?'By Ammar Awad
Rar Ra* is a journalist working in Mayanmar's Kachin state. The country has been engulfed by a brutal civil war since its transition towards democracy was cut short when the military seized power in a coup in 2021.
After the coup, the military put our outlet – a TV channel based in Yangon – on a blacklist. Some of my colleagues went straight to the border to escape to other countries, but I returned to my birthplace in Kachin state. I wanted to continue to report the news as much as I could, writing about war crimes committed by the military, airstrikes that kill children and on conditions for displaced people. I am currently living in a military-controlled town.
I have to keep a low profile when I'm out and cannot keep a record of any of my notes, deleting everything after I send my reports to my editor, because the military often check our phones and laptops. As I'm known as a journalist, I'm monitored and checked because they suspect me of reporting news against them. So I have to stay alert all the time.
I have to always be thinking about how to escape and where to, if necessary. On one occasion recently I only narrowly escaped after the military were going house-to-house in my neighbourhood searching for a journalist. I fled as soon as I could.
It is hard to get information about what is going on in Myanmar. There is no safe place, so often it can be hard to get to war-affected areas. For the past year, the military has cut the internet lines, which makes it difficult for us to talk to sources or get information from distant areas. Our job has also been made more difficult recently by the US aid cuts, which have affected media here and forced many of my colleagues to quit being journalists.
I continue with this job because of the news all around me. The war crimes being committed will not reach the world if I stop working. I am doing my best through all the challenges of danger and access to raise awareness of the people being killed every day.As told to Kaamil Ahmed