BAGHDAD — As the light faded from the wintry sky over Samarra that day, Atwar Bahjat looked into the camera with a somber face and implored her country to stay calm.
"Whether you are Sunni or Shia, Arab or Kurd, there is no difference between Iraqis," said Bahjat, one of the most respected war correspondents in the Arab world. "[We are] united in fear for this nation."
There was every reason to be afraid. They were coming for her already.
The gunmen arrived in a pickup truck, hunting for Bahjat and her crew from satellite news channel Al Arabiya. "Where's the announcer?" they yelled, according to witnesses. They seized Bahjat, her cameraman and her engineer.
Their bodies were discovered the next morning laced with bullets, dumped in the dirt on the outskirts of Samarra.
Bahjat had rushed to her hometown that day to cover the bombing of one of Shiite Islam's most sacred shrines. From the first minutes, Iraqis understood that the provocation was severe: The attack intensified the low-level battles between the two major Islamic sects, shoving the nation to the edge of all-out civil war.
Something fundamental died in Samarra that February day, and in her way, Bahjat epitomized it. The 30-year-old journalist represented a hope that is fast fading.
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Atwar Bahjat seemed to embody some other, alternate Iraq.
She was a poet, a journalist and a feminist. She had written a book tracing her adventures as a war reporter and had begun work on a second book, examining the role of women in Iraq. She didn't fit into either side of the mounting religious clash -- her mother was Shiite, her father Sunni.
She had the talent and connections to get out of Iraq, but she chose to stay because she was determined to see her country knit into a coherent nation.
She wore a gold pendant in the shape of Iraq as a symbol of her indignation over efforts to thwart that unity, and she argued with editors against identifying people as Sunni or Shiite in her broadcasts, friends and colleagues said. The hatred was hot enough already, she told them. She wanted to calm things down, not stoke the anger.
To many Iraqis, Bahjat was a heroine. She'd gone from delivering propaganda through heavily censored state television to reporting on the U.S. occupation for Al Jazeera satellite channel. She stayed with Al Jazeera for months after the Iraqi government outlawed it. This winter, she moved on to Al Arabiya, a Dubai-based satellite giant and the most popular news channel in Iraq.
