The most dangerous place in the world for journalists has imposed a new set of rules on reporting. A shabby Toyota saloon, with a smeared windscreen fringed by woollen tassels and grey nylon curtains obscuring the rear windows, is now the vehicle of choice, leaving fleets of expensive armoured vehicles to gather dust in the garage. Keeping a low profile is better protection than armour plating. All reporters have a second backup vehicle a discreet distance behind, and in this new world the escorts routinely are armed.

You try not to make appointments, so that ambushes cannot be prepared along the way; you try to stay only 20 minutes at any location, varying the route in and out, to make it harder for kidnappers. The big agencies, with permanent staffs, have their own security. But even journalists for smaller organisations, staying in the security compound around the Hamra hotel, have their own safety net, telling each other when they are coming and going and what they are doing. There are no scoops in Baghdad. Even before the “surge”, the big new U.S.-led security operation launched in February, there were 800 official roadblocks every week in Baghdad. Some consist of just a sleepy soldier sitting in the shade, waving a line of vehicles through a narrow channel made by barbed wire strung between oil barrels. But they cause huge traffic jams, a new fact of life in Baghdad, especially around the large central area seized by the Americans for their fortified Green Zone, and other sealed enclaves lived in by foreigners, including journalists. Slow progress through this is another source of tension, since sitting in a line makes you very vulnerable to attack.

As well as the army and police, there are half-a-dozen big, armed insurgent groups, while every mosque now has its own militia who slow down incoming traffic by making a slalom of palm tree trunks pulled across the road. And in every street, Iraqi men take it in turns to do guard duty by night as fears grow that Iraq could be slipping into a worsening civil war, with the landscape changing daily. As Sunni and Shia areas become more defined, 200,000 people have already left their homes. Baghdad could end up with a Shia northeast, dominated by the sprawling estates of Sadr city, and a Sunni southwest, with the two divided by the serpentine bends of the Tigris. Even in the heart of the city, on the opposite bank of the Tigris from the heavily fortified Green Zone, the district of Rusafa is becoming more definably Shia by the day.

Unique challenges

He did not get the pictures.

Figures compiled by the Committee for the Protection of Journalists show, hardly surprisingly, that nearly all of the deaths in journalism in the world, 85 per cent of the total are of local journalists – people who die in their own home location. What is perhaps more surprising is that half of them are working for foreign companies when they die. So why do they do it? In Iraq, many explain their motivation in powerful terms. They say they are willing to put their lives on the line in order to tell the story – the most visceral and basic instinctive journalism. Reporting the disaster that has befallen their country is a patriotic vocation.

In order to do their jobs more safely, local camera crews and photographers often come and stay for several weeks at a time in the guarded compounds where all foreign news companies are obliged to live, behind the relative safety of high walls. Even if their homes are nearby, they are less vulnerable if they stay away from home. It is the lifestyle of an expeditionary military force – and with the same risks too. When the bombs go off, international staff tend to stay behind the walls, watching the plumes of smoke fill the sky, while it is the local crews who film the mayhem in a city where mourners have increasingly turned in rage on cameramen. Nowhere is safe. Hospitals and government offices are controlled by different militias and the police are partisan. When the Guardian journalist Rory Carroll was kidnapped, men in Iraqi police vehicles assisted the kidnappers.

A number of Iraqi cameramen have told me that as well as these dangers they are routinely harassed and intimidated by American forces, who seize tapes and identity cards. American mistrust of local journalists has been very hazardous to some and a number have been arrested. An AP photographer, Bilal Hussein, has been held in American custody for more than a year for what is described as “inappropriate contact with insurgents”, and a stringer for another major news agency has had to leave his home in Ramadi to live in hiding after American forces stuck up “Wanted” posters for him.

In both cases, the journalists are believed by their employers to be innocent of the charges they face. The contact they had with insurgents was no more than they needed in order to carry out their jobs. Being able to function as a reporter in these very complex locations, especially a reporter living within the community, has to involve some level of understanding with gunmen. This level of contact does not necessarily mean approval. The most compelling images, particularly those taken after bomb attacks, can be taken safely only by people from the community that has been hit. Moqtada al-Sadr’s militiamen will stop anyone from outside Sadr city taking pictures there. Does that mean that the pictures are somehow tainted?

Protecting this band of highly experienced news-gatherers raises new challenges, especially as we rely on them more and more. Rodney Pinder, head of the International News Safety Institute (INSI), condemns news organisations for failure to do their duty. At a meeting in the Frontline Club in London he talked of an “apartheid in international journalism”, segregating local and foreign journalists. Asked to name and shame the culprits, he said: “Even the electronic forest is not big enough to have the trees to print the list.” INSI suffers from faltering and inconsistent support, occasionally getting big funds to put out fires, but not the core money that it needs to change the culture. As safety training has become more of a routine expectation for journalists from “western” countries, ironically there are fewer places where it is considered safe for us to go. We are better trained, but then kept back while many of the most powerful images are taken by locals who work without the protection that we now take for granted.

No moral responsibility

But what about the large area in between? Now that cameras that can take broadcast-quality images can be bought at a very low price by anyone on the planet, there are lots of filmed stories becoming available, particularly in conflict zones such as Iraq, which are not shot by journalists but are used by TV companies. One stringer, sometimes used by the BBC, is an academic. He likes to say: “I am not a journalist, but occasionally I commit acts of journalism.” If he were to go out on his own, then it could be argued that the BBC would have no responsibility should he be hurt, but if his “acts of journalism” were commissioned by the Corporation, then the BBC would accept the same moral responsibility as if he were on a more full-time contract. But he certainly does not benefit from the same safety training or support as staff sent out from Britain, nor do the English-speaking doctors who will take a camera or minidisc recorder into Baghdad’s hellish hospitals to tell the story of places where we cannot go. The principle of a duty of care to train, support and equip these people is not an easy one to apply.

The key to whether we do owe them anything surely has to depend on our level of encouragement for their enterprise. A friend who runs a small freelance TV news company recently received some rushes from a local cameraman who was shooting a film for them in Africa. There had been some clashes between rival groups over a mining contract. He had filmed interviews and most of the rest of what he needed for the story, but no fighting. My friend knew that in order to sell the story to any TV channel he would need more action, but he faced a dilemma, knowing that he would be putting the life of the freelance at risk if he commissioned him to film fighting. Could he really ask for this?

These are not hypothetical dilemmas, but a real challenge in a world where the definition of a “journalist” is fuzzier than ever, and more footage taken by people who are not journalists in the traditional sense at all is being utilised. As conventional news channels begin to use YouTube as a picture source, the safety challenge facing us in Iraq might be only the tip of the iceberg.