Fresh out of university, journalist decided to launch her career in Iraq

Rosie Garthwaite, author of How to Avoid Being Killed in a War Zone, recounts her "act-first-think-later adventures" in Iraq.

Rosie Garthwaite, author of How To Avoid Being Killed in a War Zone, at Al Jazeera's studio in Doha.

At the time, says Rosie Garthwaite, her youthful decision to travel to Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion had "seemed like a good idea". A fresh-faced Oxford history graduate in search of a career in journalism, she had lined up an internship at The Washington Post and, in the three months before it was due to start, "wanted some experience".

She certainly got that.

As luck would have it, it turned out to be a very good idea, leading to an exclusive story exposing the death of an innocent Iraqi detainee in British custody, a career in journalism, her current job as a producer-presenter for Al Jazeera in Doha and, now, the publication of a book packed with the sort of information that Rosie the ingenue could clearly have used back in 2003.

But it could so easily have turned out very different.

"It seemed like I was making a realistic judgement," says Garthwaite, now 30. "But looking back at it - 22, blonde, not knowing anything - it was an interesting decision, especially for my parents" (not least, one imagines, for her father, a professionally risk-averse insurance broker).

Not for nothing is How To Avoid Being Killed in a War Zone - a fascinating collection of advice distilled from the experiences of the author and the characters she has encountered, ranging from how to control arterial bleeding to surviving a kidnapping - dedicated to Garthwaite's mother and father, "for their sleepless nights and support for my act-first-think-later adventures".

She would, she insists, have been quite happy working back home for the Eastern Daily Press in sleepy, rural Norfolk. Yet without the necessary qualifications - a certificate issued in the UK by the National Council for the Training of Journalists - she couldn't even land an internship, let alone a job. "So it was easier for me to just go to Iraq."

She could have found herself there in uniform. After leaving Benenden, one of Britain's leading boarding schools for girls, she signed up for a gap-year commission with the British army. "The idea is that they give you a really good time for a year and that you are supposed to become an advert for the army." She did, but not in the way the army probably had in mind.

Permanent army life, she decided, was not for her - "as a woman in the army you have to prove yourself every single day, and if you do well they always assume it's because you're a woman" - and besides, the journalism bug had already bitten.

Attached to the Third Regiment of the Royal Horse Artillery (today, their steeds are self-propelled guns) she became the regimental journalist, producing a newsletter for the unit's base at Hohne in Germany. Journalism took a back seat when she went to Oxford to study ancient and modern history, but she nevertheless found time to place "a few tiny articles" here and there and won second prize in a British national newspaper's travel-writing competition.

By the time Garthwaite was being snubbed by the Eastern Daily Press, the invasion of Iraq had taken place and her former regiment was in Basra. "I had been watching the Iraq war obsessively because all my friends were over there; I decided to go to Iraq and find out what was really going on and get experience as a journalist at the same time."

She landed a non-paying job on the Baghdad Bulletin, a fortnightly English-language newspaper set up by David Enders, an American, and Mark Gordon-James, an Englishman, who had met while studying Arabic in Lebanon. After a chat with them on the telephone she concluded it seemed "reasonably safe".

That impression shifted when she arrived in Amman, Jordan, in July 2003 to hitch a ride in a convoy of cars heading to Baghdad.

On July 5, Richard Wild, another young British would-be journalist working for the Bulletin, had been killed, shot in the back of the head outside Baghdad Museum. Garthwaite didn't know him but they had much in common; he too had studied history (though at Cambridge) and had taken the same route into Baghdad, where he had hoped to earn his freelance spurs. Now, 10 days later, she was in the hotel at which he had stayed in Amman, looking at a bag of his belongings awaiting return to his parents.

Undeterred, Garthwaite pressed on, arriving outside the Bulletin's communal house in Baghdad after an "epic" 10-hour journey. At that moment, "a car full of guys wearing balaclavas goes past and shoots the guy who was walking down the road in front of us. He had been involved in the booze industry".

The incident "freaked me out", she admits, but not enough to send her home. And worse was to come as she began "learning on the job, fast". Still unsure whether she wanted to be a writer or a photographer, "my first photography experience was going under an underpass and seeing an armoured coalition vehicle shot up in front of me, probably six car-lengths away". She took pictures of the bodies being taken out and sold them to Reuters.

Close shaves became a fact of life. As well as working for the short-lived Bulletin - launched in June 2003, it had expired by September - after a month Garthwaite moved to Basra, where she was the only permanently based western journalist. Freelance work flowed in, for The Times and the BBC, among others, and, for the local rate of $10 (Dh36) a day, she became the Reuters stringer.

It was there that the network of contacts she had built up paid off. It helped her to uncover the murder of Baha Mousa, a 26-year-old Iraqi hotel receptionist beaten to death while in British military custody in Basra in September 2003. The killing led to a public inquiry, which opened in the UK in 2008 and has yet to deliver its final report, though in July 2008 the British ministry of defence apologised to Mousa's family and nine other men who were mistreated, and paid a total of £2.83m (Dh17m) in damages.

Garthwaite admits she felt conflicted as she uncovered the story and "definitely sat on it for a few more days than I needed to" before she took it to Reuters.

She was "upset that this was the same army that I'd been in, obviously. It took me about 10 days to pin it down. I went running all over the south of Iraq to meet people who were witnesses, to get the correct story. I wanted to have as much proof as possible."

In the end, she felt the story made everything she had gone through worthwhile. "That was why I was there. I felt there were huge injustices going on every day and that was my job, to try to find them and tell them to the world."

Suffering from a bad back - the by-product of a car crash when she was younger - she finally left Basra after six months, in pain and prostrate in the back of a car for the long haul back to Jordan. Back home, "I couldn't get a job with Reuters ... they thought I was too much of a risk-taker, even though I'd been writing copy eight times a day for them in Basra."

Eventually, in 2004, she landed an internship at the BBC, which she traded up into a job as a researcher and sometime producer before leaving to join Al Jazeera in Doha in 2006.

What advice would she give to a daughter of her own, hoping to follow in her footsteps? She pauses, knowing her own days of adventure are far from over. "Maybe I'm not grown up enough to answer that question, but I think I would let her make her own decision. I believe you've got to let people learn in whatever way they want to."

How To Avoid Being Killed in a War Zone is published by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing.