As for Abu Reeta and his sister, they barely made it out. News reports said that 14 journalists had been taken into custody, when in fact it was only 12 – Abu Reeta and his sister had escaped. Other news reports said that Abu Reeta was dead.
On the day after the night raid on Mosul’s media, he received a phone call from a friend who asked him how to get to where he was. “It was then that I realized my friend was speaking under duress – he may have had a gun pointed at him,” Abu Reeta speculates.
However the most dangerous thing that happened to him occurred just on the outskirts of Mosul, as he was trying to get onto the road towards Baghdad.
“I got to the main checkpoint and started to get really scared,” Abu Reeta says. “I knew that at this checkpoint the IS fighters use a laptop to check for the names of wanted persons. I expected my name to be on their lists. However I was really lucky,” he says. “They were too busy to check all the names on the computer and I managed to slip through. As soon as I was through there, I knew I’d survived,” says the young man who managed to get to the comparative safety of the Iraqi Kurdish city of Dohuk, with the help of local friends.
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