Former Los Angeles Times reporter Dexter Filkins writes from the NYT’s Baghdad bureau about what it’s like to work in Iraq these days.

Here at The New York Times, where we have spared no expense to protect ourselves, the catalogue of hits and near–misses is long enough to chill the hardiest war correspondent: we have been shot at, kidnapped, blindfolded, held at knifepoint, held at gunpoint, detained, threatened, beaten and chased. One of our correspondents was driven blindfolded to the outskirts of a town in the dead of night by armed men who told him to get out of the car. Another time, a crowd began throwing bricks, and one of our photographers, who was standing next to me, was struck in the head and required stitches.

And that’s just the intentional acts. On any given day here, car bombs explode, gun battles break out and mortar shells fall short, none of them exactly aimed at us, if they are aimed at anyone at all. In the writing of this essay, a three–hour affair, two rockets and three mortar shells have landed close enough to shake the walls of our house. The door to my balcony opens onto an Iraqi social club, and the roar from the blasts set the Iraqis into a panic, their screams audible above the Arabic music wafting from the speakers.

And lower in his essay:

The real consequence of the mayhem here is that we reporters can no longer do our jobs in the way we hope to. Reporters are nothing more than watchers and listeners, and if we can’t leave the house, the picture from Iraq, even with the help of fearless Iraqi stringers, almost inevitably will be blurry and incomplete.

Some of my colleagues have given up. Most of the European reporters, like the French and Italians and Germans, are gone. And there are far fewer American reporters here than was the case just a few months ago. This is usually not clear until someone important holds a press conference, and you look around the auditorium, as I did the other day, and realize that there are far fewer Western reporters here than there used to be.