Pakistan's War: Rageh Omaar On the Frontline

As the fallout from November’s bloody siege in Mumbai focuses the world’s attention on Pakistan, Al Jazeera’s new flagship documentary series Pakistan’s War investigates Pakistan’s ability to control militants inside its own borders. This evening we will preview the second episode of this two-part series, where Rageh Omaar joins the Pakistan army in their full-scale military offensive on the frontier with Afghanistan.

As the fallout from November’s bloody siege in Mumbai focuses the world’s attention on Pakistan, Al Jazeera’s new flagship documentary series Pakistan’s War investigates Pakistan’s ability to control militants inside its own borders. This evening we will preview the second episode of this two-part series, where Rageh Omaar joins the Pakistan army in their full-scale military offensive on the frontier with Afghanistan.

He follows infantry from house to house in their advance on the Taliban stronghold of Loe Sam. He is forced to retreat when the army unit that he is filming comes under fire from Taliban fighters.

Rageh Omaar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1967, and moved to Britain as a child, attending school in Cheltenham and gaining an Honours degree in Modern History from Oxford University in 1990. He began his journalistic career as a trainee at The Voice newspaper in Brixton before moving to Ethiopia in 1991 where he was a freelance reporter for the BBC World Service. He went on to work for the BBC as Developing World Correspondent, and Africa Correspondent. His BBC reports from Baghdad during the 2003 Iraq war made him a household name. (BBC news bulletins were syndicated across the US, where the Washington Post labelled him the 'Scud Stud'.) Rageh Omaar now presents the documentary series Witness for Al Jazeera International. He has written a biography Only Half of Me: Being a Muslim in Britain and told the human story of the Battle for Iraq in his book Revolution Day

Farah Durrani spent 20 years in BBC Television as an award winning producer/director and executive producer in Current Affairs and factual programmes. Her films have won the RTS and Grierson awards for the best documentary as well as BAFTA and Emmy nominations. In 1998 she was named Sky Journalist of Year for Women in Film and Television. She is a director of the independent producer, Midwinter Productions.
Farah helped launch the BBCTV’s award winning foreign affairs strand Correspondent and made documentaries from all over the world, including Bosnia, Kashmir, China and Afghanistan. She also produced the landmark four part series on the Roman Catholic Church, Absolute Truth and The Election of a Pope – White Smoke.
She has extensive experience of filming in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Last year she secured access to the women’s madrassa attached to the radical Red Mosque. Her film for Al Jazeera English on the siege of the Red Mosque in 2007, presented by Rageh Omaar, was nominated for an International Emmy this year. The events at the Red Mosque are the starting point for the two films Pakistan’s War which are the subject of the Frontline Club Q&A on 6 January.

Reporter: Rageh Omaar
Producer/Director: Farah Durrani

Length: 50 mins
Midwinter Productions for al Jazeera
www.aljazeera.net

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