News Xchange: Journalists picking up guns

By Jemima Kiss, Guardian

If there's a line that embedded journalists cannot cross, Dutch documentary maker Victor Franka has crossed it - picking up a gun and firing back alongside Dutch troops when ambushed by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. He described how he had been "eating, sleeping, pissing and shitting five metres" with these troops for five weeks, part of two-and-a-half years developing his film. "I trusted them and they trusted me," he said. When his camera battery ran out, he'd lost his film camera and more than 100 Taliban fighters began shooting at the group, he picked up the gun of a Dutch soldier and started shooting back.

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