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Phillip Robertson

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Since 2001, Phillip Robertson has been covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the American news and culture website, Salon.com. He has also reported for TIME magazine, BBC World Service Radio, National Public Radio in the United States and the Christian Science Monitor. Over the past five years, he has published more than sixty feature articles in Salon, using first person narrative to communicate the effects of conflict on ordinary people. In 2003, Robertson was a finalist for the USC/Annenberg award for online journalism in the breaking news category.

During the August, 2004, siege of Najaf, he collaborated with photojournalist Thorne Anderson to document the devastating course of the war in the Shia holy city. After crossing through the US cordon and Mahdi Army forward positions on foot, Anderson and Robertson remained in the Shrine of Imam Ali for three days, interviewing and photographing the Mahdi Army fighters as their lines collapsed under the American offensive. In 2005, Robertson returned to Iraq and published "The Killer and the Victim," an investigation into the killing of an Iraqi journalist by a US sniper, a story which received acclaim and was followed by National Public Radio in the US. After returning to Iraq in 2006-7, he wrote about the accelerating sectarian conflict in Iraq and the evolution of Shiite death squads in Baghdad. Robertsons story, "In the Mosque of Imam Ali" was chosen by David Foster Wallace to appear in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2007.