Journalists worked hard until the end

The goal of a journalist is to seek the truth and report it. For some journalists, fulfilling that mission meant making the ultimate sacrifice.\nRecently, four foreign journalists were killed in pursuit of the truth. \n Maria Grazia Cutuli, Harry Burton, Azizullah Haidari and Julio Fuentes were stopped, dragged out of their van, and shot. Two Afghan drivers and one translator were able to escape and warn the eight to 13 other vehicles full of journalists in the convoy of media vans behind them.\n According to CNN.com, seven journalists have been killed since the beginning of the war. Journalists. Not soldiers, not Taliban, not Afghan citizens (who are equally innocent), not the northern alliance. The people who are trying to put the world at ease by bringing them information were put to death. These people were just trying to do their jobs. They were not hurting anyone. Just trying to shed some light on this new conflict.\n Harry Burton, 33, came from West Hobart in Australia. According to theage.com, he began his career as a television cameraman for Reuters just three years ago. Asia Television news editor Victor Antonie in an article in The Mercury said Burton had found an abandoned al-Qaeda base camp and filmed Osama Bin Laden's house.\n"He was one of our rising stars ... he loved what he did, and he had ability matched with passion," Antoine said in the article.\nHe is survived by his father, four brothers and three sisters.\nAzizullah Haidari was an Afghan-born photographer that had traveled through Afghanistan many times, according to The Guardian. He has documented the people and leaders of the region, as well as the aftermath of the earthquake in 1998.\nJulio Fuentes, 42, was a foreign correspondent for the Spanish daily El Mundo newspaper. Fuentes began his career as a reporter for the Madrid daily Cambio in 1980 at the age of 21. According to CNN, he covered civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua before working also in Chechnya, Rome and Moscow. \nDeputy editor Victor de la Serna said Fuentes then went on to cover most of the major conflicts in the world for the daily El Mundo, such as the last of the wars in Central America, the Panama invasion, Kuwait and the Gulf War and the Balkans.\nMaria Grazia Cutuli,39, was a foreign correspondent for the Corriere della Sera, a newspaper in Milan, Italy. \nAccording to the article, Cutuli had only recently entered Afghan territory, but had been reporting in Islamabad, Pakistan, since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. She had been covering the Middle East from Jerusalem before that. \n"She still represented a spirit of journalism in which we must believe," special correspondent Antonio Ferrari told CNN. \nThe IDS staff celebrates the bravery of these journalists and extends our sympathies to their families.\n