A CENTCOM STAR.(Al Jazeera's coverage of Iraq War)

Photographs of Baghdad the day the American troops took control of the city

A portfolio of photographs of the fight for the Iraqi capital

Photographs of Baghdad taken before the coalition troops entered the city

An archive of NewYorker.com's coverage of the war in Iraq

Last week, when Tariq Ayoub, an Al Jazeera correspondent, was killed by an American air strike on the Arabic satellite channel's Baghdad offices, military officials at Central Command in Doha, Qatar, hastily drew up a news release. "According to commanders on the ground,"the statement read, "Coalition forces came under significant enemy fire from the building where the Al Jazeera journalists were working and, consistent with the inherent right of self-defense, Coalition forces returned fire."

Before releasing the statement to the media, a centcom representative visited Al Jazeera's cubicle in the Coalition Media Center to run it by Omar al-Issawi, a reporter and producer at the network. Al-Issawi, who was a friend of Ayoub, took a quick look at the release and was incensed. "This is not acceptable,"he told the centcom representative. "I guarantee you there was no fire coming from our building."Al Jazeera's offices, he noted later, were housed in a clearly marked two-story villa whose precise coordinates had been provided to the Pentagon to avoid just such a tragedy. Al-Issawi was not suggesting, as many observers in the Middle East were, that the armed forces had deliberately targeted the network (although he did find it curious that American forces had also fired on the offices of Abu Dhabi Television that day, and that they'd bombed an Al Jazeera office in Afghanistan in November, 2001). "Maybe it was a mistake,"he said. "They should have come out and admitted it and said they were sorry. This was just not on.”

Officials at centcom didn't change their statement, but the fact that they even bothered to show it to al-Issawi demonstrates how far Al Jazeera has come in gaining a measure of respect in the eyes of the U.S. military. At the war's outset, Al Jazeera was widely considered a rogue state among journalistic enterprises. Its decision to broadcast lurid footage of captured and apparently executed American soldiers was particularly objectionable. At centcom, Lieutenant General John Abizaid took the opportunity, during a daily briefing, to decry the "disgusting"images, scolding al-Issawi: "I regard the showing of those pictures as absolutely unacceptable."Afterward, al-Issawi was philosophical. "Look, the General's reaction was perfectly understandable,"he said. "Those were his boys. As a reporter for Al Jazeera, I have been harassed and threatened by intelligence agencies. This was pretty mild, actually.”