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A new life among all the lives lost

There was some very bad news here today. Nine U.S. soldiers were killed by roadside bombs in the past two days. And some 90 Iraqi pilgrims were killed in two suicide attacks in Hillah, and more than 160 injured. And that was only the biggest attack today... there were several attacks on groups of pilgrims, bombs exploding near them and gun attacks on groups of people who were underway on foot, and had walked many miles already, to a sacred festival in Karbala. There was an attack on a prison, and some 140 prisoners, many al-Qaida suspects, were released. The white board in our bureau is almost covered with the list of today's violent attacks all over the country.

But we also had some good news. One of our Iraqi producers had a new daughter, and both his wife and baby are well. His immediate worry is trying to resist the pressure from both sides of the family, Kurdish and Arab, to force their choice of a name on him and his wife. And, in the longer term, he worries about how to keep his young family safe. But for now, the good news of a newborn healthy baby brought a smile to everyone's face here.

Photo caption: The whiteboard in the NBC News Baghdad bureau. Photo by NBC's Paul Stimpson.

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Talking with the troops

Among the elements in the broadcast tonight from Iraq will be conversations Brian had today with U.S. troops based at Camp Victory. We have a :40 snippet for you in advance of the broadcast and hope to have extended versions later tonight.

Click here or on the image to watch.

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Meanwhile back in the Baghdad bureau

With Brian and Richard and the Nightly News team in Baghdad, but at a different location, the bureau is getting a little breathing space to do some planning ahead and do necessary chores. This morning Tom Aspell and I had to go into the Green Zone (we live in what's called the Red Zone, which is anywhere outside the Green Zone in Central Baghdad) to get our press credentials renewed. Unlike Brian and his team, who had their credentials delivered to Camp Victory, we had to make a personal appearance. No exceptions for us, who regularly work here. Every journalist must be finger-printed (all 10 fingers) and iris screened, and sign and initial every paragraph on a three-page form that gives you all the do's and don'ts of covering the military side of the story and makes you fully responsible for putting yourself in harm's way. But it gave us a chance to walk outside and, after an incident-free ride into the Green Zone, the short walk to the credentialing center in the warm sunshine felt pleasant and liberating. 

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Adventures in air travel

Because Gen. Ray Odierno is a 3-star, the No. 2 man in charge of this massive U.S. presence here in Iraq, he travels with a lot of security -- alongside him in the air and on the ground -- wherever he goes. When we learned that he was heading out today to inspect two U.S. outposts (to make up for a trip that weather canceled last week), we thought it represented the safest possible opportunity for us to get off to a fast start in our coverage and cover a lot of ground OUTSIDE the city limits of Baghdad.

You'll see the trip on tonight's broadcast. We met a lot of enormously capable commanders today -- which is almost always the case -- and they are hugely enthusiastic about the gains they've made in their specific slice of this conflict. It is very clear, in ways we will point out tonight, that the strategy here has undergone a profound change. Richard Engel also went out with U.S. forces today, to Sadr City -- and what he found meshes in many ways with what I saw to the West of here.

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A day at the palace

Hopes were not quite high, but confident, this morning that we'd be able to join Brian on his trip to Al Anbar. Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, who is in command of day-to-day operations in Iraq, invited Brian for a "battlefield tour" west of Baghdad, where Sunni insurgents have taken their strongest stand. Al Anbar province is where you find the Iraqi towns like Ramadi and Fallujah that have become household names in America because of the phenomenal violence committed there in the past five years. Getting there meant piling into precious seats available in the small fleet of helos Gen. Odierno deploys to get him around Iraq. After Brian, NBC cameraman Craig White, and sound tech Bob Lapp hopped on board, there was no room for me and Brian's producer Subrata De. Literally left in the dust of Odierno's Black Hawks, Subrata and I did what any other self-respecting journalists abandoned at Baghdad's Camp Victory would do: take a tour of one of Saddam Hussein's mega-palaces now occupied by U.S. and coalition forces.

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Monday's reporting 'mission'

Brian was on TODAY this morning for a brief chat with NBC's Ann Curry about today's coverage plans. Click here to watch it.

Cameraman Jeff Riggins also e-mailed these two photos as the team set out to do some reporting. They'll check in throughout the day with more photos and dispatches.

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Sunday video snippets

Brian and his team recorded some Web videos Sunday. For those of you who haven't seen them yet, here they are all in one place. I'll maintain a gallery of these videos throughout the week at Nightly.MSNBC.com as well.

VIDEO: Brian explains the evasive corkscrew maneuvers planes perform during final approach to Baghdad International.

VIDEO: After touchdown in Baghdad, Brian comments on the one-of-a-kind flight attendant greeting.

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Flying aboard 'Jessica'

Editor's note: Subrata wrote this at 6:40 a.m. Amman time as she, Brian and the crew were departing Jordan en route to Baghdad. I'll post some video snippets from the flight and the landing a little later tonight.

Our plane has a name.

We're boarding a Royal Jordanian flight for Baghdad, and there, near its nose, written in rather feminine script is the name, "Jessica." The only marking on an otherwise pristine plane.

The flight is full of seasoned Baghdad travelers: security contractors in their desert boots, Iraqi nationals with their worn faces, and embassy employees who are heading in for their next six week rotation. I'm pretty sure I'm one of the few on the plane who's never flown this deeply scarred route.

Our flight attendant, a South African woman, seems to sense this. Maybe it’s the way I'm straining to see out the window from my aisle seat that gives me away. She asks a lot of questions and tells me, "It's a very humbling experience going into Baghdad... Everyone there has suffered a personal loss. You have no idea."

Photo caption: 'Jessica,' the Royal Jordanian plane that safely carried Team Brian Williams to Baghdad. Photo by Subrata De.

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On the road

As Brian blogged early this morning, his team is safe in the Iraqi capital.

We just received this vlog that Brian recorded during the road trip from the airport to Camp Victory. Click here or on the image to watch.

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Broadcasting from Baghdad

For the past few days this bureau and the small NBC bureau in Amman have been a hive of activity -- moving producers and crews from London and the U.S. into Baghdad, with tons of equipment necessary to go live from a remote location. I had no hand in any of it, only having arrived this weekend for a six-week period as bureau chief here. I flew in Friday night from London, after a brief vacation in Holland, where I was visiting my 92-year-old mother. She does not know I'm in Iraq. I've never told her, but call regularly from here, reporting on the weather in London after checking the Internet.

No longer was I spending a day relaxing in Amman after arriving at 05:30 on Saturday, I had to fly straight through to Baghdad. Several other producers and crews had arrived last Thursday. Sunday's flight would have most of the Nightly team, including Brian Williams and Gen. Wayne Downing. Plus 40-50 cases of gear, the last lot of which gave our Amman bureau chief headaches trying to book space on the few flights there are, and had our local staff here driving up and down the airport road as if they were cruising down State Street. We also moved our satellite uplink truck to Camp Victory. It's called OddJob, because it's the oddest looking old pickup with a satellite dish, nothing like the state of the art sat trucks your local TV station operates.

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