User:AlinaGracheva

Alina Gracheva

A news camerawoman for Aljazeera English. I live in London, Islington and have an 11-year-old son Charlie.

I was born in Moldova, in what was then the Soviet Union. In my own youth I experienced a lot of the restlessness and the hunger for change that I now get to see among people in the Middle East. I started my career as a newspaper journalist in Moscow, and my first big story was the war in Chechnya in the mid 1990s. Russian troops laid waste to Grozny in the cold winter of 1994-95. I saw the story from both sides - the scared teenage Russian soldiers, the wild Chechen fighters in their mountain hideouts - but most of all I wanted to tell the stories of the ordinary people caught in between. Families huddled with their children in basements while the bombs exploded over head. Russian mothers who crossed the frontline in search of their missing soldier sons.

I joined television for an agency that specialised in "bang bang" pictures. Basically getting to the world's hot spots and getting pictures out for broadcasters as quickly as possible. After a couple of years in Chechnya and Georgia, they put me in charge of east africa, where I covered the civil war in zaire and other intense and dangerous stories. It was high intensity work, we got by on adrenaline and beer and the thrill of producing powerful images that could spade the world to do something about some of the worst atrocities on the planet. A few of my friends got burnt out. A couple of them got killed.

I moved back to Moscow in 1998 and joined CNN. There, my job was no longer just about getting the most exciting video, it was about telling a full story. I had the privilege of working with some of the most accomplished journalists in television. It was a slightly slower pace, and I could focus more on my family, but it still meant regular work in the field. When I was five months pregnant, I was back in Chechnya. When my son was 18 months old, I was in Afghanistan covering the fall of the Taliban. I moved to London when he was two, and by the time he was three I was covering the invasion of Iraq.

The story that probably affected me the most was back in Russia a year later, when chechen fighters captured a primary school on the first day of classes and held the children hostage. Hundreds of children died in a horrific siege. The correspondent and I met a woman who was told she could bring her infant son out but had to leave her daughter behind. The daughter was killed. I got to know her quite well, and her story just devastated me. We were nominated for an Emmy award for that story, and it was a bizarre experience sitting at an awards dinner in Manhattan in a fancy dress, surrounded by comfortable big shots, all because of this unspeakable tragedy. When word came out that al jazeera was launching a new channel in English, a lot of people in our industry were wary of a channel with an Arabic name and a headquarters in the middle east. But I felt like CNN was heading a more commercial direction, less interested in the kind of stories that I liked to cover. Jazeera was hiring many of the best people in the business, and buying the best equipment. It was clear we had a chance to start something truly amazing, and I decided I wanted to be part of it.