FROM the dark days of 9/11 and the frontlines of Afghanistan and Iraq to the overthrow of a Haitian president, Sunday Herald writers and photographers were there when it mattered. Foreign Editor David Pratt looks back over a remarkable past and forward to the continuation of a great tradition of global reporting

IF one moment defines those times for me, then it was that Tuesday afternoon 17 years ago. The date was September 11, 2001, and I had only come into the Sunday Herald office at the start of the working week to pick up a book before heading to the airport to begin a journey to Israel.

Clustered around the news desk television set, I came across most of my colleagues. On the screen in a live broadcast the first of the Twin Towers was already burning from the impact of the first fuel-laden airliner.

Only when the second plane slammed into the remaining tower did the silence of my colleagues break, replaced by gasps and cries from those standing around.

My world, our world, changed at the moment 17 years ago. The sight of that second plane meant this was no accident, but an act of terrorism.

Though they were already familiar to me, up until that moment Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were far from being the infamous household names they would soon become.

That afternoon, watching those momentous and tragic events unfolding before our eyes, I sensed, as Sunday Herald foreign editor, that what we were seeing would probably define for years to come many of the stories we would subsequently cover. It laid down a challenge too for the newspaper’s reputation in terms of its international coverage.

It had been some years earlier that I had found myself lured from my role as a correspondent with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), in the Bosnia-Herzegovina capital Sarajevo, to the Sunday Herald foreign desk.

The man responsible for my move was none other than the Sunday Herald’s visionary and idiosyncratic founding editor, Andrew Jaspan.

It was to be the start of a very special relationship with a remarkable newspaper aptly described by former colleague Pat Kane recently as one that, “felt itself to be in the world, as much as in Scotland”.

That worldliness was very much the Jaspan ethos. That, along with hard work, passion and that innate editorial ability he had for bringing together characters and talents just right for the tasks at hand, whether they be writers, designers, photographers and editors.

Among them was Trevor Royle, my long-time friend and colleague on the foreign desk and a man who was the very definition of the word polymath. Whether it was geopolitics, military and defence affairs, India, cricket, the history of Native Americans, Royle’s intellectual “hinterland” (a German word and language he spoke fluently) seemed boundless.

For both he and myself the events of that Tuesday afternoon now known simply as 9/11 effectively mapped out much of the pivotal foreign stories that we would find ourselves having to address in the years ahead.

The US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the so-called "war on terror", and later the Arab Spring uprisings, would all absorb so much of the Sunday Herald’s future foreign coverage.

That our journalism during the conflict in Iraq attracted a massive online audience from the US was testimony to what was seen as eyewitness reporting, analysis and investigative work that embraced a healthy scepticism of the military campaign in which the UK itself had also become embroiled.

It was colleague Neil Mackay’s investigative study especially into the neo-conservative think tank the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and its role underpinning the motives for going to war in Iraq, that captured American interest in the Sunday Herald’s coverage of the conflict.

It would be no exaggeration to say that the paper’s fastidious focus on the Iraq war at every level drew many US readers looking for an alternative to what some perceived as the one dimensional or partisan coverage of their own press.

For myself, meanwhile, it meant being on the road endlessly on the Sunday Herald’s behalf.

Shortly after 9/11, I found myself on my way to Pakistan and Afghanistan as it slowly became clear that bin Laden and al-Qaeda were what US President George W Bush described as the “prime suspects” behind this attack that had taken almost 3,000 lives.

In the Pakistan frontier town of Peshawar that borders Afghanistan, those Pakistanis and Afghans who inhabited its smoggy, humid streets and neighbourhoods were as courteous and polite as I remembered them to be from previous visits during the years of the Soviet War in Afghanistan.

Some things, however, had changed. Street vendors now sold books on the Taliban, maps of Afghanistan and T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Jihad is the way”.

One morning, while waiting at Peshawar airport, a Pakistani man ushered two toddler boys towards me.

“I would like you to meet my two sons, this is Osama and this one Saddam,” the father announced, touching each of the boys on the head in turn.

At first I thought it was a joke. The father’s way of saying to a rarely-seen Westerner at that time, do these boys really look like terrorists or a threat to the world? But there was no humour in the man’s voice or eyes, and just as quickly as he had introduced the boys, he quickly led them away. Looking back, I realise now that for many people, not just in this part of the world but much further afield, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had become heroes. Men who were prepared to take the fight to the United States and the West.

Less and less of my time was now spent in the Sunday Herald office and more in the field. In both Afghanistan and Iraq in the years that followed, communication with the Glasgow office or filing stories by satellite phone was often fraught. I had the confidence though of knowing the paper’s talented and immensely hardworking sub-editors and production staff would always give the material a "good show".

Often such communications with the office would take on a rather surreal quality. Like the time when, after sitting outside a hut in remotest northern Afghanistan typing my copy in night-time sub-zero temperatures on a laptop powered by a generator, I called the desk on the sat phone to ensure my copy had "dropped" safely. Passed over to editor Andrew Jaspan who wanted to speak to me, I felt my heart sink at the thought the copy was not what he was looking for.

“It’s great, no problem, terrific,” he assured me to my relief, before posing the question that had been on his mind all along. “You know those hats the Afghans wear,” he asked. “What do they call them?’

I duly told him they were known locally as a "Pakol" to which he replied “that’s what I wanted to know” before instantly hanging up leaving me totally perplexed.

Later I found out he was determined to auction off my Afghan hat to readers for charity on my return to Scotland. From that day on throughout the duration of my time in Afghanistan, my picture byline always had me kitted out in my Pakol as a reminder to readers of the "marvellous" item on offer.

It was small eccentric gestures like this, or ordering Peshawari naan and curry for all in the office on a Saturday night before deadline while these momentous events were unfolding in Afghanistan, that made the Sunday Herald such a special working environment.

It was an atmosphere both quixotic and utterly professional at one and the same time. A place where a close camaraderie and esprit de corps was fostered among a staff who spent as much time together socialising as they did working alongside each other in the newsroom.

From a foreign news coverage perspective this was a newspaper that punched way above its weight. Readers recognised its global ambition and audacity and responded in kind to its internationalist outlook, sending the circulation soaring for many years at the paper’s performing height.

There was almost never a major foreign story or location from where we were unable either to have myself reporting or another stringer covering for us on the ground. Along with photographer colleagues I reported for the Sunday Herald from Afghanistan to Africa. Quality photojournalism and its presentation was another of the paper’s great strengths.

With photographer Kirsty Anderson we found ourselves caught up in tribal disputes in remotest Afghanistan, while with Colin Mearns we were embedded with 45 Commando Royal Marines in the country’s hostile Helmand Valley.

With Colin Templeton we told the stories of the poorest in the urban slums of Nairobi. With Stewart Attwood, I travelled in conflict-wracked Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and flew into Liberia’s civil war on one of the first aid flights while boy soldiers and warring militiamen roamed the streets.

Back in 2004, Attwood and I were in Haiti when president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted. The capital Port au Prince was a volatile and sinister place then. I still recall one day when in a mad terrifying rush of rocks, bullets and machete-wielding maniacs I saw Attwood go down after being hit by a rock during vicious street clashes.

With blood from a nasty head wound running down his neck and shirt, he struggled to get to his feet and as a gunshot rang out, the bullet instantly smashed into a stationary car close by.

Both of us were lucky to escape with our lives that day, but it was typical of the Sunday Herald that it was on the scene reporting on Aristide’s last days before many much larger news organisations with deeper pockets had even arrived. At home, our Sunday Herald colleagues gave our Haitian reportage front-page billing.

Earthquakes, famines, the 2004 Tsunami, US elections, the paper I’m proud to say had it own ringside seat to some of these biggest news stories of recent decades.

Subsequent editors, Richard Walker and Neil Mackay, continued that Sunday Herald commitment to international coverage and foreign reporting with conviction.

In the midst of all these tumultuous and often painful events, however, the paper never lost its sense of fun or ability to take a look at things with a fresh eye.

“It’s right up your street, just like a war zone,” Andrew Jaspan told me one day in the office. Having survived the mountains of Afghanistan, and the mean streets of Mogadishu and Ramallah, some bright spark had persuaded him that it was high time I filed a dispatch from the frontline of music festival T in the Park.

Maybe it won’t be so bad, I told myself, Balado sounds almost like some overseas location even if it is in Kinross. Indeed, within minutes of arriving at the festival site, I was beginning to feel at home. The muddy fields, the tent cities like refugee camps, the long queues for food and drink, the unsanitary conditions and the clatter of a helicopter overhead.

The spoof piece as "foreign editor" I wrote that day went down a storm, as did a similar one many years later when as "foreign editor" I was instructed by editor Richard Walker to cover World War Z. My Glasgow flat, you see, had the misfortune of being located at the heart of the recreated American streets for the apocalyptic movie about Zombie wars starring Brad Pitt, and as a seasoned war correspondent it was only right that I should be deployed to report on it.

Yes, the Sunday Herald was a blast in so many ways. As its foreign editor I’ll always regard it a privilege to have been at the heart of its international coverage.

Right now the world is no less a dramatic or dangerous a place as it was back in those days following on from 9/11. The new Herald on Sunday launching next weekend will be picking up where the great days of the Sunday Herald left off.

Personally, I’m looking forward to continuing to bring to the paper the same quality foreign coverage.