The first war correspondent I ever met was a conflict-jonesing South African. It was the final month of my journalism course and we were given an hour with the mad dog from Mzansi. He had the complexion of an overripe plum: a lattice of ruptured veins sprawled across his cheeks. His nose was swollen and knotted. He spoke about war and death with an unmistakable desire to provoke, recounting stories of severed limbs, bullets piercing through eyeballs and child soldiers wielding machetes.
When an earnest classmate solemnly asked how he had maintained his mental health after three decades reporting from war zones, he replied, deadpan: “I take a lot of drugs and drink a lot of alcohol.” (I believed him.) Then, prompted by a wide-eyed student to discuss the role of women reporting from conflict zones, he offered an egalitarian summary: “In war, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman,” he spat. “Some of the women I’ve known in war have been bitches, and some of them have been tough legends.”
This binary – bitch or legend – sits uneasily alongside the career of Sally Hayden. The Orwell Prize-winning reporter has spent the past 12 years kicking dirt in the world’s most volatile regions. Her first assignment in 2014 at the age of just 24 took her to Rwanda to mark the 20th anniversary of the genocide. Since then, she has written from Sudan, Ethiopia, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Iraq, among other places. Her latest book, This Is Also a Love Story, distils more than a decade of this reporting into a vivid collection of dispatches from nine countries. It moves from the aftermath of air raids to public executions, capturing both the banality and the extremity of life lived under and after war, and rendering it disarmingly familiar.
When Hayden arrives in a war-stricken region, she is looking not for platoons but for people. This is not Tim O’Brien on the Song Tra Bong river, nor George Orwell in Catalonia. Hayden is attempting to “search for good in a divided world”. This Is Also a Love Story is more reminiscent of Martha Gellhorn staring at the skeletons littering Dachau in May 1945 – a reporter less interested in the front lines than catching the afterbirth of conflict: what remains of a functioning society, and what does not. “When faced with abuse and barbarity, love feels like a form of resistance. Its existence can offer hope and inspiration, something to fight for and a goodness to hold on,” reads the prologue. The title (which, had Lara Marlowe not taken it in 2021, might otherwise have been “Love in a Time of War”) should not lead any reader to assume this is a light-hearted book about moving on. It is, instead, a book about carrying on in the most baleful of circumstances.
In the garrison town of Gwoza, northern Nigeria, Hayden meets Zainabeau Hamayahi three years after Boko Haram, the jihadist militant group, descended on her home town of Madagali. They slit her husband’s throat, along with hundreds of other men murdered on the same day in December 2014. Many of her neighbours were killed as they tried to flee. Next, they came to take her 12-year-old daughter Hassana.
But Zainabeau had spent the days before the arrival of the militants digging in her back garden. Inside the dugout she placed jerry cans of water, leather bags to use as a toilet and Hassana. Her daughter would remain there for months while Zainabeau feigned insanity, smearing her body with faeces and rolling in rubbish. “Boko Haram decided they did not want a child from a madwoman,” Hayden writes. Zainabeau, unlike hundreds of other mothers, kept her children.
In this chapter focused on Nigeria, Hayden recounts, alongside Zainabeau’s story, that of Boko Haram’s young female captives turned suicide bombers, as well as the story of Mustafa, a seven-year-old boy delivered by his own father to the militant group with his mother and three siblings. She visits what Amnesty International has called the “place of death” – Borno State’s Giwa Barracks. “The day one batch of detainees were released from Giwa Barracks,” she writes, “a 70-year-old man died after scrawling his wife’s phone number into the sand on the floor of the transit centre. He did not live long enough to see her again.”
This Is Also a Love Story is teeming with anecdotes as heavy as these. In Rwanda, Hayden visits Kigali’s Genocide Memorial Centre, the final resting place of 250,000 victims. “Francine. Age: 12. Favourite food: egg and chips. Cause of death: hacked by machete,” reads one entry on the Wall of Names. “Fillette. Age: two. Cause of death: smashed against a wall,” reads another. She meets Zula Karuhimbi, who hid more than 100 people in her two-room house, including babies found on the backs of their dead mothers.
In Ukraine, she reports on wartime dating. In Syria, she meets relatives of the disappeared recalling their feverish searches through the Sednaya prison after the fall of Bashar al-Assad. In Mosul, once the “crown jewel” of Islamic State in Iraq, she details the covert ways young couples continued dating and secretly wed under a regime that banned unrelated men and women from interacting. In Japan’s Iwate Prefecture she meets Yuji Akagawa, who set up a postbox allowing survivors of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami to write to lost loved ones as a way of processing grief. (This chapter, while finely rendered, feels slightly out of step with the rest of the book, not least because of its placement at the end. The victims of this natural disaster are awkward bedfellows with bank robbers in Lebanon.)
What is remarkable is how these anecdotes manage to be comprehensive in their treatment of regional conflicts without smothering the reader with encyclopaedic accounts and a profusion of unfamiliar names, places and historical events.
But nowhere is the tenacity of Hayden’s reporting more evident than in northern Uganda, where she accompanies a trio of young men kidnapped by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army as children. Kony’s kuruts were forced to kill as part of their initiation, some instructed to rape, mutilate and murder members of their own families. As adults, many escaped and were eventually reunited with their parents, with varying degrees of harmony. Hayden’s account of these men’s reunions moves between ecstasy and rupture with careful restraint. This Is Also a Love Story is a remarkable exploration of the human capacity for forgiveness.
Any journalist who is either too stupid or too full of themselves to notice what is going on believes they could do a stint of war reporting. Most, fortunately, do not pursue it. In the simplest terms, it is lethally dangerous – and increasingly so. Last year, more journalists and media workers were killed than in any other year since the Committee to Protect Journalists began collecting such data more than three decades ago. But time at the front also appears to madden – to fragment and distort one’s perception of humanity. By their own accounts, it drove Malcolm Brabant into psychosis, turned Fergal Keane into a “shaking, sweating rock” at the sound of a backfiring car, and sent Dean Yates to a psychiatric facility. Some 29 per cent of war journalists have PTSD; one in five have major depression, according to the National Union of Journalists. The job turns many, like the mad dog from Mzansi, into brutes.
To live a life at war is one kind of reckoning; to spend it coaxing a Western readership into caring about rotten old war – the kuruts, the Islamic State brides, the 1,000 or 100,000 Sudanese victims – is another. The worst day in the country you report from may be the biggest of your career. Yet you will still fade to page 25 of the Times, a 200-word column about the child brides of Boko Haram shoved out by a photograph of the feuding Beckham family or the predictable resignation of a cabinet minister. It means birthdays spent under fire, relationships eroded by patchy phone signal, weddings and funerals missed.
In Hayden’s case, it meant missing the funeral of her grandmother; she died while Hayden was inside Sednaya prison on the day the Syrian regime fell. “A strange and potentially selfish aspect of being an international reporter is missing important moments with family and close friends,” she writes. “We customarily fail to offer support to those closest to us in their times of need, even as we dispense it to strangers.”
For a woman to choose this life – even though Hayden never concedes that this is both unorthodox and, undoubtedly, influential on her work – is a decision as honourable as it is precarious. “When you are huddled in a cold gully under shellfire with 12 men, fear is as great an equaliser as dirt,” the war correspondent Marie Colvin once said of her experience in conflicts. (Colvin was so tough that, after being struck by an RPG blast in Sri Lanka, in which she permanently lost the sight in her left eye, she still managed to file a 3,000-word dispatch from her hospital bed.)
And while one imagines cold gullies do distract from the gender pay gap, it would be negligent not to note that in the places from which Hayden and Colvin so often reported, sexual violence is routinely deployed as a tool of intimidation and control against women. Some female reporters wear swimming costumes beneath their clothing as an additional barrier in the event of assault. Social customs and requirements such as the hijab, niqab and burqa are realities they must navigate in ways their male colleagues rarely do.
What Hayden’s reporting – and, indeed, Colvin’s – offers is a level of attention to victims not always found in some of the classic works of war reportage, such as Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977) and Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War (2008). “My job is to bear witness. I have never been interested in knowing what make of plane had just bombed a village or whether the artillery that fired at it was 120mm or 155mm… What mattered was the people under fire and the people wielding the weapons,” Colvin once wrote. This mode of reporting focuses less on the spectacle of warfare and more on the idea of humanity. Barbarity is ever present: violence hums through This Is Also a Love Story, but it is the left-behinds, the long-forgotten, who accompany the reader through these conflicts. The result is a book that is all the more affecting for its restraint.
Is this a book written by a bitch? Could this terse, cathartic prose have only been written by a tough legend? I’m not sure Hayden would indulge such a garish binary. But in the face of war, she is knowing, tender. This is a story about love. And this is a story about women.
This Is Also a Love Story: Searching for Good in a Divided World
Sally Hayden
Fourth Estate, 304pp, £20
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[Further reading: Vasily Grossman, war correspondent]
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This article appears in the 12 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, A Very British Scandal
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