Undaunted, a team from French TV and Portuguese journalists, along with Arab News, decided to get in our own way — avoiding checkpoints.

We met at 3 a.m. Friday morning and drove from Kuwait City to Abdali at the Iraqi border, using the back roads, our GPS and 4WD. This is where all “unembedded” journalists are normally turned back when they try to enter Kuwait.

After getting some good directions, we avoided the checkpoint and spent all day driving 398 km, driving between other checkpoints and following directions given to us by Kuwaiti border police, US and British troops.

Each checkpoint gave different instructions on the best way to enter Iraq. We bent the truth a little, claiming that we had valid permits, playing soldiers off one another. At about 10 a.m. we were stopped by the same soldiers who, hours earlier, had fired on a French journalist, as reported by Arab News yesterday.

By 7 p.m. we were exhausted and had accepted that we were unlikely to find a way of getting into Iraq. We decided to bed down at a rest stop in Abdali and come up with a strategy for the following day.

We were ready to go by 6 a.m. the following morning. The plan was to get past checkpoints we were told were unmanned in the early hours. Unfortunately, the information we had been given was incorrect. Every checkpoint was manned and the Kuwaitis warned us that, in light of the incident involving the French journalist, they now had orders to shoot at anyone violating the checkpoint.

We drove between the Safwan and Umm Qasr checkpoint for two hours, looking for a break in the fence in the hope that there would be one. But there wasn’t. Along the Iraqi border runs a high voltage electrified fence and an anti-tank wall. We decided to drive along the anti-tank wall and look for a point where it was low enough for us to cross using the 4WDs. But we couldn’t find one. So we got out a shovel out of sight of the Kuwaiti border control and started digging. After half an hour, we managed to create for ourselves a break in the wall low enough to drive over.

Some of our cars made it after a few attempts but others got stuck. We attached towlines to them and managed to drag them over the wall. At one point, an American Shinook helicopter hovered 60 feet overhead, and we waved at it. The pilot waved back, and then went on his way.

With one anti-tank wall behind us, we drove through the Kuwait desert, avoiding all of the patrols. We continued for 12 km along the electrified fence and the Kuwaiti tanks located every kilometer or so along the wall. After driving past 10 of them, we approached one of them in the hope that we would meet some high-ranking Kuwaiti official. It was on the Iraqi side of the border. The soldier gave us directions on how to breach the next anti-tank wall and how to avoid the ditch. We followed those directions and found a way to breach the wall. We had been told that most of the Iraqi DMZ was riddled with mines.

We drove along the sandy track, which at times seemed too challenging even for a 4WD. But we were afraid to stray off the track where mines could be located. A few kilometers later, we saw in the distance some bodies pop out of nowhere. They ran around for a moment and disappeared. We knew they were either British or American, and we hoped they knew we were not Iraqis. We slowed down and took the hindmost positions in the convoy, the French and others between the rifles and us. As the French approached the embankment we saw six hands sticking out of the cars as soldiers carrying M16s approached them.

After a few seconds of harsh military instructions and our press passes being frantically waved, the situation calmed and the machine guns were lowered. The French approached the convoy and we observed the whole encounter from what we considered a safe distance. After what could have been a tragic misunderstanding, we were all too happy to be on our way and leave the American encampment behind us. We came across another encampment, which had been notified about our expected arrival by the previous one.