Michael Ware (born 25 March 1969) is an Australian journalist formerly working in CNN and was for several years based in their Baghdad bureau. He joined CNN in May 2006, after five years with sister publication, Time. His last on-air appearance for the network was in December 2009. He was one of the few mainstream reporters to live in Iraq near-continuously, since before the American invasion and gained early acclaim due to his willingness to establish contacts with the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Iraqi insurgency. He reported on the severity of the growing opposition Western coalition forces faced in mid-2003, and his contacts have provided him with controversial videotapes of attacks on coalition forces, including the murder of four Blackwater contractors. Ware has been embedded with American and British military forces on numerous occasions, and the coalition forces have been the focus of many of his reports describing conditions in Iraq. As of 2015 he is working on a book about the Iraq War, titled Between Me and the Dead. The title comes from a conversation he had with a friend in the Marines; when asked how he deals with civilians and how many people he's killed, the Marine replied, "That's between me and the dead." Life and career Michael Ware is a native of Brisbane (Queensland), Australia. He is a graduate of Brisbane Grammar School, and he earned a Bachelor of Laws and a degree in Political Science from the University of Queensland. He spent a year as Associate to then-President of the Supreme Court of Queensland Tony Fitzgerald before moving into journalism. He worked for The Courier-Mail in Brisbane (1995–2000) and gained local notice after a series of articles led to a formal investigation into police handling (or lack thereof) of a paedophile ring. Ware declined to name sources who had provided him with internal police documents in the matter. His earliest assignments for Time magazine took him to East Timor in 2000; and, in December 2001, he went into Afghanistan to cover the U.S. search for al-Qaeda. As preparations for the invasion of Iraq began in early 2003, Ware relocated to the Kurdistan area. Although he has gone into battles embedded with U.S. forces, he also travelled to insurgent camps and reported on their perspective of the war. His Time bylines include reports from Kabul, Kandahar, Fallujah, Tikrit, Tal Afar, Mosul, Samarra, Ramadi, and Baghdad. In September