 Hello my name is Rosie and my idea is to take some of the amazing knowledge that there is out there on how to avoid being killed in a war zone which is perhaps very relevant in this region and at this time unfortunately and spread them. Now it might seem strange that I want to talk about this subject. I grew up a long long way from a war zone in fact between just two of the tube stops on the London map. For the first 18 years I didn't move out of that part of the world really. But then I joined the army I certainly didn't know that much more about the subject of how to avoid being killed in a war zone then either. I learned a lot a lot a lot I cried for six months I think for every night. I got to know a little bit better over time, saw a little bit of the world and then when I left the army I took up paper and a pen and I started to write about the world a little bit and took a few photographs here and there saw some places realized how little I knew really about the world and decided I wanted to be a journalist. My dad looks a bit like Saddam Hussein which is perhaps why I went to Iraq in 2000 one of the reasons I went to Iraq in 2003 just after the war to see what was really going on then. I found it an incredibly scary place I knew nothing and I had romantically gone there thinking it would be better if perhaps I just learned everything on the ground. I got myself in a lot of trouble and I got all of the people around me in a lot of trouble as well. In fact I nearly killed several of the people in this photograph just here. I was the youngest the eldest was 26 we started a newspaper and we thought we knew quite a lot about the world. We learned very quickly how how little we knew. So I we started talking to people by the time I got to Al Jazeera and I'd spoken to a lot of people in bars in tanks in dangerous places. I'd been working around the world. I knew a little bit more about how to survive in a dangerous place and the reason I knew a lot more was due to all of the amazing people that I met along the way. I've spent the last four years compiling a dossier of all of that knowledge because several of my friends have found themselves going off to places like Gaza. I mean recently last year I don't every single one of my friends was in dangerous places in Syria and Egypt on the front line there and unfortunately several of the people I know were actually killed during during the hideous events of last year especially in Libya. But over the last four years I compiled the dossier of all of the knowledge that I had come across and all the people that I'd met including a Somali pirate, an Afghan army captain, a top hostage negotiator and took all that amazing knowledge that was out there and put it into one place so that I could spread those ideas and hopefully save just a few lives along the way. Now there are so many ideas in there and I don't have that much time to tell you them all but there are two basic ones at the very beginning that are the most important and I'm going to tell you those and then give you a few extras for free. The most important is to be prepared like I told you I went in completely unprepared but it is amazing how much knowledge you can gain just by picking up the phone and talking to people on the ground. There's never any harm in doing that. The last person to interview Osama Bin Laden was a cameraman, he went along with the interviewer, was a cameraman called Leith Mushtaq from Al Jazeera and he said that it was some information he'd picked up the night before reading in a history book, information from a long time ago that helped him win over perhaps the side kicks of Osama Bin Laden so that he could get on a level and have a conversation with this guy. So part of the preparations, not only should you think about the travel preparations, how you're going to get in and out of the country, also it's worth looking a little into the older history that there is about the country because that's a conversation that's going to be common around the dinner table. You're not going to get in trouble talking about politics and religion which can get you in so much trouble and that's the second most important thing which is to talk to people that you meet and listen and listen and listen. Several times I ignored the advice of the people that I was working with, some of them were the fathers of families with eight children and I chose to ignore them and I got myself in a lot of trouble. I would head into riots when I wasn't supposed to be heading into them thinking that just being me would help me survive. The third top tip for surviving in a war zone is to carry a sack to vac or an emergency grab bag or a grab bag and they will contain some of these things here. I compiled this list from talking to the 150 people that I interviewed directly for the book and this was the general top few items that you should always carry with you whenever you're going. Tip number four, never go into a crowd without knowing how you're going to get out. If you look at what's been going on in this region recently, an awful lot of journalists, visitors and even locals and particularly local women have got themselves in trouble going into what they thought were peaceful riots, demonstrations, people talking about democracy. It's going to be wonderful, but actually you can never predict how a crowd is going to behave. So always have a plan before you go in as to how you're going to get out. Knock on a few doors, find an escape route onto a roof if necessary. Tip number five, now I have to include this in the top ten even though it might not be relevant all around the world, but so many people wrote to me about their experience of being saved just simply by understanding, by being able to relay a verse of the Quran. There was a medical worker in Bosnia who was in the middle of an execution and because she remembered something from her childhood and spoke of us from the Quran, she was able to get one of the men standing around her, felt that it reminded him of his mother and decided to release her at the very last minute. Another girl says that she was in the middle of another girl who was actually another medical worker this time in the Congo. For some reason, I don't know why this was relevant in the Congo, just thinking about maybe she was working there and she'd been working somewhere else, but she was actually being sexually assaulted. She started reciting a verse of the Quran and reminded the guy of his sister, he said, and actually he led her to safety and out of the region. Don't carry a gun. A lot of people use, think that the best protection is weapons and in fact, if you're carrying a weapon and you're a civilian in one of these places, you're going to be considered a mercenary underneath the Geneva Convention. Make sure everyone knows where you're going and what you're doing. Keep communications up. I wanted to write a whole chapter on self-defense, but every single person I spoke to said to me that the best way of getting away from one of these situations is to run away as fast as possible. In fact, if you're a British Marine and you go along to Army College and you go to your first self-defense class, you're one and only self-defense class, the first thing they do is say, right, run as fast as possible, I'm going to chase you out of the room and that's it and they have to run for about, I don't know, 10 kilometers in that case. But don't engage, run. This one is probably specifically, because I was apparently the first woman to write a survival handbook. I wrote a whole chapter, I think, was quite relevant to women about sexual assault. And one of the things that many people, the advice that many people gave was to wear a false wedding ring. And I've been doing it for years. Not here. I don't need it here. And especially, you know, if you want to meet the man of your life, then I wouldn't wear a false wedding ring. But if you're in a taxi in the middle of nowhere, then it's a good idea to wear one. It's a safe protection. Last one, particularly relevant for Qatar, is to wear a seat belt. And that is the top 10 tips on how to avoid being killed in a war zone. If you've got any others, then please do get in touch.