Iraq

Saad Al-Awsi, the editor of weekly Al-Shahid Al-Mustaqil (The Independent Witness), was abducted by gunmen on March 25 from Rusafa prison in southeastern Baghdad where he was serving a one-year sentence, according to delayed reports. His family, which has received no news of him since his disappearance, wrote a letter on April 3 to Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki and to the head of the intelligence...

A news blackout has been imposed by Iraqi authorities on events at Camp Ashraf, a camp in northern Iraq that houses 3,500 Iranian exiles. An attack by the Iraqi army yesterday reportedly resulted in the deaths of around 30 residents and many wounded. According to several news organisations, the camp is surrounded by armoured vehicles and army trucks. Journalists have been forced to remain at the...

Murtadha Al-Shahtur, the police spokesman in the governorate Dhi Qar who also writes as a journalist for the local newspaper Al-Zaman and other newspapers and websites, was arrested in the provincial capital of Nasariyah (370 km southeast of Baghdad) on April 3 by the central government’s special security forces, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. “This...

Dana Bakir, a cameraman working for Iraq's Naliya Radio and Television (NRT), has been missing since April 1, when security forces attacked journalists who were covering a demonstration in Freedom Square (Saray Azadi) in Sulaymaniyah. NRT director-general Twana Othman said he regarded his cameraman’s disappearance as a case of abduction. Othman told Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans...

Two Iraqi journalists, Sabah al-Bazi and Muammar Khadir Abdelwahad, were among the fatal victims of Tuesday’s devastating insurgent attack on the Salahadin provincial council’s headquarter in the city of Tikrit (160 km north of Baghdad). Agence France-Presse quoted a police spokesman as putting the toll from the attack at least 65 dead and 100 wounded. Saad Khaled, a cameraman working for the...

Two Kurdish opposition journalists have escaped murder attempts in the past three days in Erbil and Dohuk, places controlled by the Kurdistan Democratic Party, while other journalists have been briefly detained or have been the target of a kidnap attempt. Many report that they are continuing to receive death threats by SMS, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières...

Nearly a dozen gunmen stormed an independent radio station in Sulaimaniya's Kalar district on Sunday, vandalising the office, breaking most of the equipment, and confiscating the rest, New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists has reported. It is the second armed assault on an independent radio station in Sulaimaniya in a less than a month, according to news reports...

An Iraqi journalist reporting for the satellite television station al-Ittijah, whose name remains unknown, was among those killed Thursday in a blast that targeted a celebration in the city of Ramadi, Aswat al Iraq news agency reported Monday. The killing occurred only a week after another Iraqi journalist was shot dead in Mosul by a group of unidentified armed men, confirming Iraq as one of the...

An armed raid was carried out Wednesday morning on the Baghdad headquarters of the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (JFO), partner organisation of Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) in Iraq, in which all of the JFO’s computers and archives were stolen “A dozen gunmen belonging to private security forces burst into our office near Al-Fardous Square in central Baghdad...

A destructive attack was carried out by 50 masked gunmen Sunday on the headquarters of Naliya Radio and Television (NRT) in the compound known as “German Village” in Sulaimaniya, in northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, to prevent it from continuing to cover unrest in the city. After firing at NRT’s guards, wounding one of them, the gunmen smashed all the broadcasting equipment and then set...