Iraq

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - An Iraqi journalist working for Reuters was released from U.S. military custody at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad on Thursday after 12 days in detention. Ali al-Mashhadani, 37, was arrested by U.S. Marines in his home town of Ramadi on May 20 when he went to a U.S. base to retrieve Reuters telephones taken from him earlier that week. He spent five months in U.S. custody last year...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has voiced its condolences to the family of TV sports presenter Jaafar Ali, who was gunned down on the morning of 31 May 2006 in Baghdad. He was the third journalist to be killed in Iraq in the space of 48 hours and the eleventh employee of the national TV station Al-Iraqiya to be killed since the start of the war in March 2003. Alarmed by the surge in...

By some reckonings, the death of two journalists working for CBS News on Monday firmly secured the Iraq war as the deadliest conflict for reporters in modern times. Since the start of the war in 2003, 71 journalists have been killed in Iraq, a figure that does not even include the more than two dozen members of news media support staff who have also died, according to the Committee to Protect...

NEW YORK, May 30 (Reuters) - The number of journalists killed in Iraq is now similar to the total who died in World War Two, underscoring the risks reporters face in informing the public about the conflict, press advocates say. The deaths of CBS News cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan on Monday increased the number of journalists deaths in Iraq to 71, as listed by the New York-based...

(CPJ/IFEX) - New York, May 30, 2006 - CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier, who was critically wounded in Iraq by a bomb that killed her two colleagues, was flown today to a U.S. military hospital in Germany. Dozier, 39, is being treated for injuries to her head and lower body, CBS reported. Col. Brian Gamble of Landstuhl Regional Medical Center said Dozier "was responsive, opening her eyes to...

(IPI/IFEX) - The summary of a review examining payments made to the Iraqi media by the US military has concluded that such operations should be re-examined. Prepared by Rear Admiral Scott Van Buskirk, the review was requested after media reports in the Los Angeles Times during late November 2005 showed that the US military was writing pro-American stories, translating them into Arabic and then...

The Voice of America's bureau in Baghdad has been closed for the past six months, ever since the government-funded agency withdrew its only reporter in Iraq after she was fired upon in an ambush and her security guard was later killed. All Western news organizations have struggled with the dangerous conditions in Iraq, which have led to such high-profile incidents as the kidnapping of Christian...

BAGHDAD -- The recent killings of six Iraqi journalists have rattled the country's fledgling press corps, a battle-worn crew that has persisted in covering the nation's turmoil while suffering dozens of dead at the hands of insurgents, government troops and even American forces. "We are scared working as journalists," said Thamer, a burly radio reporter, sitting in the threadbare cafe of the al...

Baghdad - A journalist working for the independent Iraqi News Network has been killed in Iraq, witnesses said Thursday. Sadek al-Shammari of the German-based news organization was shot dead by insurgents in Jisr Diyala, south of the Iraqi capital. More than 100 foreign and local journalists have been killed in Iraq since the US-led occupation of the country in 2003. The US army meanwhile reported...

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Freedom to criticize the government is one of the few things flourishing in contemporary Iraq. But editorial cartoonists who are testing the limits of expression face a different threat: extremists incensed by their art. During Saddam Hussein's time, speaking out could bring imprisonment, torture and even execution. Nowadays, the danger doesn't come from the government but the...