West Asia - North Africa

Reporters Without Borders has learned of the arrests of three more Iranian journalists, one of them two days ago. They bring the number of journalists detained in Iran to six. “The Iranian regime is one of the most repressive in the world towards the media,” the press freedom organisation said. “Independent journalists are closely watched and constantly harassed. Arrests are frequent, and months...

The US military accused the international media on Saturday of exacerbating Iraq's violent tensions by reporting false claims of massacres which it said were deliberately fabricated by extremist groups. This week several newspapers and agencies reported that Iraqi police had found 20 beheaded corpses in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. AFP did not carry the report after its sources were unable to...

Three more Iraqi journalists have been killed in the past two weeks, delayed reports have said. They bring the number of media workers killed in Iraq since the start of the year to 36, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). One of the many victims of a bombing in Al-Khalis (55 km north of Baghdad) on June 11 was Aref Ali Falih, 32, who had been the correspondent of the independent news...

Yemeni authorities are questioning a journalist over alleged links to Shiite Muslim rebels accused of planning attacks against strategic sites, the ruling party said Thursday. Abdelkarim Al-Kiwani, editor of the Al-Shura weekly of the Union of Popular Forces Shiite party, "is currently being questioned ... about a link to the terrorist cell" led by Abdulmalik al-Huthi, it said on its website...

Journalists in Yemen rallied in protest after police arrested a Yemeni opposition editor accused of backing the country's Shiite rebels. Dozens of journalists gathered in front of the general prosecutor office in the Yemeni capital, San'a, demanding the release of the Al-Shura weekly's editor Abdel Abdul Karim al-Khawinay, taken by police to jail earlier in the day. Undated photo shows Yemeni...

The body of an Iraqi newspaper editor kidnapped last week was found Sunday in Baghdad, police said. Gunmen ambushed Flayeh Wadi Mijthab, editor of the state-owned Al-Sabah newspaper, last Wednesday in eastern Baghdad as he was heading to work. His 25-year-old son and driver were left behind, the Associated Press (AP) reported. Mijthab's body was discovered Sunday near the Firdaws mosque in the al...

Ability to report freely has become a casualty in the ongoing battle for control over Gaza between rival Hamas and Fatah groups. From raids on news establishments and rampant abductions of journalists, to use of Press markings on vehicles by combatants, all have made reporting riskier than before in a conflict that draws some of the world's most intense media coverage. Dozens of armed members of...

Reporters Without Borders today condemned new media censorship in Yemen, where access to at least two websites has been blocked since the start of the year, in one case for three months, and the information ministry is now censoring the distribution of news to mobile phones by SMS message. “It is disturbing that the Yemeni government is attacking new technology in this way,” the press freedom...

DUBAI (Reuters) - An Iraqi militant group has claimed responsibility for the killing of an Iraqi journalist who it said "distorted the reputation of the mujahideen". Sahar al-Haideri, a mother of three, worked for the independent Aswat al-Iraq news agency in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, where gunmen killed her on Thursday. "When she arrived at the area of the ambush the brothers rained her...

MOSUL, Iraq, June 7 (Xinhua) -- Gunmen on Thursday shot dead a female journalist working for an independent Iraqi news agency in Mosul, some 400 km north of Baghdad, a provincial police source said. "Gunmen attacked Sahar al-Haidari, a female journalist, in front of her house in the al-Hadbaa neighborhood in Mosul and showered her with bullets," the source from Nineveh province told Xinhua by...