Deathtrap Iraq

Taha Al-Alawi, the head of satellite television station Al-Masar TV, was killed in the Werij district of southern Baghdad on Friday. Gunmen shot at the car in which he was travelling. Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) urged Iraqi authorities to carry out a proper investigation into this killing in order to find those responsible and bring them to justice. Impunity for...

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...

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...

Press freedom groups have condemned journalist Hilal Al-Ahmadi’s murder Thursday in the northern city of Mosul. Ahmadi, who worked for two local weeklies, the Mosul Echo and Iraqiyoun, was gunned down outside his home. “We are extremely shocked and dismayed by Ahmadi’s death,” Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) secretary-general Jean-François Julliard said. “The...

Journalist and presenter on the satellite TV channel al-Anbar Omar Rassim al-Qayssi died on Sunday of injuries he suffered in a booby-trap car bomb in al-Anbar city centre, Ramadi, 167 km east of Baghdad). Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) hopes that an investigation will be opened and those responsible will be brought to trial. The press freedom organisation said it...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) and the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (JFO), its partner organization in Iraq, have condemned the threat of a wave of Al-Qaeda bombings against news media that has just been reported by the Iraqi interior ministry. Asking not to be named, a ministry official said on November 30 that Al-Qaeda was planning a campaign of car-bombings...

Iraqi authorities have decided to close down Al-Baghdadia TV offices in Iraq. The closure of the Cairo-based satellite channel was announced after it broadcast the demands of gunmen who attacked a church in Baghdad on Sunday, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Fifty-eight people were killed during the siege, according to news reports. On Monday, security forces...

The pressure used by the US and Iraqi authorities in an attempt to prevent the website Wikileaks from releasing about 400,000 “classified” US military documents about the war in Iraq was both absurd and contrary to the principle of access to public information, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has said. The documents shed light on the scale of the violence that the...

Alaa Mohsen, the host of the programme “Liqa Sakhen” on state-run Al-Iraqiya television, was badly injured by a bomb placed underneath his car as he was about to leave his home in the Baghdad suburb of Saydiya on the morning of September 27 to go to work. Rushed to the Yarmouk district hospital, he was reported to be in a critical condition Tuesday, according to Paris-based press freedom group...

A Baghdad court gave two alleged Sunni militants life sentences Wednesday after convicting them of the 2004 abduction of French journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot and their Syrian guide, who were held hostage for 124 days, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). “We hail this conviction and we hope that the impunity so long enjoyed by the...