Monday, December 30, 2013
At least 70 journalists were killed on the job around the world in 2013, including 29 who died covering the civil war in Syria and 10 slain in Iraq, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The dead in Syria included a number of citizen journalists working to
document combat in their home cities, broadcasters who worked with media outlets
affiliated with either the government or the opposition, and a handful
of correspondents for the foreign press, including an Al-Jazeera
reporter, Mohamed al-Mesalma, who was shot by a sniper.
Six journalists died in Egypt. Half of those reporters were killed while reporting an Aug. 14 crackdown by Egyptian security forces on demonstrators protesting the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi.
"The Middle East has become a
killing field for journalists. While the number of journalists killed
for their work has declined in some places, the civil war in Syria ?and a
renewal of sectarian attacks in Iraq have taken an agonizing toll," the
committee's deputy director,
Robert Mahoney, said in a statement. "The international community must
prevail on all governments and armed groups to respect the civilian
status of reporters and to prosecute the killers of journalists."
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has been tracking deaths among reporters and broadcasters since 1992.
Most of the killings it has documented over the years involve people
who are covering news in the places they live. That was the case, as
well, in 2013.
Many of the deaths occurred during combat, or among reporters
covering conflict zones, but journalists in several countries were also
murdered after reporting on sensitive subjects.
Reporters and commentators who covered police misconduct, political
corruption or drug trafficking and other sensitive topics were slain in
separate incidents in Brazil, Colombia, the Philippines, India,
Bangladesh, Pakistan and Russia.
A pair of Radio France Internationale journalists were abducted and
killed after meeting with a leader of ethnic Tuareg separatists in
Kidal, Mali. Militants in Iraq killed five members of the news staff of
Salaheddin TV in a suicide attack this month on the channel's offices in
Tikrit, Iraq.
For the first time in a decade, no journalists were known to have been killed for their work in Mexico.
The CPJ is still looking into the deaths of an additional 25
journalists in 2013, not included in the tally of 70, to determine
whether they had anything to do with their work.
To date, at least 63 journalists have been killed covering the
conflict in Syria, the CPJ's report said — and that tally may understate
the problem. Sixty journalists have been abducted in Syria this year
alone. Thirty are still missing.