A dream to seek Truth. A dream to become the ‘Voice of the People’. A dream to become a Journalist. Samira al-Shibli had nurtured this dream in a country where over 100 reporters have been killed since the war began and where death threats are as common to journalists as a daily meal.
Her dream came very close to coming true when the regime of Saddam Hussein collapsed in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. However, with anarchy descending over Iraq, she started receiving death threats. She has been forced to quit her career and leave her country.
The last time she was threatened was in March. Extremists posted warning notes on the walls, saying that she has been sentenced to death as a punishment for working with infidels.
In a statement given to the Associated Press in Cairo, Samira al-Shibli said that she had anticipated ‘trouble’ when taking up journalism as a profession, which she describes as a ‘profession of looking for trouble’. But she didn’t realize that ‘trouble’ could mean death.
With the fall of Saddam Hussein and the bright prospect of ‘Freedom of Press’ seeming possible, al-Shibli had quit her job as an English teacher to join a reporting course offered by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a British organization training would-be journalists in the standards of Western journalism.
In a statement she said -
I felt finally I was doing something which I always wanted to do. The whole world was holding out its hands to me and showing me a new path.
Soon afterwards she was impelled to flee from her hometown where death threats were targeted at her. She and her brother flew to Egypt. She refused to give away any information about her hometown or the group who she was threatened by, for fear of her family having to face the consequences.
Her case is certainly reminiscent of the consecutive murders of the two female journalists - Zakia Zaki and Sanga Amach, within a week’s time, in Afghanistan this June. The issue of journalists being silenced by threats and bullets is definitely not specific to Iraq. It is now a truth in most of the areas where religious fanaticism and extremist politics are acutely existent.
In the case of Iraq, the situation is quite intimidating. The journalists in Iraq are sensing the threat on their profession with the increasing prospect of violent death related to being an Iraqi journalist.
Friday marked Iraqi Press Day as well as the 138th anniversary of the first Iraqi newspaper, Al Zawra.
The body of an Iraqi newspaper editor was found on Sunday. He was kidnapped last week, according to the police. Flayeh Wadi Mijdab, editor of the state-owned al-Sabah newspaper in eastern Baghdad, was ambushed by gunmen on his way to his office.
Since the beginning of the Iraq war, over 106 journalists have been murdered, of whom 84 were Iraqis, says the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
The list includes five employees of The Associated Press. Over a dozen other media employees in Iraq have fallen victims to kidnap gangs and sectarian death squads. Aref Ali Filaih, a correspondent for the independent news agency Aswat al-Iraq, was killed by a roadside bomb on Monday.
Sahar al-Haidari, who covered political and cultural news for Aswat al-Iraq, was shot to dead as she waited for a taxi in Khalis last week. Two Iraqis working for ABC News in Baghdad, cameraman Alaa Uldeen Aziz, and sound man Saif Laith Yousuf, were killed as they drove home from work last month. Said M. Fakhry, an AP Television News cameraman, is the most recent victim. He was shot dead in Baghdad on May 31.
A section of people in Iraq had expected the extremist dictatorship in Iraq to end with the fall of Saddam. The deprivation from basic liberties had even seemed to have given way to a newer era of Freedom of Speech with the immediate advent of a number of independent newspapers. The violence against the media in Iraq at present has shattered their hopes.
Hasim Hassan, the key person of the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory based in Baghdad said that journalists were being targeted by a ‘mass campaign of terror’.
Mr. Hassan is also among the many Iraqi journalists planning to leave Iraq due to death threats.
The situation is getting worse by day. The question of freedom, either of choice or of expression, seems like a farce now in Iraq.
Image Credit: Oilempire
Via: MSNBC
