Iraq has become the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist. Since the invasion in 2003, 106 journalists, mostly Iraqi's, and 35 support staff have been killed. Most have been deliberately targeted; 12 were murdered in May alone.
One of the murdered journalists was Sahar al-Haideri, a 45- year-old mother of three. She had received 13 death threats before her murder in Mosul last week.
She knew her calling would cost her her life, but she refused to back down. "We know we will be killed soon," she told fellow journalists on the Journal Iraq online newspaper. She had even stopped using a nom de plume and wrote under own name with her picture. She said: "I was kidnapped and threatened while using a pen name, so I decided to write ... with my real name."
The Ansar al-Sunna fundamentalist group claimed responsibility for killing Mrs al-Haideri, saying she "distorted the reputation of the mujahedin [fighters]." They had put her name on a death list, that included nine journalists, issued by the Islamic State of Iraq, the umbrella organisation of extreme Jihadi and Salafi groups. The list was posted in several mosques in Mosul.
"When she arrived at the area of the ambush the brothers rained her with bullets from their machineguns killing her instantly," Ansar al-Sunna said. It added that it had found the telephone numbers of policemen on her mobile phone, citing this as evidence that "she was an agent for the apostate police and the government of the apostate [Prime Minister, Nouri] al-Maliki."
When colleagues called Mrs al-Haideri's phone after she was murdered it was answered by an insurgent who said "she went to hell".
Mrs al-Haideri knew her home was being watched because two of the 13 death threats she received were contained in handwritten letters left at her house, she told the Iraqi Journalistic Freedom Observatory. The group said Mosul, a largely Sunni city with a Kurdish minority, had become the most dangerous city in Iraq for journalists, with 35 killed since 2003.
Targeting the press is especially heinous, and to my mind, the mark of a coward. A coward that can only resort to the sword when faced with the power of the pen.
