Last week, I wrote about ways in which the Iraqi government is trying to control and intimidate the press in that country–a beleaguered group that already has enough problems without having to fight off government censors.
This morning, word comes that yet another Iraqi journalist has been killed. A twenty-two year-old reporter for the Az-zaman newspaper, Ali Khalil, was kidnapped and killed on Sunday in the Baiyaa neighborhood of Baghdad. Khalil leaves behind a wife and a week-old baby, and the paper reports that his brother had also recently been killed.
Khalil joins a long list of Iraqi journalists to die since the start of the war in 2003–a list that also includes the two Iraqi employees of ABC news who were murdered on Friday. I wrote about the plight of Iraqi journalists last January, and it looks like little has changed since then.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.