Al-Jazeera reporter killed by Russian air strike
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is saddened to learn that Ibrahim Al-Omar, 38, a Syrian reporter for Al-Jazeera, was killed yesterday while covering airstrikes near the northwestern city of Idlib. RSF condemns the many obstacles to freedom of information that exist in Syria and the extreme violence to which journalists are repeatedly exposed in the course of their work.
A native of the suburbs of Aleppo, Ibrahim Al-Omar was working for Al-Jazeera Mubasher, an Arabic-language live news feed channel operated by Qatar-based Al-Jazeera Media Network. According to Aljazeera, the journalist was killed while covering Russian airstrikes on the Tarmanin, a village in Idlib's suburbs.
In a communiqué, Al-Jazeera noted that many of its employees have been killed while covering the conflict in Syria. The most recent previous Al-Jazeera victim was Zakaria Ibrahim, a 19-year-old cameraman who was killed in the northern outskirts of Homs in December 2015 during a bombardment by government forces.
RSF supports a lawsuit that has just been filed with a court in Washington accusing President Bashar al-Assad’s government of deliberately murdering US reporter Marie Colvin in Homs in 2012.
Ranked 177th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2016 World Press Freedom Index, Syria is one of the world’s deadliest countries for journalists. According to RSF’s tally, around 200 journalists and citizen journalists have been killed in Syria since the start of the conflict in March 2011 – six of them this year.
