Female TV Presenter Murdered In Iraq

Gunmen
murdered
a female
TV
presenter
in
northern
Iraq on
Sunday,
her station and police said, making her the sixth
journalist to be killed in the country since October.
Nawras al-Nuaimi was shot near her home in
Mosul, Al-Mosuliyah TV said, and was the fifth
journalist killed in the northern city in the same
period.
Mostly Sunni Arab Mosul is one of the most
dangerous cities in Iraq, with militants frequently
carrying out attacks and reportedly extorting money
from shopkeepers.
On December 5, Kawa Ahmed Germyani, the editor-
in-chief of Rayal magazine and a correspondent for
Awene newspaper, was gunned down in front of his
mother in Kalar, Sulaimaniyah province, in the
autonomous Kurdistan region.
Following that killing, media rights watchdog
Reporters Without Borders said it was “worried
about the very dangerous climate for journalists
both in Iraqi Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq, and
about the impunity enjoyed by their attackers and
killers.”
Germyani’s death followed that of Alaa Edwar, a
Christian journalist working for the Nineveh al-Ghad
television network, who was shot dead in Mosul in
November.
Al-Mosuliyah cameraman Bashar Abdulqader Najm
and two journalists from the Sharqiya television
channel — correspondent Mohammed Karim al-
Badrani and cameraman Mohammed Ghanem —
were killed in Mosul in October.
Iraq has come in for repeated criticism over
shortcomings in media freedom, and ranks first in
the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Impunity
Index, which tracks unsolved murders of
journalists.
Bloodshed in the country has reached a level
unseen since 2008, when Iraq was emerging from a
period of brutal sectarian conflict.
More than 6,400 people have been killed in violence
since the beginning of the year, according to AFP
figures based on security and medical sources.