User:Crtew/Professional Syrian journalists

Professional Syrian journalists is about the reporters for Syrian state news organizations who were killed because rebels wanted to disrupt the dissemination of pro-state news The attacks increased around the middle of the summer.

Context: President Bashar Assad
President Bashar al-Assad 's father Hafez al-Assad ran the Syrian Air Force before the coup that brought him to power in 1970. The Air Force is equipped with 325 airplanes and 33 helicopter gunships, both can be used for ground attacks. The Air Force personnel are less like than army personnel to defect. The Air Force is controlled heavily by the Alawites, which Assad is a part of.

Context: The Syrian Civil War
In April 2012 some high-level people from Assad's regime defected, the rebels became more bold in their assault in Damascus and Turkey was hostile because Syria took down a Turkish military jet. The Syrian government said the Turkish airplane looked like an Israeli plane. 25 May 2012, There was a massacre of 108 civilians in the string of villages in western Syria called Houla, of which the United Nations thinks the Syrian government is responsible for. There was fighting in all of the provinces or Syria with the primary battleground, during Sept. 2012, was Aleppo where the government and the rebels were fighting back and forth since July of 2012. In the suburbs of Damascus young many men were dying. Air raids and shelling were from ez-Zor to southern Deraa. Aug. 2012 was the bloodiest month of the civil war when one-fifth of the 25,000 deaths occured. Civilian and military deaths and the number of refugees were steadily increasing. Fighting increased in brutality over the summer, in part, because the counterattacks were in heavily civilian populated areas and the Free Syrian Army was presumptuous in their ability to take and keep Damascus and Aleppo. President Assad's regime did not have restraint because they were increasing in desperation to keep control and they not sure how far the international community would let them go. Assad's regime crossed almost all of the lines that Western leaders had hoped they would respect. One of those lines is their use of air power. They first dispatched helicopter gunships, then they sent fighter jets to terrorize and punish areas that they lost control of during the fighting while they were reserving their ground forces (especially their tanks because the rebels have become more experienced). Outsiders had trouble knowing what the unobstructed truth was because Syrian government effectively banned all international reporters, relief workers and monitoring officials. Both sides have executed civilians during the war, beginning with their political affiliation and now it is because of their religious affiliation.

Professional Syrian journalists
You're to write an overview of the phenomenon -- killed and missing journalists from the established, and pro-state news organizations for the above article.

Teshreen
Teshreen was established in 1974 and is a daily newspaper. It is rather analytical of the local government (corruption and mismanagement), but it is still pro-government.


 * Professsional journalists being killed In a "wave"


 * Musab al-Odallah of Tishrin was killed 22 August 2012.  Odallah was shot point blank in his home during the raids in the Nahr Eisha district of Damascus.   Odallah, from Deraa, reported online under the psuedonim Abu Saeed for the pro-revolutionaries about Syria's restriction on Deraa, where the uprising began.

SANA
Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) is the official national news with connections to Syria's Ministry of Information. It was established in 1965. SANA's headquarters are in Damascus with offices in Beirut, Paris, Moscow, Jordan, Tehran, Kuwait, Cairo, Libya, Rome and Turkey and around 43 correspondents in the Arab world and other countries. SANA releases 5oo news stories daily in Arabic and some in English, French, Spanish and Turkish.


 * Ali Abbas of SANA was killed 11 August 2012.  SANA received a nonconfirmed claim from Al-Nusra Front (an Islamist group that is armed and linked to al-Qaeda) that Al-Nusra Front killed Abas in a statement sent Aug. 17. SANA reported that Abas, head of domestic news, was killed by the gunmen in his Damascus home to keep the Syrian pro-state media from reporting.


 * Mohammad Saeed of SANA killed 3 August 2012. Saeed, a tv reporter for SANA, was kidnapped by Al-Nusra July 19 and was reportedly beheaded Aug. 4.

Syrian News Channel (Al-Ikhbariya)
The Syrian News Channel is privately owned, but it still supports President Assad's regime.


 * Hatem Abu Yehia of Syria News Channel was killed 10 August 2012. On Aug. 10 Yahia was abducted from al-Tal, a suburb of Damascus, with three other employees of the newspaper where he works, Abdullah Tubara (camera operator), Yara al-Saleh (anchor for the station), and Hussam Imad (driver).  The three other employees were shown on a YouTube video saying that they were being treated well and that Yehia was dead.  Al-Saleh, after they were released, said the Free Syrian Army make them report false information on the video, such as they were not treated fairly and al-Saleh and the others heard gunshots but never saw Yehia's body.


 * Mohammad Shamma of Syria News Channel killed 27 June 2012. Shamma was workin late at night with Sami Abu Amin in the offices of Syria News Channel in Doursha (south of Damascus) when gunmen ransacked the offices and planted explosives, which killed three staff members and four security guards.


 * Sami Abu Amin of Syria News Channel was killed 27 June 2012. Abu Amin died in the same attack as Shamma.

al-Thawra
Al-Thawra was established in 1974 and is a daily newspaper. It is an official government newspaper and covers government initiatives in economic and social aspects. In Feb. 2012 al-Thawra's newspaper was suspended because armed men protested the extraction of former President Saleh's picture from al-Thawra's front page by charging SANA's headquarters. In March 2012 al-Thawra's newspaper was suspended for financial reasons due to the former government administration which left al-Thawra with huge debts. Employees had not been paid for three months when the suspension began. Before 2012 the al-Thawra had not suspended printing since Sept. 28, 1962. The newspaper continues to run online.
 * State of Business
 * Assad connection
 * Ihsan al Buni of al-Thawra (daily) was killed 12 July 2012.
 * Shoukri Ahmed Ratib Abu Bourghoul (also spelled Shukri Ratib Abu Burghol) of al-Thawra (daily) and Radio Damas was killed 2 January 2012.   Bourghoul was shot in his house Dec. 31, 2011, when he stood up in his home during an anti-government protest to see why there was gunfire he was shot in his left eye and died three days later in the hospital from his wounds.  Before his death Bourghoul, deputy director of the Censorship Department for al-Thawra and host for Radio Damascus, received death threats from an unknown source for his work in state media.

Attack on SANA
On 14 July 2012 SANA's website was attacked by foreign sides, and they failed. An anonymous side stole SANA's logo from their website and distributed false information through email.

Attack on Syria News Channel
The attacks on Assad's regime targets increased.

In June 2012 Two employees, Mazen Mohammad and Fadi Yakoub, were shot and wounded in Haffa when they covered the conflict between the government and the rebels. Mohammad and Yahoud were reporting from near National Hospital in Haffa, in the Lattakia countryside, when armed terrorists (what Assad's regime calls the rebels) open-fired on their car.

On 27 June 2012, the day after President Assad declared that Syria is in a "state of war," Syria News Channel's Drousha compound was attacked by armed gunmen. The gunmen invaded the compound and killed 7 people, kidnapped four people and wounded some. The rebels say the armed gunmen who attacked Syria News Channel were defectors from the Republican Guard (they guard the capital and the inner circle of Assad), while the Syrian government says the attackers are the rebels.