463 media workers lost their lives since 2011: monitor

The Syrian Center for Journalistic Freedoms has documented the killing of 463 media and press workers in Syria between March 2011 and March 2022.

"With the outbreak of the Syrian revolution in March 2011, the Syrian regime embarked on a systematic campaign with the aim of eliminating any loophole that Syrian and foreign media professionals might exploit to convey a picture to the world of what is happening in the country."  the center said in a report on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day.

The journalistic freedoms unit of the Syrian Journalists Association  indicated that it had documented 1,435 violations against media professionals since the outbreak of the revolution until March of this year, as the killings ranked first among the types of documented violations.

Other violations included injuries, beatings, arrests, and others.

In an unprecedented exception since the outbreak of the Syrian revolution, the Center said that it had not documented any violation against media professionals in Syria during the months of March and April 2022, while one murder was committed in February.

The center pointed out that the largest percentage of killings was in 2013, with 110 cases, and that the Assad regime alone killed 315 media professionals, while the "Islamic State" groups killed 61, then Russia, which killed 24 media professionals.

The monitoring unit was unable to determine the party or parties responsible for the killing of 47 others.

According to the report, among the victims were 7 female workers working in a field between Syrian women and foreigners, and 33 media professionals who died as a result of torture in the regime’s prisons and detention centers, while the fate of the detained media workers is still unknown.

The killings took place in all Syrian provinces, but Aleppo witnessed the largest number of media killings with 107 cases, followed by Damascus Suburbs with 91 cases, then Daraa with 60 cases, Homs with 52 cases, and Idlib with 40 cases.

According to the center, 5 Syrian media workers have been killed outside Syria since 2011, 4 of them in Turkey and one in Lebanon.