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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Islamic State (ISIS) tries but has failed to intimidate journalists through attacks on news media, said a press freedom advocate.
ISIS believes that they can make news media cower in fear by their attacks on the press, said Jason Stern, senior research associate for the Committee to Protect Journalists’ (CPJ) Middle East and North Africa program, speaking to Rudaw on Friday.
“They believe that they will silence us by intimating us. That’s simply not true,” he said, citing the attack on Rudaw’s main office in Erbil on June 25. “Everywhere they have tried to silence a journalist, they failed,”
“Everyday journalists from Rudaw and other channels go out, they report the facts as they see them,” he added.
ISIS has killed at least 27 journalists around the world and kidnapped many more, according to Stern. “We get reports about journalists who have been kidnapped or killed by so-called Islamic State all over the region, including from Rudaw,” Stern said.
Referring to the liberation of Rudaw’s correspondents Farhad Hamo and Massoud Aqeel who were captured by ISIS in December 2014, Stern said that CPJ were relieved to hear that the two journalists were eventually released by the militants in “one of the few times that we heard good news when it comes to the Islamic State and journalists.”
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