ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Islamic State (ISIS) has executed five local journalists in Mosul, according to a Rudaw source in the city.
Brothers Ahmed and Aitar Rafi, Mohandis Yasir, Yasir Alqaisi, and Modhas Adari were executed in the city’s southeastern Sumar district of Mosul on Thursday, the source told Rudaw.
The local resident identified the journalist as having worked for a Mosul-based television station, Shema TV, and said ISIS had killed them for “acting as spies.”
Since ISIS toppled Mosul in June, reports have emerged of kidnappings of journalists in Iraq’s second-largest city, with several raids reported in late October.
The news of these murders arrives only days after German agency DPA reported four journalists were killed on Tuesday, after 12 journalists were abducted in October.
It has proven difficult to confirm any of the deaths, because the group has driven most journalists out of the city or intimidated them into silence.
“It is currently very hard to get any reliable information from either Iraq or Syria,” Reporters Without Borders wrote in a press statement in October, after conflicting accounts emerged about the alleged murder of Mosul journalist Mohanad Al-Aqidi.
“This example of contradictory information demonstrates the difficulty or even impossibility for journalists to work,” it said.
While the videotaped murder of western journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff were orchestrated and publicized to provoke Western reaction, analysts believe that ISIS’s crusade against local journalists is motivated by the desire to cut off from the outside world, prevent intelligence gathering and consolidate the group’s control on public information.
The group issued a series of draconian guidelines to journalists in early October stating that they must declare allegiance to the Islamic State and obtain approval for all reports.
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