463 media activist killed, 1027 others arrested and kidnapped
Introduction:
As the popular protests began in March 2011 the Syrian authorities realized the crucial role of the media in exposing their crimes and violations and in delivering the people main demands, so they fought it with everything they have, and blocked the Arabian and international media by a percentage that reached 100% and then the local activist headed to the alternative media through the modern technology and through the social network as they started with simple cell phones’ cameras, as time passed and the movement developed they developed their tools and their form, and their form and ways of handling the events and covering it improved clearly and as websites specialized in transporting news and media appeared, also newspapers and news radio stations, but the rapid emergence of the alternative media wasn’t accompanied with the same level of training what made it under the effects of the moods and abilities and limits of the people responsible.
The Syrian authorities fought the activist through targeting them directly with killings and arrest, as many of them suffered death under torture to be a warning to the rest of their colleagues.
When the popular protests turned to an internal conflict, violations against media personnel started to happen more widely by all other nongovernmental parties, and this violations increased drastically, as this report try to shed light on this matter to deliver a simple concept of the grave sacrifices made by media activist and journalists in order to deliver the truth that coasted many of them their lives, and we’ve recorded many cases that the last photo taken by a photographer lens was the moment he lost his life.
The emergence of the extremist groups on top of it ISIS added a new type of terrorism and new ways of killing and abducting journalists, as happened with the two American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and Japanese journalist Kinji Goto.