In the afternoon of July 24, 2019, at least 10 members of the Al-Qaeda offshoot Hayat Tahrir al-Sham detained Jumaa Haj Hamdou, a reporter for the Syrian pro-civil rights opposition news website Zaman al-Wasl, at his home in Abian, a village in western Aleppo governorate under control of the militant group, according to the France-based…
On July 16, 2019, the British Broadcasting Corporation said it had closed its bureau in Burundi, more than one year after its transmissions had been banned in the country, according to a report by the broadcaster and a BBC statement sent to CPJ.
On July 19, 2019, in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, a group of protesters assaulted Ayman al-Sheikh, a correspondent for the private Iraqi broadcaster Al-Sharqiyya, according to news reports and local press freedom group Press Freedom Advocacy Association in Iraq.
On July 19 and 20, 2019, Israeli soldiers fired rubber bullets and tear gas canisters that hit Palestinian journalists while they were covering protests in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, injuring at least three, according to local press freedom organizations.
In July 2019, Humayra Bakhtiyar, a Tajik journalist living in exile who was recently granted asylum in a European Union country, told CPJ in a phone call that Tajik authorities have harassed and intimidated her family over the past several years as retribution for her critical reporting.
On July 17, 2019, in the Iraqi Kurdistan capital of Erbil, officers from the Kurdish Counter-Terrorism Forces assaulted Al-Jazeera reporter Ahmed al-Zawiti, according to the journalist, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app, and news reports.
On July 12, 2019, plainclothes police in Kireka, a suburb of Kampala, Uganda’s capital, arrested Joseph Kabuleta, a local minister and former reporter who regularly posts political commentary on social media, for allegedly posting “offensive communication against the person of the President” online, according to a July 12 police statement reviewed by CPJ and Fred…
On July 9, 2019, in the city of Sulaymaniyah, in Iraqi Kurdistan, Kurdish security forces detained and questioned freelance photojournalist Zmnako Ismael for more than an hour while he was covering the funeral of Diyar Gharib Mohammed, a senior leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party militant group, according to local news reports and Ismael, who…