Qais al-Jazar (Qais al-Qadhi)

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Al-Jisr TV reporter Qais al-Jazar, known professionally as Qais al-Qadhi, was killed during a shelling attack in the eastern suburbs of Damascus on October 29, 2017, according to reports from his employer and AFP.

Al-Qadhi, who was the director of al-Jisr’s Damascus office, was on a farm in the town of Homouria in eastern Damascus reporting on shelling by Syrian forces in the area [EB1] when an artillery shell landed on the farm, according to an al-Jisr report. Al-Jisr cameraman Omar al-Dimashqi, who was reporting with al-Qadhi, suffered a foot injury in the same attack, their employer reported.

Eight civilians also died in the attack and many more were injured, according to the same al-Jisr report, which was presented by the channel’s correspondent Mohammad al-Rifai. CPJ was unable to determine if the journalist was among the number of dead.

In the AFP report, a photo of al-Qadhi’s bloodied corpse shows him wearing a clearly visible press card.

In the same al-Jisr report, al-Rifai said that the Syrian military had previously targeted the channel’s Damascus office, as well as its correspondents working in the eastern Damascus suburbs, without providing specific examples.

CPJ could not verify al-Rifai’s claim.

Al-Jisr had also come under fire from Islamic State group militants. The Syrian Journalists Association, a secular pro-opposition press advocacy group, reported that a shell fired by IS militants injured the director of al-Jisr’s Daraa office in southern Syria while he was covering clashes between the group and a faction of the FSA on October 12, 2017, in rural Daraa Province.

Al-Qadhi was born in 1994 in Arbin, the next town over from Homouria in the Ghouta area of eastern Damascus, and had been director of Al-Jisr’s Damascus office since it opened two years earlier.