Abdul-Wahab, 36, a freelance journalist and contributor to
the Muraslon news site, was shot
and killed while resisting abduction in the Al-Bakr area of
“We were going shopping when two men in a white car stopped
and asked my daughter to get in the car, and when she refused, they started
dragging and forcing her to ride in the car,” said Amira Wasfi, the
journalist’s mother. “I was screaming and shouting to leave her alone. They hit
me on my head with the end of a machine gun and I fell on the street.” When Abdul-Wahab
resisted, the men shot her in the leg and then in the head, the mother said. “The
neighbors were there watching, but nobody helped me save my daughter,” Wasfi
said.
A few weeks prior to the killing, Abdul-Wahab received a
threatening phone call from a group calling itself the “Islamic State of Iraq”
asking her “to quit her activities or else,” according to Muraslon Editor-in-Chief Mohamed
al-Jebori, whom she had told about the threats.
Abdul-Wahab, who for safety reasons wrote under the pen name
Sarwa Darweesh, published critical articles about Iraqi insurgent groups. In an
April 24 story on Muraslon‘s Web site, she discussed efforts by insurgents
to intimidate drivers working for a cement factory in Mosul.
An April 26 piece called on the people of
to get rid of the terrorists so that the rebuilding of
“the so-called Islamic State of Iraq” was responsible for the destruction of
Mosul.
Yasir al-Hamadani, head of the
Journalists’ Rights, said Abdul-Wahab was a member, The Associated Press reported. Abdul-Wahab’s
friends and colleagues said she had recently traveled to Jordan for a
government-sponsored training conference for journalists covering upcoming
Iraqi elections.
Ibrahim al-Saraj, head of the Iraqi Journalists Rights
Defense Association, told CPJ that Abdul-Wahab had reported to him that she had
received threatening phone calls two weeks before she was killed, warning her
to quit her job “or else.” He and al-Jebori said they had each advised
Abdul-Wahab to leave