Syria
2011
Smashing the hand that holds the pen
Ali Ferzat likes to work through the night. His attackers knew that. Masked men grabbed Syria’s most famous cartoonist as he set out for home from his office near Damascus’ central Umayyad Square at around 5 a.m. on Thursday, and bundled him into a van. A few hours later, he lay in a bloody heap…
Masked men break hands of critical Syrian cartoonist
New York, August 25, 2011–Ali Ferzat, a famous Syrian cartoonist critical of the government, was abducted and severely beaten by masked gunmen as he left his office early on Thursday in Damascus, international media reported. The attackers stomped on his hands and said the beating was a warning, the Associated Press said. He was dumped…
Silencing global coverage, Syria detains, expels reporters
New York, July 14, 2011–The Syrian government has detained a local journalist who contributes to pan-Arab news outlets and expelled an international reporter, according to news reports, continuing a crackdown designed to silence global news coverage of the nation’s political crisis.
Syria’s Assad gives tacit OK to online attacks on press
On Monday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gave his third public address on the vast unrest that has roiled his nation. Reporters described him as nervous. He, the reporters, or perhaps both, may have been thinking about the significance of speech No. 3. Both Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak were overthrown…
Syria must prove jailed blogger is alive, well
New York, June 23, 2011–The Committee to Protect Journalists and the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information today called on the Syrian government to produce immediate evidence showing that unjustly imprisoned blogger Tal al-Mallohi is alive and well. The demand follows several recent news reports saying that al-Mallohi died in a Syrian prison a month…
Beyond the Amina hoax: Real cases in the Middle East
A Gay Girl in Damascus was a personal blog, said to be written by a young woman named Amina Arraf, that appeared to give an everyday record of being a lesbian in modern-day Syria. Following the events of the Arab Spring, as the political situation in Syria grew less stable, the blog attracted more readers…
Syrian Facebook users develop strategies against online threats
Jennifer Preston in the New York Times reports on some stories that we also have been hearing from Syrian Internet use. She documents incidents of passwords extracted by force, and the deliberate defacing of social networking pages by security forces, apparently in order to sabotage reports of unrest from that country. A man in his…
Parvaz says Syria detained her for Al-Jazeera work
Al-Jazeera has interviewed Dorothy Parvaz, the network journalist who was held for 19 days in Syria and Iran. Parvaz describes how the Syrian government told her at first that she was believed to be a U.S. spy, but later it became clear, she said, that she was being held because she worked for the network.…
CPJ voices concern as journalists are released
New York, May 18, 2011–The release of foreign journalists held in Iran and Libya today is a very positive development in a region where the press has been under attack since social upheaval began in Tunisia early this year, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.