SYRIA

Syria is a Republic located in Western Asia. This country is in the hands of the President Bashar al-Assad’s family and his Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, who have remained dominant forces in the country’s politics since the 1970 coup. Since they came to the power Syria has a turbulent economic and a bad situation in terms of human rights.

Freedom House is an independent watchdog organization dedicated to the expansion of freedom and democracy around the world. They made a Freedom World 2019 Map where you can check the situation of every place. According to this source, Syria is part of those locations where the freedom doesn´t exist at all. They did a ranking based on the Internet freedom of all countries and they gave the score of 13/25 to Syria, whereas for example Canada has 24/25.

Other organization which can prove what Freedom House said is Reporters without borders (RSF), an independent NGO who promotes freedom of information. They did a ranking as well, called The World Press Freedom Index, it is published every year since 2002 and it is an advocacy tool based on the principle of emulation between states. According to that, Syria is the 177 out of 180 countries in the freedom world ranking in 2018.

“Syria’s civil war has made it one of the world’s deadliest country for journalists” RSF added.

Syria’s civil war started in 2011, this has made it one of the world’s deadliest country for journalists. Professional journalists and citizen-journalists are victims of violence by all parties.
This war is a relevant cause to explain the increase of crimes against journalists in the country. If we search the data from The World Press Freedom Index, we can see that before the war, for example in 2010, 58 journalists were killed, whereas in period of war, for example in 2015, the figure goes up to 82 journalists.

In 2019 a journalist has already died. The actual situation in this country is worrying and Syria’s civil war is not an excuse for explaining these deaths, because there are some more factors which are destroying the freedom, like the manipulation of the dictator Bashar al-Assad, as VICE New says, a channel which produces daily documentary essays and video. They did a documentary based on the actual situation in Syria, called This is what life is like inside Assad´s Syria, which shows perfectly what is going on there.

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Maria Jose Garcia is a JMC major who is graduating this year and considers journalism her passion.