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Reporters Without Borders is dismayed to learn that Canadian freelance photographer Ali Mustafa was killed by a barrel bomb in the Aleppo district Al-Hadariyeh on 9 March while photographing the death and destruction cause by an earlier bomb. Seven other people were killed.
Mustafa, 30, had gone to Syria to cover the suffering of the civilian population in Aleppo, of late the target of a wave of barrel bombs – barrels packed with explosives that government forces drop from low-flying aircraft.
Born in Toronto of immigrant parents of Pakistani and Portuguese origin, he had been covering the Middle East for several years and had closely followed the Arab uprisings that began in 2011.
A wake was held for him yesterday evening in Toronto.
Mustafa was the 9th foreign journalist to be killed in Syria since the start of the uprising in March 2011. A total of 28 Syrian journalists and more than 100 citizen journalists have been killed in connection with their reporting in the past three years. Syria is ranked 177th out of 180 countries in the 2014 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.
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