Suhaib Bader Darwish, who was arrested on November 18. On De- cember 18, 2003, Al-Ajili was released, while Darwish remained in jail until January 25, 2004. - On May 21, 2004, Al Jazeera’s cameraman, Rashid Hamid Wali, was shot dead by U.S. snipers in the city of Karbala in southern Iraq, while he was filming the fighting. - In October 2006, former British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, revealed in an interview with the British Channel 4 that, during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, he proposed to the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, that the British army bomb Al Jazeera’s office in Baghdad (1) . - On August 7, 2004, the Iraqi interim-government ordered the clo- sure of the Network’s Baghdad office for one month. The following month, the order was extended indefinitely. The closure lasted for more than six years and the bureau resumed its operations on March 3, 2011. - In 2013, the Iraqi Communications and Media Commission sus- pended the licenses of Al Jazeera and nine other channels, but Al Jazeera continued to operate from the northern city of Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region. - On April 14, 2016, the Central Military Commission withdrew Al Jazeera’s permit to operate in Iraq for one year. A year later, the ban was lifted, and the Network resumed its operation from its Baghdad bureau. 3. Hacking and Spying: Another Form of Targeting Al Jazeera On March 4, 2003, the New York Stock Exchange authority banned Al Jazeera’s business correspondents, Ammar Al-Sinkari and Ramzi Al-Shibr, who were preparing their reports from within the New York Stock Exchange premises. The American campaign against Al Jazeera
(1) “Blunkett: We Must Bomb Al-Jazeera TV”, Daily Mirror , (12 October 2006): https:// www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/blunkett-we-must-bomb-al-jazeera-tv-703191/ (accessed 30/03/2021).
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