Al Jazeera’s pioneering and unapparelled coverage of the Arab Spring led to more challenges for the network. Its journalists suffered different forms of abuses ranging from harassment, to detention and murder. The following are a few examples of such abuses: Yemen: In March 2011, the Yemeni authorities terminated Al Jazeera’s license to operate in the country. In August 2016, journalist Mubarak Al-Abadi was killed as a result of a mortar shell falling near him while he was covering the fighting between government forces and Houthi rebels in Al-Jawf province. Libya : In March 2011, the late leader Muammar Gaddafi’s offi- cials arrested an Al Jazeera team consisting of four members, journal- ists Ahmed Val Ould Eddine and Lotfi Messaoudi, and cameramen Am- mar Al-Hamdan and Kamal Al-Talua. On March 12 of the same year, cameraman, Ali Hassan Al-Jaber, was killed in an ambush near Beng- hazi. His colleague, Al Jazeera reporter, Biba Ould Mahadi, recounts these difficult moments saying: “One evening, two young men came to the bureau and asked me to cover an activity they intended to organize in Suluq, 45 kilometres southwest of Benghazi…We agreed to cover the event, and on our way back to Benghazi just before nightfall, we suddenly heard an explosion, followed by bullets. I saw blood flowing from the head of our colleague Nasser Al-Haddar, while our colleague Ali Hassan Al-Jaber was reciting the ‘shahada’ prayer. (1) Syria: In April 2011, Syrian forces arrested Al Jazeera English’s correspondent, Dorothy Parvaz, who was later deported to Iran. In July 2012, correspondent Omar Khashram sustained injuries when a shell exploded near him, while he was covering events in Aleppo. During the course of four years, seven Al Jazeera staff members were killed in Syria (2) .
(1) Biba Ould Mahadi, personal interview, Doha, 22 February 2021.
(2) Those staff members are: Muhammad al-Hourani, a reporter who was killed with a sniper’s bullet on 18 January 2013 as he was covering the fights in Daraa. Hussein Abbas, a citizen journalist who was killed on May 1, 2014, as he was heading back home after covering the fighting in the outskirts of Idlib. Muhammad Al-Qasim, was killed on 10 September 2014, during an ambush by unknown as- sailants as he was returning from covering the fighting in the outskirts of Idlib.
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