WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Syria was the least safe country for journalists in 2015, US Secretary of State John Kerry stated at a Washington Post headquarters opening ceremony on Thursday.
"Last year alone 71 media workers were killed while on duty, almost 200 were thrown into jail. The most dangerous country was Syria," Kerry said.
Radical groups killed 28 journalists last year, nine of them were killed in France, which became the second most dangerous country for the press in 2015 after Syria, according to the CPJ report.
John Kerry said that most of the media workers who get killed while on duty are targeted because of their profession.
"In our era, roughly two thirds of the reporters who died violently or killed, not in spite of their profession, but because of it," Kerry stated.
Kerry noted that when he was in Vietnam during the war I that country, he used to read or hear occasionally about journalists’ deaths mostly in accidents.
"It was essentially anonymous. That is not true today. Journalists then were rarely hunted. Today they are," Kerry pointed out.
A December report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on journalists killed in 2015 revealed that many of the deaths came as a result of deliberate violence against the press as journalists have become targets of various radical groups.
The RFS report noted that a total of 110 journalists were killed last year in connection with their job or for unclear reasons. Of the total number of killed journalists, 67 were targeted when they were on the job, according to the report.
