Shifa Gardi reporting from the Mosul frontline on 25 February. She was killed the same day in a bomb explosion. Photo: screenshot from a video report aired on Rudaw. On 26 February, Shifa Gardi, a journalist and presenter with the Iraqi Kurdish TV station Rudaw, lost her life in a bomb explosion while covering Iraqi forces’ operations to reclaim Mosul from ISIS. The journalist was killed while she was interviewing the commander of a militia group near an ISIS mass grave, when a bomb believed to be planted by the militant group exploded killing Gardi, the commander and four other fighters. The explosion also injured Rudaw TV's cameraman Younis Mustafa. Mustafa was released from hospital, tweeted Rudaw on 20 March, and he is recovering. Gardi's story is not unique in Iraq, and rights groups are concerned that she may not be the last one to lose her life while doing her job as a journalist in a country where at least 178 journalists were killed since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (JFO), a non-profit organization promoting press freedom in the country puts the number of journalists, media support workers and technicians killed since 2003 at 299. The discrepancy between these numbers reflects different methodologies — CPJ only counts confirmed cases of journalists killed in direct reprisal for their work, or those killed while covering clashes and conflicts. The JFO, on the other hand, appears to include numbers of unconfirmed cases. As the conflict continues in Iraq, so do the threats against journalists and media workers. Because of its brutal tactics, ISIS has so far received extensive coverage for its violations committed against media and press freedoms. However, journalists in Iraq also face threats from armed militia groups and government authorities. After ISIS took over Mosul in June 2014, the city “turned into a death trap for journalists,” the JFO and Reporters Without Borders said in a report shedding light on media and press freedom violations committed by the extremist and violent group. Between June 2014 and the date of the release of an updated version of the report earlier this year, the organizations documented the kidnapping of 48 journalists, media workers and journalism students by ISIS in Mosul. Thirteen of those kidnapped were executed, while 25 were released thanks to clan and tribal mediation, but only after they were subjected to torture and pledged not to practice journalism anymore. The fate of ten others remains unknown. ISIS snipers have been responsible for killing journalists while they were on the frontline covering the Iraqi army's battle against the group. On 22 October 2016, Ali Risan a cameraman for Al-Sumaria TV channel was killed while covering clashes between Iraqi forces and ISIS, when a sniper hit him with a bullet in the chest. Just a day earlier, another journalist, Ahmet Haceroğlu of Türkmeneli TV, was killed while covering clashes between Kurdish forces and ISIS militants in the city of Kirkuk. According to the journalist's news outlet and police, Haceroğlu was hit in the chest by an ISIS sniper. A reporter in Mosul, Iraq in November 2016. Photo by Mstyslav Chernov via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) “During the last three years we have lost many journalists: some were executed by Daesh [Arabic language acronym for ISIS] in the regions occupied by the terrorist group, and many others were killed while covering the clashes”, said Bahar Jasim a freelance Iraqi journalist and blogger previously based in Iraq. Jasim left the country in 2014 due to fears over threats in relation to his work. Jasim is hoping that an end to the war with ISIS would “at least mean an end to the murder of journalists by the group” and that journalists “would not have to cover the clashes and put their lives at risk”. Although in the past few weeks, Iraqi forces have been making progress in the battle against ISIS, it remains unclear when the conflict will end, and to what extent the terrorist threat in Iraq will diminish. Most importantly, however, the threats, journalists and reporters face in Iraq, will not come to an end with the defeat of ISIS, as they are also at the mercy of armed militia groups. Renad Mansour, a researcher on Iraq previously affiliated with the Beirut-based Carnegie Middle East Center, estimates the number of armed militias in Iraq between 60 and 70, comprising about 90,000 to 100,000 fighters. Government figures estimate the number of militia fighters at 140,000. Some of these militias are affiliated with political parties such as the Badr Organization, which has members elected to the parliament. Others have close ties to the government.