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| Mika Yamamoto |
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| Yamamoto's body in the field hospital as her colleague Sato (top right) tries to stroke her forehead (below) |
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| FSA members (top) escorted Yamamoto's body to southern Turkey |
“Condolences from all of us Syrian people to the family of Mika
Yamamoto. She has shared our tragic annihilation at Assad’s hands. May she rest
in peace.”
Rana Kabbani,
the Syrian writer, broadcaster and daughter of former Syrian ambassador to the
United Sates Sabah Kabbani, posted these words on her Twitter page this morning
as a tribute to the Japanese woman journalist killed by Syrian
forces in Aleppo yesterday.
Mika Yamamoto, a
45-year-old award-winning journalist working for Tokyo-based independent newswire
Japan Press, was fatally wounded while travelling with the Free Syrian Army
(FSA), Reuters quoted a Japanese foreign ministry official as saying.
In a telephone
interview with a Japanese TV news program, fellow Japan Press reporter Kazutaka
Sato, who was travelling with Yamamoto, said it appeared government forces shot
her.
“We saw a group of
people in camouflage fatigues coming toward us. They appeared to be government
soldiers. They started random shooting. They were just 20, 30 meters away or
even closer,” said Sato.
He also told Japanese
broadcaster TBS that Yamamoto had been shot in the neck.
The Syrian Observatory
for Human Rights said she was shot in the Sulaimaniya district of Aleppo, the
scene of heavy fighting between government and rebel forces.
The Syrian activist
group also said Bashar Fahmi, a Palestinian reporter for the U.S.
government-funded broadcaster Al-Hurra, his Turkish cameramen Cüneyt Ünal, and
an unnamed Lebanese journalist had disappeared in Aleppo.
Japan Press said on its
website Yamamoto reported from Afghanistan under the Taliban and covered the
2003 Iraq war from Baghdad.
Yamamoto’s Iraq reporting
won a Vaughn-Ueda prize given by the Japanese Newspaper Publishers and Editors
Association and modeled after the U.S. Pulitzers media awards.
In April 2003 she
narrowly escaped a U.S. tank’s attack on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, Jiji
news agency said, while news agency Kyodo described her as a “pioneer video
journalist”.
Yamamoto, who was born
in 1967 and joined Japan Press in 1995, is the first Japanese killed in the
current armed conflict in Syria, the ministry official said.
A video posted on YouTube
overnight showed Yamamoto’s badly injured body lying in a makeshift field
hospital.
One clip shows Sato,
her colleague, bending over her body as if to stroke her forehead.
In the YouTube video, a
group of FSA fighters led by Capt. Ahmed Ghazali are shown escorting Yamamoto’s
body to southern Turkey.
"We welcome any
journalist who wants to enter Syria," Ghazali says. "We will secure
their entry, but we are not responsible for the brutality of Assad's forces
against the media."
“It is extremely
regrettable that a Japanese reporter was gunned down and killed,” Chief Cabinet
Secretary Osamu Fujimura said at a daily news briefing. “We reproach such an
act and offer our heartfelt condolences to those left behind.”
The dead woman's
father, retired journalist Koji Yamamoto, said reports of her death were
"too much to bear."
"I can't believe
it until I see her with my own eyes," the 77-year-old told Jiji Press by
telephone.
"She was always
talking about tragic people who were caught in conflicts, human lives and world
peace. She was more than I was... she is a wonderful reporter and
daughter," he said.
"We mourn the loss
of our colleague Mika Yamamoto and send our deepest condolences to her family
and friends," said CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists) Executive Director
Joel Simon. "Syria has become the most dangerous place in the world for
both local and international journalists."
Yamamoto is the fourth
foreign reporter to have died in the violence in Syria since March 2011.
French reporter Gilles
Jacquier was killed on January 11 at central Syria's Homs, where American
journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik died on February
22.
Maj. Gen. Jamil Hassan
On the day Yamamoto was
killed, the Arabic language website of Russian broadcaster Russia Today quoted
an unnamed Arab source as saying a high-ranking Syrian military official had
died in a Russian hospital and a private jet had flown his body back from
Moscow to Damascus.
Syrian activists and
the FSA have since named the Syrian officer as Maj. Gen. Jamil Hassan, head of
Air Force Intelligence.
Maj. Gen. Hassan presumably suffered serious
injuries in the July 18 bomb blast that killed Assad’s brother-in-law and his
defense minister and decapitated the Syrian security hierarchy.
In its profiles last month
of President Bashar al-Assad’s inner circle
members, the BBC recalled that Maj. Gen. Hassan replaced Abdulfattah Qudsiya as
head of Air Force Intelligence in 2009.
Though smaller than
Military Intelligence, AFI is seen by some as the elite agency of Syria's
intelligence empire. The agency owes its power to Hafez al-Assad, who was air
force chief before coming to power in a coup.
AFI was originally tasked
with protection of the Air Force, including the president’s plane and the
president himself during his trips abroad.
It now plays a leading
role in operations against opposition groups, as well as covert actions abroad,
and has a reputation for brutality.
Gen. Hassan, an Alawite, previously
served as a security official in the eastern governorate of Deir Ezzor.
In late April 2011,
personnel from Air Force Intelligence fired tear gas and live ammunition to
disperse crowds of demonstrators who took to the streets in Damascus and other
cities after noon prayers, killing at least 43 people, according to the US.
The next month, the EU
said Gen Hassan was "involved in the repression against the civilian
population" during the recent anti-government unrest, and imposed a travel
ban on him and froze his assets.
