Award-winning Syria journalist killed in regime air strike

Award-winning Syrian journalist, Anas Alkharboutli, was killed in an air strike by the Bashar Al-Assad regime in western Syria on Wednesday, Anadolu Agency reports.

The attack that killed Alkharboutli was conducted by a regime’s Su-22 warplane in the district of Morik in Hama province at 9.22 a.m. local time (0622GMT).

Alkharboutli, who was born in Kafr Batna, a town in the Eastern Ghouta region of the capital, Damascus, where he began studying energy engineering.

After security forces arrested fellow students at Damascus University in 2011, he paused his studies and began working as a photojournalist in 2014 to document the brutal siege and attacks on Eastern Ghouta by regime forces and their allies.

Eastern Ghouta has a grim history, notably when the Syrian regime carried out a chemical weapons attack on 21 August, 2013, killing over 1,400 civilians in the opposition-controlled area.

In 2018, the region again drew international attention due to relentless assaults by Syrian regime forces and Iranian-backed groups, supported by Russian air strikes.

Thousands of civilians were killed, and humanitarian aid was blocked during the siege. In April 2018, opposition forces were ultimately forced to evacuate Eastern Ghouta under intense military pressure.

In 2016, Alkharboutli was wounded by shrapnel in his foot while covering the shelling by regime forces in his home town, located in the Damascus countryside.

He won the 2020 Young Reporter of the Year Prize at the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for war correspondents.

Alkharboutli won the prize for his work covering the latest military campaign in Idlib and documenting the actions of the Syrian regime, Russia, and Iran as they targeted hospitals, residential areas and public markets.

His photographs, showing people fleeing their homes and taking refuge in farms and camps, were shared by the Ghouta Media Centre.

Alkharboutli received third prize in the Story Sports category of the 2021 Istanbul Photo Awards for his series “Syria: Sport and Fun Instead of War and Fear”. This was part of the seventh round of Anadolu Agency‘s international news photography contest.

Having previously provided news and visual services to Anadolu during the siege of Eastern Ghouta and attacks on the region, he left the region in forced evacuations in 2018.

After his forced displacement, Alkharboutli worked as a photojournalist for German news agency, DPA.

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