Control Room is a 2004 documentary film directed by Jehane Noujaim, about Al Jazeera and its relations with the US Central Command (CENTCOM), as well as the other news organizations that covered the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Paul Marshall Johnson Jr. was an American helicopter engineer who lived in Saudi Arabia. In 2004, he was taken hostage by militants and his murder was recorded on video tape.
Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, abbreviated as JTJ or Jama'at, was an Islamic extremist Salafi jihadist terrorist group. It was founded in Jordan in 1999, and was led by Jordanian national Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for the entirety of its existence. During the Iraqi insurgency (2003–11), the group became a decentralized network with foreign fighters with a considerable Iraqi membership.
Enzo G. Baldoni was an Italian journalist working freelance and for the Italian news magazine Diario before being kidnapped and killed in captivity as captured on video by his captors. Baldoni was one of two Italians kidnapped in Iraq.
Kenneth John Bigley was a British civil engineer who was kidnapped by Islamic extremists in the al-Mansour district of Baghdad, Iraq, on 16 September 2004, along with his colleagues, U.S. citizens Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong. Following the murders of Hensley and Armstrong by beheading over the course of three days, Bigley was killed in the same manner two weeks later, despite the attempted intervention of the Muslim Council of Britain and the indirect intervention of the British government. Videos of the killings were posted on websites and blogs.
Fabrizio Quattrocchi was an Italian mercenary taken hostage and subsequently murdered by insurgents in the Iraq War.
Akihiko Saito was a Japanese security specialist adviser who was taken hostage by the Jaish Ansar al-Sunna in Iraq in 2005.
Members of the Iraqi insurgency began taking foreign hostages in Iraq beginning in April 2004. Since then, in a dramatic instance of Islamist kidnapping they have taken captive more than 200 foreigners and thousands of Iraqis; among them, dozens of hostages were killed and others rescued or freed. In 2004, executions of captives were often filmed, and many were beheaded. However, the number of the recorded killings decreased significantly. Many hostages remain missing with no clue as to their whereabouts. The United States Department of State Hostage Working Group was organized by the U.S. Embassy, Baghdad, in the summer of 2004 to monitor foreign hostages in Iraq.
The Christian Peacemaker hostage crisis involved four human rights workers of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) who were held hostage in Iraq from November 26, 2005 by the Swords of Righteousness Brigade. One hostage, Tom Fox, was killed, and the remaining three freed in a military operation on March 23, 2006.
Jill Carroll is an American former journalist who worked for news organizations such as The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, and the Christian Science Monitor. On January 7, 2006 while working for the Monitor, she was kidnapped in Iraq, attracting worldwide support for her release. Carroll was freed on March 30, 2006. After her release, Carroll wrote a series of articles for the Monitor on her recollection of her experiences in Iraq. She participated in a fellowship at Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and returned to work for the Monitor. She later retired from journalism and began working as a firefighter.
Richard Engel is an American journalist and author who is the chief foreign correspondent for NBC News. He was assigned to that position on April 18, 2008 after serving as the network's Middle East correspondent and Beirut bureau chief. Before joining NBC in May 2003, Engel reported on the start of the 2003 war in Iraq for ABC News as a freelance journalist in Baghdad.
Marie-Hélène Carleton is a writer, photographer, model, and documentary filmmaker, based out of New York City.
Operation Ancient Babylon was the code name given to the deployment of Italian forces during the Iraq War. Their mission lasted from 15 July 2003 to 1 December 2006. The troops were located in and around Nasiriyah.
Mark Franchetti is a journalist and documentary filmmaker. He worked for 23 years as a correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, much of it as the paper's Moscow correspondent. Fluent in five languages, Franchetti was awarded the British Press Award in 2003, after reporting on the Moscow theatre siege, when he entered the building twice during the hostage taking to interview the terrorists and a Foreign Press Association award in 2004 for his reports on the alleged abuse of Iraqi civilians by U.S Marines. He writes mainly about Russia and the former Soviet Union, has reported extensively on the conflict in Chechnya and covered the wars in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Georgia, and Ukraine.
John Henry Cantlie was a British war photographer and correspondent. He was kidnapped in Syria with James Foley in November 2012. He had previously been kidnapped in Syria alongside Dutch photographer Jeroen Oerlemans in July 2012, but was rescued a week later. In July 2017, reports surfaced in Iraqi media claiming Cantlie had been killed in an airstrike sometime during the battle of Mosul. In October 2017, a French ISIS fighter told French magazine Paris Match that he had seen Cantlie "seven or eight months ago" in Raqqa. In January 2019, an official of the Syrian Democratic Forces stated Cantlie may still be alive inside Deir ez-Zor Governorate, Syria.
Al Jazeera Media Network, endowed by the Government of Qatar, is one of the world's largest news organizations. It provides extensive news coverage through 80 bureaus on a variety of media platforms in several languages, including Arabic and English. Al Jazeera has a large audience, but the organization has been criticized for its alleged involvement in controversies ranging from slanted journalism to anti-Hindu bias and anti-Israel bias.
Al Jazeera Arabic is a Qatari state-owned Arabic-language news television network. It is based in Doha and operated by the Al Jazeera Media Network, which also operates Al Jazeera English. It is the largest news network in the Middle East and North Africa region. It was founded in 1996 by the then Emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. Noted for its journalistic professionalism, Al Jazeera gained popularity in the Arab World as an alternative to the previous landscape of largely local state owned broadcasters, with its early coverage being openly critical of autocratic leaders in the region, as well as hosting a wide range of viewpoints, gaining credibility through its extensive frontline coverage of the Second Intifada and the Iraq War. Al Jazeera Arabic is editorially independent from Al Jazeera English.
The Kidnapping of Angelo dela Cruz, a Filipino Overseas Filipino Worker working in Iraq, is an event that led to the withdrawal of Filipino soldiers from the Multi-National Force – Iraq, a United States-led multinational coalition which was a participant in the Iraq War.
Abdulameer M. Al-Dafar Al-Hamdani was an archaeologist and politician who served as the minister of culture of Iraq between 2018 and 2020.
A series of demonstrations, marches, sit-ins and civil disobedience took place in Iraq from 2019 until 2021. It started on 1 October 2019, a date which was set by civil activists on social media, spreading mainly over the central and southern provinces of Iraq, to protest corruption, high unemployment, political sectarianism, inefficient public services and foreign interventionism. Protests spread quickly, coordinated over social media, to other provinces in Iraq. As the intensity of the demonstrations peaked in late October, protesters’ anger focused not only on the desire for a complete overhaul of the Iraqi government but also on driving out Iranian influence, including Iranian-aligned Shia militias. The government, with the help of Iranian-backed militias responded brutally, using live bullets, marksmen, hot water, hot pepper gas and tear gas against protesters, leading to many deaths and injuries.
