Iraq's press freedom index falls amid armed factions kidnappings, record violations
Shafaq News
Thirty-three days before Reporters Without Borders published its annual verdict on press freedom worldwide, a car pulled up alongside American journalist Shelly Kittleson on Saadoun Street in central Baghdad. Two men bundled her into the back seat. By the time Iraqi security forces intercepted one of the getaway vehicles near the town of Al-Haswa in Babil province, Kittleson was gone, and the trail led to Kataib Hezbollah, one of the most powerful Iranian-backed forces operating inside Iraq's official security architecture.
The abduction on March 31 was a dispatch from the environment that the 2026 RSF index has now formally recorded: Iraq has fallen to 162nd place out of 180 countries, down seven positions from last year, with an overall score of 28.85 out of 100. The economic indicator —which measures the financial independence of media— is the weakest of all five categories, placing Iraq 169th globally. Armed conflict, political capture, and structural economic precarity have combined to make Iraq one of the most hostile press environments on earth, and the index reflects a year in which that hostility became measurably worse.
The regression matters beyond the numbers. A year ago, Iraq had climbed fourteen places —from 169th to 155th —in what some observers read as tentative progress. That reading was always contested by journalists on the ground. The 2026 figure forecloses the debate. RSF now places Iraq in the same category as Sudan and Yemen, countries defined by active armed conflict, identifying recurring violence as the primary driver of decline.
A Profession Under Institutional Siege
The Kittleson kidnapping crystallized, for an international audience, a threat that Iraqi journalists have described for years. The US Embassy had warned her repeatedly to leave the country in the weeks before her abduction. She had written, just that morning, about drone and missile strikes in Iraqi Kurdistan. The warning came while she was already inside Baghdad, and she stayed.
That calculus —stay and risk, leave and silence— is familiar to Iraqi reporters who cannot relocate to Italy between assignments. The Journalists' Rights Defense Association recorded 182 violations against journalists across Iraq in 2025 alone: two killings, seven kidnappings, 53 cases of blocked coverage, 24 equipment confiscations, 28 legal complaints, and 11 physical assaults.
Baghdad accounted for 62 of those violations, the highest of any province. The Al-Nakheel Center for Rights and Press Freedoms documented more than 100 violations in 2025, with 35 more recorded in the first quarter of 2026 alone, spanning arrests, coverage bans, and institutional pressure on media organizations.
Ziad Al-Ajili, head of the Press Freedoms Center, told Shafaq News that 2025 and 2026 represent among the worst years for Iraqi journalism in recent memory. Restrictions on journalists' movement and access, he said, have increasingly limited field reporting, even as digital tools like artificial intelligence offer theoretical workarounds that institutional and security constraints make difficult to use in practice.
The legal framework compounds the physical danger. Iraq's 1969 Penal Code remains the primary instrument deployed against journalists, its vague provisions on "public morals" and "public order" offering prosecutors wide latitude to pursue reporters who probe corruption or criticize officials. A cybercrime bill that has been repeatedly resubmitted to parliament provides for life imprisonment for online content deemed harmful to national unity, economic interests, or security, categories broad enough to encompass almost any investigative journalism.
In August 2025, the outgoing parliament revived a draft law originally titled the Law on Freedom of Expression, Assembly, and Peaceful Demonstration. In its revived form, all references to "freedom of expression" and the "right to knowledge" had been stripped from both the title and its articles. Legal experts who reviewed the draft for Shafaq News identified at least 17 fundamental flaws requiring complete reconstruction. The bill passed from parliament without becoming law. It now sits with a new legislature whose political composition offers little grounds for optimism.
Read more: The Fine Print of Freedom
Kurdistan's Exceptionalism Collapses
The Kurdistan Region of Iraq has long presented itself, and been received internationally, as a comparatively open media environment, a partial exception to the repression that characterizes Baghdad and the south. That claim did not survive 2025.
Violations against journalists in the Kurdistan Region nearly doubled last year, reaching 315 cases according to the Metro Center for Journalists' Rights, including 74 physical assaults or direct attacks, 53 incidents of equipment seizure or destruction, and 120 coverage bans. Security forces detained journalists without warrants, searched mobile phones, and violated privacy protections. The Metro Center described the findings as evidence of a "serious crisis in the rule of law."
The cases are specific and documented. In February 2025, Kurdistan security forces teargassed at least 22 journalists and arrested two while they were covering a teachers' protest over unpaid salaries, reporters subjected to harsher treatment, witnesses said, than the demonstrators themselves.
In August, journalist Sherwan Sherwani, already imprisoned since 2020 on espionage charges that human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and the United Nations, have characterized as politically motivated, received an additional four years and five months in prison while serving prior sentences. The Committee to Protect Journalists called the sentencing a demonstration of the authorities' determination to silence critical voices permanently.
The Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the two dominant parties that control the Region's political and security apparatus, have both been linked to intimidation campaigns against journalists investigating corruption and official misconduct.
RSF's 2026 profile of Iraq notes that in the Kurdistan Region, critical journalists have been accused of espionage and imprisoned, a pattern that Amnesty International, in a report issued ahead of last year's World Press Freedom Day, described as a "ludicrous" contradiction of the region's self-proclaimed status as a beacon of press freedom.
A Profession Being Economically Suffocated
Behind the arrests and the kidnappings lies a structural erosion that international indices are poorly designed to capture. Iraqi journalists do not only fear gunmen and defamation lawsuits. They fear unemployment.
Jumanah Mumtaz, a journalist who spoke to Shafaq News, described media institutions that dismiss staff without notice, without compensation, and frequently without legal contracts, leaving reporters, particularly those with families and financial obligations, in a position of permanent professional insecurity.
Inas Halim of Al-Sharqiya television described a labor market in which violations routinely include termination without warning or severance, and in which the journalists' syndicate lacks the capacity to provide basic protections, including social security and retirement coverage.
Haider Shalal Mutaab, an academic specializing in media, told Shafaq News that the economic transformation of the Iraqi media sector and the acceleration of digital platforms have produced a more fragile, less stable labor market for journalists. The threats and the absence of legal protection, he said, directly undermine professional stability and reduce reporters' capacity to cover sensitive subjects.
This is the dimension of press freedom that does not appear in security indicators: the slow economic suffocation of independent journalism. RSF's own data shows Iraq's economic indicator at 169th globally —its lowest-ranked category— reflecting a media landscape in which financial survival depends overwhelmingly on alignment with political patrons.
The greater a political party's resources, the more one-sided the outlet tends to be, the organization notes. Independent journalism is not merely dangerous in Iraq. It is, for most practitioners, economically infeasible.
Read more: The New era of control
What The New Parliament Inherits
Iraq's new parliament, shaped by the dominant political blocs that emerged from the 2025 elections, enters its term with the gutted press freedom bill in committee, 182 recorded violations from the prior year on the record, and a ranking that has reversed the modest gains of 2024. That regression carries regional weight: Iraq now sits in the lower tier of Arab press freedom rankings —behind Qatar, Morocco, and Lebanon, but ahead of Egypt, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, which recorded the steepest Arab decline after authorities executed journalist Turki Al-Jasser in 2025.
The Kittleson case —an American journalist, abducted in daylight, by an armed group that operates within the state's own security structure— placed Iraq's press environment briefly on the front pages of international outlets before other crises displaced it.
Read more: The treacherous reality for journalists in Iraq
For Iraqi journalists, there was nothing brief about it. The trajectory of the index, the documented violations, and the economic conditions that make independent reporting structurally unviable all point in the same direction. Whether the legislature elected in 2025 produces a law that reverses that trajectory, or whether it produces nothing —or something worse— is the problem that the next index should solve.
Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.
