The 29 year-old Serena Shim was married and had two young children. Her tragic death was almost certainly an unlawful assassination designed firstly to silence her from reporting further on Turkey’s involvement in the rise of ISIL/Daesh, and secondly to act as a violent warning to other journalists to stay away from trying to expose the true nature of the war in Syria and the cynical manufacturing of the ‘Islamic State’ for geo-political purposes. The United States’ lack of interest in pursuing the matter of her death also suggests the US is complicit in that warning too.In October 2014 Serena Shim herself joined the roll-call of brave journalists over the years who’ve risked – and ultimately sacrificed – their lives for the sake of uncovering the truth. Her bravery is all the more meaningful in the context of how most mainstream, corporate-owned journalism has been either reluctant or unwilling to dig deeper beyond the superficial surface of the ‘ISIS’ story and report more honestly about the origins of the crisis.Certainly at the time of her death this time last year, mainstream journalists were almost entirely conforming to the approved corporate/political script, even if more meaningful journalism has started to gradually emerge in isolated spurts between then and now. But Shim was one of the few who was risking life and limb in dangerous territory to report on what was really going on. And she paid with her life.____________________Reporters Without Borders has labelled Turkey the ‘world’s largest prison for journalists’. In the supposedly democratic nation with EU membership aspirations, press freedom is pretty much non-existent. In an atmosphere of intimidation and fear, Turkey imprisons more journalists than any other modern nation; in spite of this tight control of information, people like Serena Shim and others have nevertheless managed to expose Turkey’s criminal role in supporting the Islamic State terror group and sustaining/funding the War in Syria that has killed over a quarter-of-a-million Syrians.Meanwhile the killing of journalists and activists, either as tragic consequences of reporting from danger zones or by deliberate, targeted assassination, is an ongoing crime all over the world. The highly suspicious death of Jacky Sutton in a Turkish airport, just announced this evening, demonstrates that Serena Shim wasn’t the first and won’t be the last journalist to lose their life in the field, and that she is part of a long line of journalists who’ve been killed for various reasons over the years, including the likes of Max Hastings, Hunter S. Thompson, Garry Webb, Daniel Pearl, Maya Nasser and many others. According to the International Press Institute, 64 journalists have been killed so far in 2015.This, this, this and this are all examples of the very real, mortal dangers journalists and photo-journalists face when putting themselves on the line for the sake of information or the sake of exposing inconvenient truths.Change.org is petitioning the United States Department of Justice to investigate Shim’s death; you can add your signature to the petition here. Anonymous also launched

Source: The Killing of SERENA SHIM & the ‘Suicide’ of Former BBC Journalist Jackie Sutton…