Anti-Daesh Syrian filmmaker laid to rest in southern Turkey

Grieving relatives and supporters on Monday buried a Syrian filmmaker who was assassinated in Turkey after producing documentaries hostile to the Islamic State (IS) group.

Dozens of supporters attended the funeral of Naji Jerf, 37, in the southeastern Turkish city of Gaziantep before he was laid to rest, an AFP photographer said.

Fellow activists from the citizen-journalism group Raqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS) had said Jerf, a father of two, was shot dead in Gaziantep on Sunday with a silencer-equipped pistol.

There has so far been no public comment on the killing by Turkish officials.

Relatives and loved ones held up pictures of Jerf and crowded round the coffin to touch his eyes and the skin on his face for the last time.

Jerf's colleagues had said he was supposed to arrive in Paris this week after he and his family received a visa for asylum in France.

Jerf was also editor in chief of Hentah, a Syrian magazine that reports on the "daily lives of Syrian citizens", said the publication's website.

RBSS is a group of citizen journalists who work to expose human rights abuses in Raqa, the northeastern city that IS uses as its de facto capital in Syria. Jerf had made films for the group.

Gaziantep, just north of Syria, is a major hub for the Syrian population in Turkey who fled the civil war and who now number at least 2.2 million nationwide.

This is not the first time a Syrian opposition figure has been murdered in Turkey.

At the end of October, IS claimed responsibility for killing young activist Ibrahim Abdelkader and his friend Fares Hamadi. They were found decapitated in a house in Sanliurfa in southern Turkey.

"Syrian journalists who have fled to Turkey for their safety are not safe at all," said Sherif Mansour of the US-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

"We call on Turkish authorities to bring the killers of Naji Jerf to justice swiftly and transparently, and to step up measures to protect all Syrian journalists on Turkish soil," Mansour said in a statement.

The CPJ noted that Jerf had recently directed and produced a documentary about the killing of Syrian activists by IS jihadists which had aired on Saudi-owned TV channel Al-Arabiya and received tens of thousands of views on the Internet.
Source: AFP