Small World News

Ali Shafeya was killed on December 14th. I’ve listed the details of his death below as they appear on Alive in Baghdad’s blog. We’re determined to continue and will be raising money for the future of Alive in Baghdad via a new ChipIn widget soon. We raised $2500 to cover the costs of his funeral and support the family. We hope you will continue to support Alive in Baghdad as it continues. You can also call the Committee to Protect Journalists and ask why they did not list Ali Shafeya in their annual list of Journalists killed in 2007. Here is their phone number: 212-465-1004

Thanks again for all your support.

***Original Blog below***

Ali Shafeya Al-Moussawi was born in 1984 on December 16th, he was killed on December 14th, 2007.

We are collecting donations for the funeral and his family. You can make a donation via Paypal to smallworldnews (at) gmail.com . If you would like to make a donation by mail or via a different payment service please email us directly at the previous address. We have raised nearly $600 until now, but more will help. His mother and sister are displaced Iraqis leaving in Syria without employment.

Ali lived in Habibya, it’s considered as a part of the Sadr city. On Friday the 14th at 11:30pm Baghdad time, Iraqi National Guard forces raided the street where Ali’s house is, one of the neighbors heard a gun firing after 15 minutes from the arrival of the Iraqi National Guard convoy to the street, the force left at 3:00am. His neighbors kept calling Ali’s phone and it was switched off all the time, so they called his cousin Amar because he lives one block away from where Ali lives.

Amar arrived in Ali’s house and found Ali shoot dead in the living room, Amar called the Iraqi Police and told them the story as he heard it from Ali’s neighbors. At 8:30 am Baghdad time the Iraqi Police took Ali’s body to the morgue, his two uncles received the body at 10:00am and they headed to Najaf to bury him.

Amar said the  neighbor who lives in the front of his house was shot dead too during that raid, the guy’s name is Hussein and he is 26 years old. He was in his place along with his brother and nephew. The brother and the nephew disappeared after the convoy left.

The morgue report says that Ali took 31 bullets between the chest and the head and died immediately. He will be missed and remembered. His two brothers were killed in the Firdos Square bombing in 2005. He is survived by his mother and sister. As written above, we are collecting donations for his family via Paypal and mail at smallworldnews (at) gmail.com No amount is too small, and anything will be appreciated.

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This is just a note to let our readers and viewers know that Brian Conley will be on Johnny’s Partay this Wednesday, November 13th. Come watch and join in the discussion. You can ask Brian questions via chat, or via live webcam if you have an Operator 11 account!

Check out <a href=”http://www.jonnygoldstein.com/2007/11/10/alive-in-baghdad-on-jonnys-partay-weds-nov-14-9pm-eastern/”>Johnny’s post about the event</a>, to learn how you can participate and engage in discussion! If you have questions for Brian about Alive in Baghdad’s work, or stories you’d like to suggest, come join in!

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We’re fortunate to have some very good news to report! We have raised 1770.00 dollars since I posted that we were broke. That means we’ll be able to continue the project for the time being, but we are still seeking support in the form of monthly subscription payments, which are currently stalled at about $225/mo (that’s less than 10% of what we need to run the project each month).

We hope you will consider making an ongoing payment if you haven’t yet, and you value the work of Alive in Baghdad. We are lucky to have a colleague who has made a substantial loan to the project, which will keep us going at least through November. We are uncertain how long this arrangement will be tenable, and hope that the donation of $2200/mo by one
dedicated supporter will encourage those of you who have not yet taken a moment to support the work of Iraqi journalists, who risk their lives each week to bring you they type of detailed stories you can’t find anywhere else.

Last but not least, we have received a bit of media coverage of late! Please check out this great story by Dan Rubin of the Philly Inquirer, profiling Alive in Baghdad. Also, if you’re in the New York Area, Brian will be speaking on the Bryant Park Project between 7 and 8am on Friday October 26th.

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A friend sent me a link to this article in the Hollywood Reporter this morning. So apparently ABC thinks what we’re doing is viable and the future of at least some portion of news. Make no mistake, we started opening new foreign bureaus in Summer 2006 with the establishment of a weekly program produced in Iraq.

We’re happy to see that other media are following our lead, now we hope a savvy investor will recognize we’re doing it better than the old media, and cheaper. How? The answer to both is the same, we employ locals with local knowledge and relationships. ABC is still insisting on sending foreign nationals trained and salaried at ABC into the field. Hiring foreign nationals is expensive, and they don’t have the same local contacts and networks.

I hope this is good news for our work and that we’ll be able to locate individuals or organizations/investors to collaborate with at the Networked Journalism Summit next week, given this news and of course our own track record.

On the funding side, we’ve raised about $800 so far, which is approximately 1/3rd of our expenses to cover Baghdad staff and necessities. Please consider making a subscription payment if you haven’t yet, and you appreciate our work. Also remember Alive in Mexico needs your support as well!

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We’d like to thank everyone who has donated money thus far, especially those of you who have decided to become ongoing supporters of Alive in Baghdad through subscription payments! We still need to raise $2400 to pay our bills for October, most of which are due by November 1st. At our current rate, we will almost make that!

Please think hard about the money you’re going to spend this month.  Don’t ask yourself how much you can give or donate to Alive in Baghdad. We are not here to be a charity. Please ask yourself what you would pay for on-the-ground news at the grassroots level, of what civilian life is like in Iraq. Can you save $5, $10, or $25 this month and spend it, not only to receive solid information from Iraq, but to support our Iraqi staff who have each been hit hard by the conflict and are desperate for work.

We want everyone to be able to see what is happening in Iraq, whether they can pay or not. However, this work is difficult, dangerous, and not free. If you want to see what is happening on the ground in Iraq, and not just read about it, spend some money to support that work. If you think we are doing a good job depicting life in Iraq, let our staff in Baghdad know by helping to pay their salaries.

If you have comments, criticisms, or stories you’d like to see, please let us know! We welcome the input of our viewers and hope to continue producing a show that is an interesting and enlightening look at daily life in Baghdad.

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