French journalist dies from injuries sustained in western Mosul

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — French journalist Stephan Villeneuve who was injured in an explosion in western Mosul has succumbed to his injuries, France 2 television confirmed in a statement on Tuesday.

"The management and staff at France Télévisions sympathise with the pain of his partner Sophie, his four children, his family and all those he was close to. They offer their most sincere condolences," the head of the news department wrote in a statement announcing his death as the result of a mine explosion.

The photojournalist Villeneuve and two other French journalists were working with Kurdish journalist Bakhtiyar Haddad, when a planted bomb exploded, killing Haddad on Monday. Stephan Villeneuve was reporting on the Battle of Mosul for the Envoyé Spécial program on France 2.

Villeneuve and a colleague Veronique Robert were taken to a US base in the town of Qayyara in southern Nineveh Province for treatment. The US-led international coalition to defeat ISIS told Rudaw English that it would leave it up to the nation of origin to release details about their citizens. The French Embassy in Iraq hadn’t commented on the incident.

The other French journalist Samuel Fore, who has worked for media organizations including the French daily LeFigaro, tweeted on Monday night “I am ok. I am immensely saddened for Bakhtiyar and my colleagues. Please do not try to contact me in the next few days.”

The blast occurred in the Ras al-Jadah district west of Old Mosul. Iraqi security forces announced a three-pronged offensive over the weekend to recapture ISIS’s last pocket in the densely populated old city.

Old Mosul is where ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the so-called Islamic Caliphate on June 29, 2014 in al-Nuri mosque.

Villeneuve and Robert were described by veteran French journalist and TV producer Emilie Raffoul as “not burnt heads, they knew how to handle the danger, it’s just being on the spot in this war of unfortunateness.” Villeneuve had reported on the war in Kosovo. “He was really a seasoned journalist,” explained Raffoul during an interview on the program Bourdin Direct.

AFP news agency reported on Tuesday morning that Elysee announced Villeneuve was made a knight of the Legion of Honor posthumously — a rare distinctino for a journalist killed while reporting.

These are the third and fourth confirmed killings of a journalist in conflict in Iraq in 2017. 

Rudaw correspondent Shifa Gardi was killed while working on a story about an ISIS mass grave south of Mosul on February 25. Her cameraman, Younis Mustafa, was injured in the explosion of an IED that killed Shifa and several Hashd al-Shaabi fighters. 

Nuzhian Arhan, a Turkish citizen who was working for a news agency affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), died from wounds she sustained while covering clashes between the Kurdistan Region's Peshmerga forces and the PKK-affiliate Shingal Protections Units (YBS) in Shingal, west of Mosul on March 23. 

With the death of Villeneuve and Haddad, the conflict in Iraq has killed 28 journalists or professional journalists since 2014, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), and adding "Nobody should pay the high price of just doing their information work."