Tributes for Shifa Gardi, 'courageous' journalist killed in Mosul reporting Isil atrocities

Colleagues have paid tribute to a Kurdish journalist who was killed by a road side bomb while reporting on the battle to recapture Mosul from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).  

Shifa Gardi, a presenter and head of output for Rudwar, an Iraqi Kurdish television station Rudaw, was killed on Saturday while investigating mass graves left behind by Isil in the Mosul area.

Gardi, 30, was interviewing the commander of a Shiite militia unit near a large hole believed to have been used as a mass grave when the commander inadvertently stepped on a trip wire that set off the bomb on Saturday afternoon.

The blast killed Gardi, the commander, and four other fighters, Rudaw said in a statement on Sunday.

Younis Mustafa , her cameraman, and seven other fighters were injured.

Gardi and Mustafa had been making a report about the so called “valley of death,” an area 20 kilometers south of Mosul and five kilometers from the main Baghdad-Mosul road that is believed to have been used by Isil for mass executions.

Ms Gardi, 30, was the presenter of Focus Mosul, a special a daily news program focusing on the battle to recapture Mosul from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

She had recently started broadcasting from within the city itself.

Rudaw described Ms Gardi as one of the stations’s "most daring journalists," and said she “cracked the glass ceiling.”

“Journalism remains male-dominated — Shifa Gardi broke those perceptions & stereotypes,” the station said in a statement.

“We pay tribute to her courageous journalism.”

In a report last week, she described rescue ng an injured rabbit she came across in a village recently liberated from Isil.

“I encountered an injured rabbit in the village of Albu Saif which was liberated yesterday evening. The rabbit is suffering from malnutrition which has caused visible damage to its face,” she said in the report.