Naji al Jerf

Naji al Jerf was born in Salamiyah, Syria, and belonged to the Ismaeli minority, a branch of Shia Islam. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Tishreen University. He worked as an Al Jazeera documentary producer in Damascus until the beginning of the civil war. He then became the editor-in-chief of Hentah, a Syrian magazine that reports on the daily lives of Syrian citizens. He also founded Hentawi magazine, a version geared towards young readers. He was one of the co-founders and filmmakers of Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, a group exposing human rights abuses in the Syrian capital of IS. He made two documentaries about IS, one of them about their killing of media activists and a health worker in Aleppo. He also trained hundreds of citizen journalists in Syria and Turkey. He was married to Boshra Kashmar, a poet, and had two daughters. He was known by many as 'Uncle' because of his mentoring and training of many young people in the revolutionary movement. He was granted asylum in France and was about to leave Turkey with his family when he was shot and killed by unknown assailants with a silenced pistol in Gaziantep, Turkey, on 27 December 2015. He is buried at Yeşilkent cemetery.