Towards the end of 2013, Himal asked whether Southasia was becoming a safer place for journalists. The answer at the time was: "seems to be". This conclusion followed the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)'s statistics on the imprisonment and country-by-country killings of reporters for the year.
In the wake of the Taliban's 20 January attack this year on Afghanistan's TOLO TV network, killing eight of the network's employees, it seems time to revisit our earlier conclusion.
India and Pakistan both saw a journalist killed in 2015 for reasons directly related to their profession, according to figures from the CPJ. Five were killed in Bangladesh that same year. In Afghanistan however, no journalists were killed in 2015 – despite three murders the previous year.
The world leader in killing journalists in 2015 was again Syria, which has held this undesirable position since erupting into conflict in 2012. However despite the deaths of 14 journalists in the country last year, the casualties have fallen from the peak of 31 in 2012. France last year appeared second on CPJ's list, with all eight deaths attributable to the Charlie Hebdo attack.