Iraq is no longer the world's deadliest nation for journalists, (the Philippines is), and no journalists or media workers were abducted last year, another stark improvement from prior years.
Now that journalists are not being killed, efforts are being made to control what they write and broadcast.
Take the newspaper journalist Nadjha Khadum who carved a role for herself during the 1980s war between Iraq and Iran.
She filed dispatches from the front lines, though Saddam Hussein's iron censorship meant that even if she wanted to, she could not report on Iraq's use of chemical and nerve agents against legions of Iranian child soldiers.
Continue reading Iraq's alarming 'return to authoritarianism'.