70 Journalists Killed On The Job In 2013, Syria Listed As Deadliest (VIDEO)

At least 70 journalists were killed on the job around the world in 2013, including 29 who died covering the civil war in Syria and 10 killed in Iraq, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The Syrian casaulities included a number of citizen journalists working to document combat in their home cities, broadcasters who worked with media outlets affiliated with either the government or the opposition, and a handful of correspondents for the foreign press, including an Al-Jazeera reporter, Mohamed al-Mesalma, who was shot by a sniper, the Associated Press reported.

While reporting an Aug. 14 crackdown by Egyptian security forces on demonstrators protesting the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, three reporters were killed. Six journalists, in total, died in Egypt.

"The Middle East has become a killing field for journalists. While the number of journalists killed for their work has declined in some places, the civil war in Syria and a renewal of sectarian attacks in Iraq have taken an agonizing toll," the committee's deputy director, Robert Mahoney, said in a statement. "The international community must prevail on all governments and armed groups to respect the civilian status of reporters and to prosecute the killers of journalists."

The deaths of reporters and broadcasters have been tracked since 1992 by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. The majority of killings involve people covering the news in the places where they live. The same can be said to have happened in 2013.

Many of the deaths occurred during combat, or among reporters covering conflict zones, but journalists in several countries were also murdered after reporting on sensitive subjects, the AP reported.

In separate incidents in Brazil, Colombia, the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Russia, reporters and commentators were slain for covering police misconduct, political corruption or drug trafficking and other sensitive topics.

According to the AP, after meeting with a leader of ethnic Tuareg separatists in Kidal, Mali, a pair of Radio France Internationale journalists were abducted and killed. Militants in Iraq killed five members of the news staff of Salaheddin TV in a suicide attack this month on the channel's offices in Tikrit, Iraq.

For the first time in a decade, no journalists were known to have been killed for their work in Mexico, the AP reported.

The CPJ is still looking into the deaths of an additional 25 journalists in 2013, not included in the tally of 70, to determine whether their deaths had anything to do with their work.

To date, at least 63 journalists have been killed covering the conflict in Syria, the CPJ's report said - and that tally may understate the problem. Sixty journalists have been abducted in Syria this year alone. Thirty are still missing.