article: That is how Mohammad Mallak, editor-in-chief of Syrian magazine Saiedet Souria, describes his colleague Naji Jerf. "He was a smiling man, energetic. He was laughing all the timeâ€¦" Last month, Jerf, a 38-year-old Syrian anti-Islamic State (IS) activist and journalist, was shot in broad daylight with a silenced pistol in the middle of a busy Turkish street. He was murdered in Gaziantep, a city near the Syrian border, now home to nearly 300,000 Syrians. He was about to leave Turkey with his family for France, where he had been granted asylum. Soon after his death, Reporters Without Borders released the visa application letter Jerf wrote to the French ambassador in Turkey. "I now live in the Turkish city of Gaziantep and my safety is more and more difficult after an increase in the threats to me and my family - above all because I am a secularist and belong to the Ismaili minority, which is targeted by the jihadis." Jerf's journalism and activism made him a target in Syria, the reason he fled across the border to Turkey in November 2012. "Naji was one of the first people who was trying to document what is happening in Syria," says Mohammad Mallak. "The regime wanted him." "At 2012 we began to see that our friends were being taken and got killed by the regime," he adds. "We knew that if they took a friend that they would call the family in two days to deliver his dead body." Once in Turkey, Jerf made two anti-IS films. One of them, about IS in Aleppo, was broadcast on the Saudi-run al-Arabiya channel in September 2012, to an audience of at least 12m, according to the channel. Mr Mallak says that after the release of this documentary, the threats against Jerf, who had two young daughters, increased. "He was afraid. He knew that they were planning to do that. But he didn't believe they could do it. Still, he was saying that he knew that they would shoot him. One day he said, 'But I am afraid of the sound of shooting.'" From Turkey, Jerf also worked with the prominent anti-IS group, Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS), reporting on the IS abuses in the northern Syrian city. He had just finished a film about Raqqa shortly before his death. The film has not yet been released. Jerf also used his base in Gaziantep to train citizen journalists in Syria, as he had done with RBSS before leaving Syria, according to Mr Mallak. "Naji trained more than a thousand citizen journalists," he says. "We trained face to face, we trained via Skype and created tens of journalists' committees to cover the war. We taught them how to make a TV report, radio report, how to write for the newsâ€¦" Turkey, which shares a 900km (560 miles) border with Syria, quickly became a haven for hundreds of Syrian media outlets from 2012, with the majority of journalists based, like Jerf, in border towns like Gaziantep. But the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said recently that Syrian journalists
summary: "He was reliable, generous and a great friendâ€¦"