Mexico is the second-most deadly conflict zone in the world behind only Syria in the number of murders committed each year ONly the deaths in Mexico are caused by the Drug Cartels, not a war zone, according to a new study.

The country has surpassed both Iraq and Afghanistan to become the world’s most violent country after Syria, the study by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) says.

Nearly 23,000 people were killed in Mexico in 2016 as the turf wars among drug cartels continued. Around 17,000 were killed in Afghanistan and 16,000 in Iraq during the same time period.

Researchers pointed out that Mexico’s level of violence is especially shocking because the conflict in the country is “marked by the absence of artillery, tanks or combat aviation,” IISS director general John Chipman said while discussing the survey in London on Tuesday. Instead, Chipman said, almost all of the Mexican deaths were the result of small arms.

The highest numbers of deaths were reported in the states of Sinaloa and Guerrero, known for fighting “among competing, increasingly fragmented cartels,” he said. Violence frequently occurs as gangs attempt to clear locations of rivals so that they can gain control of select drug trafficking routes or markets.

Overall, Syria remained the most violent place on earth, according to the study cited by Bloomberg. The conflict in Syria has left around 50,000 people dead since it started in 2011.

Violence dropped significantly in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the study, with the amount of people killed falling more than a third from the year before.

Worldwide, the number of people who died in armed battles dropped to 157,000 in 2016 from 167,000 in 2015. The globalists are slacking but those numbers are still high compared to the previous decade. According to the survey the number of civilians displaced by globalist wars continue to increase, too.

Even Journalists are being murdered in astounding rates. On March 23, the 54-year-old correspondent for Chihuahua’s La Jornadabecame the 30th journalist murdered in the country since 2012.

According to Reporters without Borders, Mexico is currently the most dangerous country in the world for journalists, with nine media professionals murdered in 2016 alone.

“The effect of the violence is a kind of self-censorship,” said Javier Valdez, an award-winning reporter who worked with Breach in northwest Mexico. “You have to know the rules – how the gangs or police or a local politician here or there will respond to a certain story – but those rules can change quickly.”

“These are impossible conditions in which to practice journalism,” Valdez said.

Last month alone five journalist were targeted across the country — three of them fatally.

While organized crime hangs over the majority of reporters’ deaths, occasionally the motives are hard to pinpoint. Ricardo Monlui, a newspaper columnist in Veracruz who was shot March 19 by a gunman on a motorcycle, mostly covered issues relating to the sugar-cane industry.

As for Breach, she uncovered many scandals along her 20-year career, yet colleagues and state officials believe her work on the political activities of drug traffickers is what ultimately led to her murder.

“Miroslava documented and denounced the links between state politics and drug trafficking,” said Chihuahua Governor Javier Corral, who knew Breach personally, during a radio interview.

In view of the rising number of journalists being targeted, the Mexican government created the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Crimes against Freedom of Expression (FEADLE) to investigate all known cases since 2006.

According to a recent freedom of information request made by the Mexican news outlet Animal Político, in the past seven years FEADLE has opened 798 investigations into aggressions against journalists, which included 47 murders, but only three cases have resulted in a criminal conviction.

For Esteban Illades, a leading Mexico City journalist, the problem of impunity can partly be traced to a taut relationship between media and authorities and a notoriously dysfunctional criminal justice system in which startlingly few crimes are solved.

“Historically, in Mexico the government has failed to understand the role of the press and the difficulties they face in doing their jobs,” Illades told Fox News. “The criminal justice systems at both the state and federal level are simply inadequate.”

Mexico has seen widespread drug violence since the mid-2000s when the federal government launched a crackdown on organized crime. Ironically, the attacks against journalists in recent years have come as the country transitioned into a competitive democracy after 71 years of one-party rule and the media – once largely state-controlled – gained unprecedented freedom.

Yet according to Illades, solidarity among Mexican media outlets and journalists is weak.

“The guild of journalists in Mexico is very fragmented, there are diverse groups with diverse loyalties,” he said. “Almost no one supports another journalist who is threatened. On the contrary, I’ve seen journalists celebrate threats against others because of the kind of work they do.”