As Turkey Escalates Attacks in Iraq, Kurdish Journalists Are Becoming Targets

Journalist Rêbîn Bekir was driving near the Kurdish town of Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq on the morning of August 23, when a rocket slammed into his car.

The vehicle immediately burst into flames. Bekir was lucky. He was thrown from the car by the explosion and survived with injuries. But Bekir’s colleagues, Gülistan Tara and Hêro Bahadîn, died instantly, their bodies burned beyond recognition. The three journalists were traveling to make a documentary for Chatr Multimedia Production Company, where they all worked.

The authorities of the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq said that the rocket was fired by a Turkish drone, a claim that the Turkish Ministry of Defense denies. However, the pro-government Turkish press has offered a different story. For example, the state-run Anadolu Ajansı news agency, citing “security sources,” reported that the attack was a targeted operation by the Turkish intelligence service to “neutralize” “PKK terrorists.”

The attack on the journalists took place against the backdrop of increasing Turkish operations in the Kurdistan region. Since the beginning of July, the Turkish army has intensified its operations against guerrilla units of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in northern Iraq and crossed the border of the autonomous region of Kurdistan with hundreds of soldiers and heavy equipment.

The Kurdish people have a homeland that stretches through regions of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, but no state of their own. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, the Kurds of northern Iraq have enjoyed an extensive and constitutionally protected autonomous status within the borders of the Republic of Iraq. In Syria, the Kurdish population has also been able to achieve an unrecognized de facto autonomous status in the course of the Syrian civil war. Meanwhile, Kurdish parties and organizations in Turkey, where the majority of the Kurdish population live, continue to struggle for legal recognition of their identity and language. In the eastern part of the Kurdish homeland, in Iran, all Kurdish parties are still banned by the ruling government.

The PKK has been fighting for the political and cultural rights of the Kurdish population in Turkey and neighboring countries for 40 years. While at the beginning of its struggle the PKK advocated the creation of an independent Kurdish nation-state, it moved away from this goal in the 2000s and now demands political autonomy for the Kurdish population within existing borders. Most recently, PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan, who has been imprisoned in Turkey for more than 25 years, took part in peace negotiations with the Turkish government between 2013 and 2015, which ultimately failed.

For the first time since the Turkish army began its cross-border ground operations against PKK guerrillas in northern Iraq in 2018, Turkish forces are also advancing into the towns and villages of the region. In recent years, the Turkish army has concentrated mainly on gaining control of strategic mountain peaks and transporting personnel and equipment to the theatre of operations, either on foot or by air. Only in exceptional cases have Turkish troops been found in residential areas or villages. For months, mostly blurry mobile phone videos have been making the rounds on social media, shared thousands of times. Columns of Turkish armored vehicles snake through the streets of the northern Iraqi town of Amadiya. Patrols comb villages in the area in search of suspected guerrillas.

Many fear that the current operation is just the beginning of a long-term occupation of the region. The governor of Sîdekan province told the Rudaw news agency in late June that 46 percent of his province was now under Turkish control. In a particularly explosive development, the Turkish army appears to have begun setting up checkpoints on the roads connecting towns and villages. According to local reports, Turkish soldiers control the movement of Iraqi civilians and prevent them from returning to their villages near the combat zones. The Turkish Ministry of Defense denied the existence of Turkish checkpoints up to 30 kilometers inside Iraqi territory. But a reporter for the U.S. government broadcaster Voice of America published video footage earlier this year showing one of those checkpoints.

Civilians living in the region have been particularly hard hit by the ongoing operations. According to the U.S. nongovernmental organization Community Peacemaker Teams (CPT), at least 6,500 hectares of forest and farmland have been set ablaze by bombing and artillery fire since the latest attacks began. CPT and its teams in the affected areas have been reporting on the impact of Turkish operations on civilians for several years, collecting information and evidence of possible war crimes. “Since the beginning of the year until 1 July, we have been able to verify more than 1,076 attacks by aircraft or artillery. Since the start of the latest offensive in mid-June alone, there have been at least 212,” Julian Floyd Bil, the organization’s human rights officer, told Truthout. Floyd Bil conducts research in the affected areas of northern Iraq. According to CPT, at least 602 villages in the contested areas are at risk of depopulation, as the Turkish army’s air strikes repeatedly hit civilian areas. According to Floyd Bil, only a few families are still in the villages despite the ongoing war, but if the situation continues, they too will soon have to leave their homes.

Rêbîn Bekir has also reported from the embattled areas in recent months. For the managing director of Chatr Multimedia Productions, Kemal Heme Reza, Bekir’s reporting could explain why his car came under attack. “Any journalist who denounces Turkish fascism and reports on how it burns Kurdistan and murders civilians must expect to become a target,” says Heme Reza. Since it was founded in late 2009, his company has been at the forefront of reporting on the Turkish army’s operations. As a production company, Chatr Multimedia Productions has also produced a number of short films and documentaries that have been broadcast on television channels associated with the Kurdish freedom movement, such as Sterk TV and Aryen TV. Both channels openly support the PKK’s fight against the Turkish army and are therefore a thorn in the side of the Turkish leadership.

Heme Reza believes the attack on the three journalists was targeted. The two journalists who were killed had worked for several Kurdish news agencies for years and had also covered the aftermath of the ongoing Turkish operations in northern Iraq. Gülistan Tara was born in 1982 in the city of Batman, in Turkey’s Kurdish region, and worked for media in Iraq and Syria for more than 20 years. In Syria, she was particularly involved in training young female journalists and staff of the first Kurdish women’s channel, JIN TV. Hêro Bahadîn was from Sulaymaniyah and had worked for Chatr for seven years. She was just 27 years old.

This specific attack was not isolated. Just two days earlier, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published an alarming report on the increasing violence against media workers in Kurdistan. In July, Murad Mirza Ibrahim, a 27-year-old employee of Çira TV, was killed in the bombing in the Şengal region of Iraq. Ibrahim was travelling to the village of Tal Qasab with his colleague, 21-year-old TV journalist Medya Kemal Hassan, to cover the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Islamic State’s attack on the region, when their vehicle was blown apart by a Turkish drone. Hassan and the TV station’s driver survived with injuries. Ibrahim died three days after the attack.

RSF condemned the latest attack as a “shocking crime against media personnel.” In a statement, Jonathan Dagher, head of RSF’s Middle East desk, warned that “the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan is becoming one of the most dangerous places in the world for reporters.” For freelance journalist Rêbaz Hasan, the attacks are political and should be seen as part of Turkey’s war against the Kurdish movement. “The murder of the Çira TV journalist and our two colleagues Gülistan and Hêro sends the message that anyone who dares to speak out about the occupation will be killed,” Hasan told Truthout.

Hasan, who has known the two killed journalists for years and often worked with them, vehemently denies that the journalists killed were PKK fighters, as has been claimed in the Turkish press. “That is a lie! None of us ever saw them with a gun in their hands. They only had their cameras, pens and computers,” Hasan said.

The anti-terror unit of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which governs the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan, referred to the women killed as “PKK fighters” in a statement. The KDP has close political and economic ties with the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and cooperates with the Turkish army in the fight against PKK guerrilla units. Turkey is by far the largest buyer of crude oil from the autonomous region. However, Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani of the opposition Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) rejected the ruling party’s statements, insisting that the victims were only journalists.

The Kurdish autonomous authorities, led by the KDP, have also continued to crack down on opposition voices. In July, for example, a court in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Duhok province sentenced the editor-in-chief of the Arabic section of the RojNews agency, Suleiman Ahmed, to three years in prison on charges of espionage and alleged membership in the Democratic Union Party of Northern Syria (PYD), a majority Kurdish political party ideologically close to the PKK. Various civil society and professional press organizations have strongly condemned the court’s decision and deplored the restriction of press freedom in Iraqi Kurdistan. In view of the precarious situation of journalists in northern Iraq, RSF in its latest report called on the authorities in Iraqi Kurdistan to put an end to the practice of “intimidation and violence” against media professionals.

According to RSF, Nijyar Mohammed, a reporter for the Sulaymaniyah-based Channel 8 television station, and photojournalist Behez Akreyi were also detained by security forces for several hours on July 13 while documenting Turkish army troop movements in the city of Duhok. On the same day, Pulitzer Prize winner Murat Yazar was arrested in that same province while working on a documentary. The Kurdish journalist from Turkey was arbitrarily detained for eight days. Until his release, his family had no information about his fate. Journalists in Kurdistan are not only in danger from the air or from the authorities. In October, Nagihan Akarsel, editor of the Kurdish monthly Jineolojî, was executed by an assassin, who fired 11 shots at her door in Sulaymaniyah. Activists suspect that the Turkish secret service was behind the journalist’s brutal murder.

In northern and eastern Syria, where the Turkish air force carries out indiscriminate air strikes against civilian and military targets on an almost weekly basis, the media is also warning of an increase in violence. The Turkish government regards the Kurdish organizations in northern Syria and their armed units as an extension of the PKK. Turkey regularly bombs Kurdish areas south of its border under the pretext of fighting terrorism, and has already launched two ground offensives — in 2018 and 2019. On August 23, 2023, exactly one year before the deadly attack in Sulaymaniyah, a vehicle belonging to the women’s television station JIN TV was attacked in Syria, near the Turkish border. The driver of the vehicle, Necmeddîn Feysel Hec Sînan, was killed and correspondent Delîla Egîd was seriously injured, losing her left arm.

In November 2022, correspondent Isam Abdullah of the local ANHA news agency was killed while trying to document the aftermath of a Turkish air strike in the village of Teqil Beqil. After first bombing a civilian vehicle, the Turkish air force launched a so-called “double strike,” bombing the crowd rushing to help. Seven civilians, including Abdullah, were killed in the bombing. Double strikes are internationally recognized as a war crime.

Dilyar Cizîrî, head of the Free Press Association, an organization representing the interests of media professionals in northern and eastern Syria, told the ANF news agency that 27 members of the free press had been killed in Turkish attacks since the Turkish airstrikes began. Given that many attacks, including the recent bombings in Iraq, have involved the use of advanced drones with precision munitions, and that the Turkish side has said some of the attacks were used for “neutralising terrorists” — as targeted killings are called in the official language of Turkish ministries — it is difficult to dismiss the high number of victims among media professionals as mere coincidence.

Reporters Without Borders said Turkey’s denial of the attack on August 23 was “insufficient” and demanded that “the Turkish authorities be held to account.” UNESCO director-general Audrey Azoulay also said on the UN agency’s website that she deplored the attack and called for a full investigation into the incident.

To date, however, neither the Iraqi government nor the relevant authorities in the Kurdish Regional Government have commented on any possible investigations or even condemned the attack, which represents a blatant violation of Iraqi sovereignty. But for Rêbaz Hasan and many of his colleagues, one thing is clear: despite the attacks — and, more importantly, because of them — they must continue their work. “As journalists, we made a promise to our friends who were killed,” said Hasan. “We will do more and nobody can stop us. We will not let Turkey occupy our country!