Kurdish Journalists in Turkey: Jailed at Home, Murdered Abroad

The grim reality of journalists working in Turkey is now well-known. The country is one of the world’s most notorious jailers of journalists, taking the top spot as the country with the highest number of imprisoned journalists in 2012, 2013, 2016, 2017, and 2018. Only in 2023 did Turkey drop below the 5^th place spot, according to the annual prison census of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

It should come as no surprise that Kurdish journalists bear the brunt of Turkey’s anti-press-freedom crusade, with four out of the five newly imprisoned journalists in CPJ’s 2023 census having been Kurdish. One employee of the now-closed pro-Kurdish Özgür Gündem newspaper, Celalettin Can, was sentenced to 15 months simply for serving as a guest editor for one day. Turkey set a world record for number of arrested journalists after a failed coup in the country in 2016 led to massive arrest campaigns, jailing 84 media workers that year alone. That year also saw the Turkish government shut down more than 100 media outlets, many of which were pro-Kurdish.

The use of arbitrary arrests of journalists in Turkey replaced a much bloodier method of press censorship which became infamous in the 1990s.From 1992 to 1995, 12 Kurdish journalists were murdered in Turkey, more than half of which worked for Özgür Gündem. The majority of the cases are officially unsolved; however, the Turkish state or agents working on its behalf are strongly suspected.

1994 also saw the simultaneous bombing of both the Istanbul and Ankara offices of the pro-Kurdish Özgür Ülke newspaper, which killed a 32-year-old driver working at the newspaper and injured 23 others. A lawyer for the newspaper later uncovered a top-secret documented, signed by Turkey’s former prime minister, issuing a not-so-subtle call to target what it termed “separatist” media organizations (i.e. Kurdish) . The perpetrator of the bombing has not officially been identified.

There have been only a handful of murders of journalists in Turkey since the 1990s, possibly the most famous case being the assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul in 2007. 2014 saw the murder of Kadri Bağdu, a Kurdish media worker for Azadiya Welat, murdered by unknown individuals on a motorbike in Adana. A lawyer for Bağdu’s family has stated that the journalist was murdered by the Islamic State (ISIS) over his support for the resistance of Kobane, and that Turkish police and prosecutors know the identity of his killers.

In 2015 and 2016, four Syrian journalists who were critical of ISIS were murdered in Gaziantep and Urfa. Though the Turkish government was not directly implicated in the murders of these four, it is well known that ISIS activity was tacitly tolerated by the Turkish state in its border cities, particularly in Gaziantep.

A new wave of arrests began in 2023 in the wake of the deadly February 6 earthquake which killed more than 50,000 people in Turkey and Syria. Several Kurdish journalists were threatened with arrest or detained on the basis of Turkey’s “disinformation law,” passed in October 2022.

Not content with lengthening the list of egregious violations of press freedom at home, Turkey has endeavored to intimidate, harass, assault, and even murder countless journalists abroad.

Over the past four years, several exiled Turkish journalists have been threatened and attacked. In 2020, executive director of Nordic Monitor and former writer at the now-closed Zaman, Abdullah Bozkurt was attacked outside his home in Stockholm, Sweden. A year later, a columnist for the left-leaning Turkish daily BirGün was assaulted near his home in Berlin.

Attacks on these journalists are not the result of “lone wolf” perpetrators acting on their own, but rather spurred on by Turkish state media and Turkish officials themselves. Relatedly, journalists in exile in Europe have had their locations revealed publicly by pro-government Turkish media outlets, further jeopardizing their safety. A 2017 live TV program by the pro-government TGRT channel shows two pro-Erdogan journalists calling for assassins to “blow the brains out of 3 to 5” journalists living abroad, listing several of them by name. Deputy of the Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) Aydın Ünal threatened several exiled journalists by name, listing them as potential targets in his column in the pro-government daily Yeni Şafak. Erdogan security advisor Mesut Hakkı Caşın also warned Abdullah Bozkurt that he would be “fed to the fish or the sharks.”

Threats to the lives and freedoms of Turkish journalists abroad are not just limited to assaults on the street. Turkey also has a history of extradition requests to foreign governments hosting these journalists. Germany has denied at least two of Turkey’s extradition requests for journalists – of exiled journalists Can Dündar and Cevheri Güven – in 2020 and 2022, respectively. In 2021 and 2022, Sweden also denied two extradition requests for exiled journalists Levent Kenez and Bülent Keneş, whom Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had requested as part of a deal to ratify Sweden’s NATO membership. As part of the terms of the deal, the Turkish government went as far as asking Sweden to shut down Nordic Monitor, which is run by exiled Turkish journalists often critical of Turkey’s human rights abuses.

Turkey has demanded the extradition of exiled journalists from several other countries, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece, Romania, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Sadly, not all requests were denied; in 2016, Bulgarian border authorities deported an unnamed Turkish journalist to Turkey, where he was imprisoned for more than seven years. In 2018, the government of Ukraine handed exiled journalist Yusuf Inan over to Turkish authorities. One journalist, who had already been granted asylum in Germany in 2006, was detained for six months in Croatia and was nearly extradited to Turkey before finally being released.

Kurdish journalist Serdar Karakoç, who has lived in exile in the Netherlands for more than two decades, was recently arrested and faced extradition to Germany, who accuses him of membership in a terrorist organization in Germany from 2017 to 2018. Ironically, Karakoç is one of the survivors of the 1994 Özgür Ülke bombing.

“After seven years, Germany has issued an international arrest warrant against me. If I committed such a serious crime, why didn’t they catch me red-handed in the same years? What were they waiting for? This case is obviously purely politically motivated and is being carried out in the interests of the Turkish state. Germany is behaving more despotically than the Turkish state on the Kurdish issue and is persecuting Kurdish journalists and politicians. By criminalizing Kurds, a solution to the Kurdish issue is being blocked. This process is illegal and supports Turkish foreign policy,” Karakoç, who had recently written investigative pieces on the Turkish ultranationalist Grey Wolves movement in Europe, told ANF News last month. In July, the Dutch court ruled that Germany’s extradition order was legitimate, though Karakoç’s whereabouts are currently unknown.

Turkish journalists who manage to flee to Europe receive assault and threats to their lives, and those who remain in Turkey receive a prison sentence. Kurdish journalists working in Iraq and Syria, however, often receive a far worse sentence – a death sentence.

This tradition is not new; in 1997, fighters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, acting on the orders of Turkey during the latter’s Operation Hammer in South Kurdistan, attacked multiple institutions, including a hospital and two newspapers. 20 journalists from North, South, and West Kurdistan, working for Roj, Watan al-Shams, and Med TV, were killed in the massacre.

The most recent attack on Kurdish journalists outside of Turkey occurred thus past summer. On August 23, a Turkish drone strike in the Said Sadiq area, on the road between Sulaymaniyah and Halabja in Southern Kurdistan, claimed the lives of two Sterk TV journalists, 40-year-old Gulistan Tara of Elih and 27-year-old Hero Bahadin of Sangawi, Southern Kurdistan. 30-year-old social media manager Rebin Bakir, of Sterk TV’s parent company Chatr Multimedia Production, was also injured. The killings were condemned by deputy prime minister of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq Qubad Talabani, who called them an “inexcusable crime” as well as a violation of Iraq’s territorial sovereignty.

Just one month prior to this attack, on July 8, a Turkish drone struck a vehicle carrying Çira TV reporters Mydia Hussen and Murad Mirza as they travelled in the Shengal area. Hussen and their driver Khalaf Khidr were wounded in the strike, and Mirza died of his injuries at a hospital in Mosul three days later, making him the first journalist killed in Iraq in 2024. Mirza, a Shengali native who had worked for Çira FM radio since the spring of 2024, left behind a wife and three children.

Turkey doesn’t just limit their assassinations to aerial strikes—in 2022, the streets of Sulaymaniyah witnessed a killing eerily reminiscent of the murders of Kurdish journalists of the 1990s. In October that year, researcher and academic Nagihan Akarsel, a native of Konya and member of the Jineology Research Center, was shot dead in front of her home in Sulaymaniyah. While her murder is still officially unsolved, the Iraqi Ambassador to Turkey Ali Reza Guney allegedly claimed that the killer was a Turkish citizen acting on the orders of Turkish intelligence.

Turkey’s increased aerial warfare during and after the invasion of Sere Kaniye and Gire Spi in 2019 has seen countless civilian, political, and military officials targeted in Rojava and Bashur.

The invasion claimed the lives of four journalists. On October 11, 2019, 27-year-old filmmaker and journalist Vedat Erdemci, of Viranşehir in North Kurdistan, was killed. Erdemci had previously worked on a documentary about Yazidi children freed from ISIS by the Syrian Democratic Forces. His body was never recovered as Turkish proxy militias with the Syrian National Army (SNA) quickly overran the area. Horrifyingly, as Erdemci’s colleagues repeatedly called his phone, an SNA militant answered the phone and stated that “the owner of this telephone is dead.” The militants later sent footage of Erdemci’s decapitated body to his family. Erdemci left behind two children in Northern Kurdistan.

Two days later marked the deadliest day for journalists in Rojava’s history. A Turkish airstrike on a civilian convoy travelling from the Jazira region to Sere Kaniye killed eleven people and wounded at least 70. Two journalists lost their lives in the strike. Saad Ahmed, a reporter for ANHA and native of Bab al-Khair village near Tel Tamr, was killed instantly. He was just 19 years old.

Çira TV cameraman Mihemed Hisen Reşo, a 23-year-old native of Afrin, died of injuries sustained in the strike the next day. Multiple other journalists sustained injuries, including ANF correspondent Ersin Çaksu, Emre Yunis of Stêrk TV, Dilsoz Yousef of North Press Agency, freelance journalists Bircan Yıldız, Rojbin Ekin, Abdreşid Mihemed Mihemed, Rudaw correspondent Hûner Ehmed, and ANHA correspondent Mehmet Ekici.

Though the invasion of Sere Kaniye and Gire Spi eventually slowed into a long-drawn out occupation, the Turkish military has not ceased in their targeting of journalists. An intense military escalation at the end of November 2022, during which more than 1,500 strikes killed 14 and injured 24 civilians, inflicted casualties among Rojava’s journalists.

On November 20, correspondents from Sterk TV in Kobane travelled to the site of a children’s hospital – luckily empty and still under construction – to document damage inflicted by Turkish bombardment the day prior. Sterk TV correspondent Muhammed Bakr al-Jeradeh was wounded when Turkish warplanes struck the site again, suffering from a cerebral hemorrhage and needing stitches at the local hospital.

After midnight on the same day, ANHA journalist Essam Abdullah travelled to the village of Teqil Beqil near Rojava’s Derik. The village was the site of a civilian gathering in protest of a Turkish bombardment there, which killed a civilian worker and caused major damage to critical natural gas facilities. Despite the presence of a nearby US military convoy, Turkish aircraft again bombed the area, killing eleven civilians, including Abdullah. Abdullah had worked as a journalist since 2013, initially for Ronahi TV and later for ANHA.

Exactly one year before the recent tragedy which saw the deaths of two female journalists in Sulaymaniyah, a Turkish drone targeted a van carrying several journalists and media workers from Rojava’s Jin TV, a women’s news agency. The August 23, 2023, attack killed the driver Necmettin Feysel Hej Sinan and injured Jin TV reported Delila Agid.

The Turkish state has succeeded, then, in nearly destroying the profession of journalism from the inside out. Kurdish journalists – and truly, journalists from all walks of life living in Turkey – are left with three options. The first is to suffer in silence, towing the line of AKP and writing either state propaganda or tabloid tales devoid of substance. The second is to publish the truth and face constant censorship, harassment, and imprisonment. The last, a path which many have taken, is self-imposed exile. Many exiled journalists feel they are starting anew, able to finally express themselves and carry out their work. This though, as we have seen, is not always the case, so long as the Turkish state is determined to ensure the long arms of its “justice” apparatus means that no one who has crossed its government, no matter how trivial their crimes may seem, is truly safe.