About NRT 2

NRT 2

NRT 2 is a Kurdish general entertainment television channel based in Sulaymaniyah, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. It is the entertainment sister channel of NRT News and part of the Nalia Media Corporation, the media group founded by the businessman Shaswar Abdulwahid. Launched in 2012 as an arts and entertainment service, NRT 2 complements the group's flagship news channel with drama, entertainment and family programming in Kurdish, giving the Nalia group a second screen for the large audience that watches television for series and light programming rather than politics. Official and independent descriptions agree on the division of labour inside the group: NRT is the news channel, NRT 2 is the entertainment channel, NRT 3 is a children's channel and NRT 4 is a religious channel.

The Nalia group and the origins of NRT

NRT 2 cannot be understood apart from its parent network. Nalia Radio and Television, NRT, grew from an idea formed in 2010, when a group of freelance journalists set out to fill the absence of independent media networks in the Kurdistan Region and to launch the first ever independent media network, funded by Nalia, a construction company owned by Shaswar Abdulwahid. The corporation's aim was to transfer news in a professional and standard way under the slogan Courage, Balance and Truth. NRT was launched on 17 February 2011 and is considered the first independent television news channel in the Kurdistan Region. Twana Osman was appointed president of the Nalia Media Corporation by its founder.

The group's headquarters are in Sulaymaniyah, and the corporation developed offices in Erbil, Baghdad, Brussels, Paris, London, Washington and Diyarbakir, among other places. Over time Nalia Media Corporation came to consist of the NRT HD satellite news channel broadcasting in Sorani and Badini Kurdish, NRT 2, an Arabic news channel launched in 2016, NRT Digital Media managing websites and mobile apps, the Nalia FM radio station, the Nalia Media Academy training institute founded in 2015, and Pam Media, a production company established in 2014 producing advertisements. NRT 2 sits inside that structure as the group's entertainment television arm.

Launch and role as the entertainment sister

Reference profiles of the Nalia corporation date NRT 2's launch to 2012 and describe it as an arts and entertainment channel. Its creation followed a familiar logic in Kurdish television. A news channel builds a brand and a satellite presence, but audiences spend most viewing time on drama, series, music and family entertainment; a second channel captures that viewing, holds the audience within the group, and gives advertisers a non-political environment. Listings of Kurdish-language channels classify NRT2 as a General channel under the same ownership as NRT News, and Kurdistan Region media guides describe it directly as NRT 2 Entertainment TV, website and social media, within the media outlets of what became the New Generation Movement.

The channel's programming, as described in the batch record and group profiles, centres on drama, entertainment and family programming in Kurdish. It complements, and deliberately contrasts with, the hard news identity of NRT News, whose coverage of protests and corruption made the group famous and controversial. On NRT 2 the same corporate brand delivers the lighter side of Kurdish television: series and entertainment for family viewing, in the Sorani Kurdish of the Sulaymaniyah audience and for Kurdish viewers across the region and the diaspora who receive the channel by satellite and online.

A network born in protest: the 2011 attack

The history that shaped the whole Nalia group, including NRT 2, began days after the flagship channel launched. NRT had started broadcasting on 17 February 2011, just as anti-corruption protests swept Sulaymaniyah, and it broadcast footage of police firing on demonstrators. At about 2:30 a.m. on 20 February 2011, some fifty masked gunmen stormed the NRT headquarters in the German Village compound in Sulaymaniyah, opened fire on its guards, wounding one, smashed all the broadcasting equipment and set fire to the building. Reporters Without Borders recorded that the station had existed for seventy-two hours and provided just seventeen hours of broadcasting when the attack took place, and that its executives had received threats since launch day. The attack was never fully investigated and no one was brought to justice, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, but the station was rebuilt and resumed broadcasting. A display of a charred monitor, a burnt vision mixer and a smashed camera lens from the attack was later kept in the stairwell of the rebuilt headquarters as an exhibit of the network's origin story.

That origin matters for NRT 2 because the entertainment channel shares the group's identity and infrastructure. When authorities later moved against NRT, they moved against all of its channels together, entertainment included, a pattern that repeated throughout the group's history.

Closures and pressure affecting all NRT channels

In December 2017, during a wave of protests in the Kurdistan Region, security forces raided the NRT headquarters in Sulaymaniyah on 19 December and suspended broadcasting by all of its channels, NRT 1, NRT 2 and NRT Arabic, confiscating equipment although the authorities said the closure would last seven days. The authorities accused NRT of encouraging the protests and violence; NRT disputed the legal basis for the closure, and its website was shut down the following day. The group's founder, who had left NRT management months earlier to form the opposition party New Generation, was arrested at Sulaymaniyah airport the same day and held for a week.

The pattern continued in later protest waves. A Kurdistan Regional Government order closing NRT for one week, reported by KirkukNow, stated the position plainly: NRT 2 is an entertainment channel, NRT 3 a children's channel and NRT 4 a religious channel, yet all were stopped together with the news channel, and staff were not allowed to enter the building. An NRT manager quoted in that report argued the decision was political, asking why, in addition to NRT 1, the other three channels were stopped. Iraq's Communications and Media Commission likewise listed NRT among channels suspended during the 2019 protest period. For viewers, the practical consequence is that NRT 2's entertainment schedule has been interrupted not by anything in its own programming but by the news channel's confrontations with the authorities.

From independent network to movement media

The group's political identity changed when its owner entered politics. After Shaswar Abdulwahid founded the New Generation Movement in 2018, viewers increasingly saw NRT as another party-funded operation, according to the Middle East Institute's study of partisan media in the Kurdistan Region, although the study also notes that NRT's coverage remained highly critical of the ruling parties and aired viewpoints passed over by KDP and PUK channels, making it a widely viewed alternative. Media landscape mappings now list NRT TV, NRT 2 Entertainment and NRT 4 Religious together as the New Generation Movement's media outlets. NRT 2's entertainment content thus travels with a political brand: the channel itself shows drama and family programmes, but its ownership places it inside an opposition movement's media family.

Distribution and audiences

NRT 2 is distributed by satellite at the Eutelsat 8 West B position used by the Nalia channels, and the group's content is distributed online through nrttv.com and official social channels, managed by NRT Digital Media. Kurdish audience research in the mid-2010s measured NRT 2 among the top Kurdish stations by reach, listed alongside its news sister and rivals such as Rudaw, Kurdistan 24 and Kurdsat, which confirms that the entertainment sister achieved the purpose for which it was created: holding a mass audience inside the Nalia group beyond news hours. Its viewers are the general Kurdish television audience of the Sulaymaniyah region and beyond, watching Kurdish-language drama and entertainment at home and in the diaspora.

Sister channels and the wider family

NRT 2 is one element of a four-channel television family. The flagship NRT HD carries news in Sorani and Badini Kurdish. NRT Arabic, launched in 2016, extended the group's news voice to Arabic-speaking Iraq. NRT 3 is the children's channel and NRT 4 the religious channel, so that between them the four services cover news in two languages, entertainment, children and religion. Around the channels sit Nalia FM radio, which broadcasts music and news, the NRT Digital Media division founded in 2011 to manage the group's websites and mobile applications, the Nalia Media Academy, and Pam Media, the advertising production company established in 2014. That breadth explains both the group's resilience and its exposure: a raid or closure order aimed at the newsroom silences children's programmes and entertainment as well, because all of the channels share one corporation, one headquarters and one owner.

NRT 2 today

NRT 2 continues as the entertainment channel of Nalia Radio and Television, broadcasting Kurdish drama, entertainment and family programming from Sulaymaniyah as the lighter counterpart to NRT News. Its story is inseparable from its group's: founded as part of Kurdistan's first independent media network in the aftermath of the 2011 attack, expanded in 2012 to capture the entertainment audience, and periodically silenced alongside its sister channels whenever the news operation's coverage brought official retaliation. Within the Nalia family it remains the channel of series and family viewing, under the same roof, and the same slogan of Courage, Balance and Truth, as one of the Kurdistan Region's most contested news organisations.