About AKnews

AKnews

AKnews was an independent Kurdish news agency based in Arbil, also rendered Erbil, in the Kurdistan Region of northern Iraq. Academic research on Kurdish media described it as an independent Kurdish news agency that was launched in 2008 and closed down in 2012, which places its active life in a short but consequential period for Iraqi and Kurdish politics. In those years Iraq held parliamentary elections, struggled for months to form a government, debated a long-delayed national census, argued over the future of Kirkuk and the other disputed territories, and saw street protests spread through Kurdish cities. AKnews reported on all of those subjects, and its English-language dispatches were widely republished outside Iraq, so that for many readers abroad its reports became one of the regular windows on Kurdish affairs. Because the agency has closed, this profile is written in the past tense.

Identity and place in the Kurdish media landscape

To understand AKnews, it helps to understand the media environment in which it worked. Reporting by BBC Monitoring on Iraqi Kurdish media explained that Kurdish outlets had mushroomed after the semi-autonomous status the region gained following the uprising against Saddam Hussein's regime in 1991, and that the two dominant political forces, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, controlled most outlets. Most political parties owned television and radio stations and newspapers, and, with the exception of independent outlets, Kurdish media were dogged by reliance on funding from their political backers rather than on sales and advertising. An overview of Iraqi media similarly listed AK News among the online outlets with the most prominent presence in Iraq, describing it as a Kurdish source published in English and Arabic as well. Against that background, an agency presenting itself as independent, rather than as a party organ, occupied a distinctive position. Reporters Without Borders, in its study of the media paradox in Iraqi Kurdistan, quoted voices from across that system, including the director of the agency Aswat al-Iraq and the general director of AKnews, treating the agency as one of the established press institutions whose view of the system mattered.

Founding and leadership

The Kurdistan Center for Arts and Culture, where he later served as vice president, identifies Bedran Habeeb as the founder of AK News, describing it as a multilingual news agency based in Kurdistan. Habeeb was also the founder and former director of Aras Publications, described by the same source as Kurdistan's largest literary publishing house, and he had served as a cultural adviser to a former prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government. In Kurdish media reporting and in his own published commentary he was styled Bedran A. Habeeb, Director General of the Kurdistan News Agency, and Reporters Without Borders likewise identified Bedran A. Habeeb as general director of the press agency AKnews. That background matters because AKnews was not simply a wire desk. Its leading figure came from literary publishing and cultural administration, and he wrote signed opinion pieces that were carried under the agency's name, giving the outlet a public editorial voice alongside its news reporting.

Base, bureaus and languages

The Committee to Protect Journalists described AKNews as an Arbil-based news agency, and its dispatches carried Erbil datelines as a matter of routine. The agency's reach extended beyond the regional capital. CPJ's reporting named Sebah Atrushi as the agency's Duhok bureau chief, which confirms that AKnews maintained at least one bureau elsewhere in the Kurdistan Region, in Duhok. Its reporting also carried Baghdad datelines, as in its August 2010 reporting on preparations for the national census, which shows correspondents or stringers filing on federal Iraqi affairs as well as regional ones. The agency published through the website aknews.com, with an English section whose story addresses took the form aknews.com/en/aknews, and the Kurdistan Center for Arts and Culture description of the agency as multilingual, together with the Iraqi media overview noting publication in English and Arabic, reflects a service intended to address Kurdish, Iraqi and international readers at the same time. Dispatches typically closed with reporter initials followed by the AKnews name, the conventional signature of a wire service.

News coverage and dispatches

The surviving record of AKnews is largely the record of its dispatches, many of which were republished in full by Iraqi news forums and monitoring services. In August 2010 it reported from Baghdad that a federal government committee would meet its Kurdistan counterpart to arrange protection for census officials in disputed areas such as Mosul and Kirkuk, and it explained why the census, originally expected the previous year, had been postponed amid fears it would fuel ethnic and sectarian tension. In December 2010 it reported the Iraqi parliament's approval of the long-awaited government that ended eight months of dispute after the March 2010 elections, including the protest by women lawmakers that the new cabinet included no women. In early 2011 its Erbil reporting followed the protest wave that began on 17 February in Sulaimaniyah, including parliament's emergency reading of the 2011 budget bill in March, the committee formed to hear protesters' demands, and the casualty figures then being reported. In May 2011 it reported a visit by a United States congressional delegation including Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham to Kurdistan Region President Massoud Barzani, and their call for a new initiative to break the deadlock in Baghdad. In September 2011, an AKnews dispatch relayed Reporters Without Borders' account of the beating of Asos Hardi, founder and editor of the independent newspaper Awene, in Sulaimaniyah. Taken together, these reports show a general news agency whose beat ran from the Kurdistan parliament and presidency to the federal government in Baghdad, the disputed territories, and the condition of the Kurdish press itself.

Editorial voice and commentary

AKnews also carried signed commentary by its director general. Between October 2010 and February 2011 Bedran A. Habeeb published a multi-part series arguing the case for Kirkuk's attachment to Kurdistan, contending that a prosperous Erbil with democratic life, independent media and respect for minorities would draw Kirkuk toward the region, and that revival of the economy and democracy should be advocated for Iraq as a whole. Other signed pieces from the same period addressed state-building, freedom as responsibility, and the WikiLeaks disclosures. The presence of such a series on an agency platform is unusual for a pure newswire, and it underlines the hybrid character of AKnews: a reporting service that also served as a platform for its founder's arguments about the political questions, above all Kirkuk, that its news columns covered from day to day. Readers using the agency therefore encountered both its dispatches and an identifiable editorial position held by the man who ran it, a combination common in the Kurdish media of the period, where outlets frequently acted as political participants as well as observers.

The 2009 defamation case

The best-documented episode in the agency's history is the defamation case recorded by the Committee to Protect Journalists in its letter of 5 May 2009 to Kurdistan Regional Government Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani. CPJ reported that on 31 March, Lazgin Chuqi, a journalist with AKNews, and Sebah Atrushi, the agency's Duhok bureau chief, appeared in court to answer defamation charges filed by a police officer who claimed that Chuqi had falsely attributed a quote to him in a story. Chuqi was detained for a day and released on a bail bond. Atrushi told CPJ that when they appeared before the judge, the judge refused to try them under the region's new press law and instead charged them under the 1969 penal code. In mid-April the officer dropped the charges against the journalists. CPJ used the case as one example in a wider warning: the region's press law, passed in September 2008 and in force from 20 October 2008, contained no jail terms for journalists, yet judges were still charging and convicting journalists under the older penal code, and dozens of lawsuits had been filed against journalists in the region that year. The AKnews case therefore became part of the international record on the gap between Kurdistan's written press protections and their application in court.

Views on the media system

Habeeb also spoke on the record about the economics and politics of Kurdish journalism. In the Reporters Without Borders study of Iraqi Kurdistan's media, he argued that the government, rather than the political parties, should invest in the media, while noting that no distinction was then being made between the government and the political parties. He added that as long as news and the media were not managed as a profitable economic sector, nothing would change in Kurdistan. That diagnosis aligned with the broader analysis in the same study, in which the director of Aswat al-Iraq described semi-independent or shadow media as an attempt to fill the gap between partisan media and independent media because audiences did not trust partisan outlets, and in which a Kurdistan-based media trainer lamented that readers needed to consult several newspapers to build an overall picture of a single subject. AKnews operated inside exactly that tension: formally independent, led by a figure with a government advisory past, and dependent on an advertising and sales market that its own director described as underdeveloped.

Closure

Academic research on English-Kurdish translation in Kurdish media discourse, surveying the region's outlets, recorded the agency in a single line: AKnews was an independent Kurdish news agency launched in 2008 and closed down in 2012. No fuller public account of the reasons for the closure was located in the sources consulted for this profile, and this profile does not speculate about them. What can be said from the record is that the agency's active years coincided with a period in which its reporting was regularly carried beyond Kurdistan, and that after its closure its website ceased to function as a living news service. Surviving AKnews material is now encountered mainly where it was republished at the time, in forum archives, monitoring digests and the reports of press-freedom organisations, rather than as a continuously maintained archive of the agency's own.

Legacy and assessment

AKnews matters to the history of Iraqi media for three reasons that the surviving record supports. First, it demonstrated that a Kurdistan-based agency could supply English-language reporting on Kurdish and Iraqi affairs that outside readers and other outlets actually used, at a time when most Kurdish media addressed primarily partisan, Kurdish-language audiences. Second, through the case of Chuqi and Atrushi, it became a documented test of the Kurdistan Region's 2008 press law, and its treatment by a court applying the 1969 penal code remains part of the evidence base used by press-freedom monitors to describe the region. Third, its director's published commentary and his criticism of party-dominated media finance give historians a statement, from inside the system, of the structural problem that shaped Kurdish journalism after 2003. The agency's short life, from 2008 to 2012, its Erbil base and Duhok bureau, its multilingual wire and its abrupt disappearance from the active media landscape together make it a compact case study of both the ambition and the fragility of independent news agencies in post-2003 Iraq.