About Al Iraqiya Kurd

Al Iraqiya Kurd

Al Iraqiya Kurd is the Kurdish-language general television channel of the Iraqi Media Network (IMN), Iraq's state public broadcaster. Broadcasting in Kurdish under the name عێراقی کوردی from the network's headquarters in Baghdad, it is the federal broadcaster's dedicated service for Kurdish-speaking viewers, aimed in particular at the citizens of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Founded in 2017 and launched on 17 October of that year, the channel carries news, discussion, cultural, social and variety programming in Kurdish, together with coverage of events and issues in Kurdish and Iraqi affairs. It sits within a family of Al Iraqiya services that includes the Arabic general, news and sports channels and sister language services in Turkmen and Syriac, and it is listed in international channel guides as a general channel owned by the Republic of Iraq. In a country where most Kurdish-language television is produced in Erbil or Sulaymaniyah by Kurdistan-based parties and institutions, Al Iraqiya Kurd is distinctive: it is Kurdish television made in Baghdad, by the Iraqi state, for a national audience.

Founding and launch in October 2017

Al Iraqiya Kurd was established in 2017 within the Iraqi Media Network, and its broadcast began on 17 October 2017 in the Kurdish language, directed especially to the Kurdish public in Iraq. The launch was a modest one by the standards of a state network. A launch-period report by the Iraqi channel Al Sumaria, preserved in the channel's reference record, carried the announcement by the network's head Abu al-Hail that Al Iraqiya Kurd would begin broadcasting at two hours a day. From that limited starting window the service grew into the full schedule it is listed with today: channel references describe it as broadcasting twenty-four hours a day, free to air and available online as well as by satellite, with a broadcast area given as the Arab world. The channel's own record is otherwise spare. It has no long separate corporate history, no independent launch archive in English, and only a short dedicated article in Arabic reference sources — a thinness that reflects its position as one service among many inside a large state network rather than a standalone broadcaster with its own public profile.

The moment of the launch

The timing of the launch deserves to be recorded carefully, as context rather than as any documented statement of intent. Al Iraqiya Kurd went on air on 17 October 2017, three weeks after the Kurdistan Region's independence referendum of 25 September 2017, in which voters overwhelmingly backed statehood in a vote Baghdad deemed unconstitutional, and one day after Iraqi federal forces retook the disputed city of Kirkuk from Peshmerga control on 16 October 2017, opening the Iraqi–Kurdish conflict of that autumn. No source examined for this profile states that the channel was created in response to the referendum or the Kirkuk operation, and this profile makes no such claim. What can be said on the record is that a Baghdad-based, state-run Kurdish-language channel began broadcasting at precisely the moment when relations between the federal government and the Kurdistan Region were at their most strained since 2003, and when a federal Kurdish voice on air carried an obvious public significance beyond ordinary programme planning. The channel has continued through the years of negotiation and tension that followed, remaining part of the federal network's standing offer to Kurdish-speaking citizens.

Ownership and place in the Iraqi Media Network

Al Iraqiya Kurd is owned by the Iraqi Media Network, the state media conglomerate headquartered in Baghdad. The network itself is the institutional parent, and the facts in this section describe that parent, not the Kurdish channel alone. IMN was established in May 2003, under the Coalition Provisional Authority, as the legal successor to the Iraqi Radio and Television Corporation, the Ba'ath-era state broadcasting apparatus. It operates television, radio, print and news-agency assets under a Board of Trustees nominated by the Iraqi Council of Ministers and approved by the Council of Representatives. Its television portfolio is organised mainly under the Al Iraqiya brand: a general channel, a news channel and a sports channel in Arabic, and language-specific services of which the Kurdish channel is one, alongside the Syriac and Turkmen channels. Reference guides to the network describe exactly this structure, presenting the Kurdish service as the network's provision for Kurdish-speaking audiences and for content relevant to the Kurdistan Region, in parallel with Syriac provision for the Syriac-speaking community and Turkmen provision for Turkmen speakers. The Kurdish channel's headquarters is Baghdad, the network's home city, rather than any city in the Kurdistan Region.

Governance and funding of the parent network

Because Al Iraqiya Kurd has no separate legal personality, its governance is the governance of IMN, and that context is attributed here to the network as a whole. The 2015 Law on the Iraqi Media Network reshaped IMN as a public-sector institution with legal personality, placed under the supervision of the Council of Representatives, and the law includes formal public-service and editorial-independence language. In practice, monitors have repeatedly questioned how far that independence runs. The State Media Monitor classifies IMN as State-Controlled, noting that the appointment process for trustees has not always followed the law's own route: in February 2024 the Council of Ministers directly designated five new trustees, prompting parliamentary criticism that the appointments should have been sent to parliament for approval. The Washington Institute has reported the network's annual budget at approximately 75 million US dollars and its workforce at approximately 3,500 staff, with a bureau in each Iraqi province and offices abroad; expert estimates retained by the State Media Monitor put the state-subsidy share of the budget at at least 80 per cent, and the network does not publish audited financial statements. A Kurdish-language channel inside such a structure is therefore a creature of federal public policy: funded from the state budget, governed by a politically appointed board, and expected — under the network's statutory public-service language — to serve all of Iraq's communities in their own languages.

Programming and named shows

The channel's output is general rather than specialised. Its recorded programme mix spans news, talk and discussion formats, cultural programmes, social programmes and variety, together with coverage of events and activities connected to Kurdish and Iraqi affairs. Arabic reference listings name a set of its programmes that gives a concrete picture of the schedule. Sabah al-Watan, Morning of the Homeland, is a morning title; Studio Kurdistan places the Kurdistan Region in the studio; Manshit al-Sahafa, Press Headlines, reviews the newspapers; and Al-Mayk Lak, The Microphone Is Yours, suggests a public-voice format. Al-Nukhba, The Elite, and Jalsa, A Session, belong to the discussion end of the schedule, while Ana wa Baladi, Me and My Country, Risalat Duhok, the Duhok Dispatch, Qaryati, My Village, and Min Kurdistan, From Kurdistan, root the channel in places and communities across the Kurdish north. Ahdath al-Usbu, Events of the Week, rounds up the news; Al-Matbakh, The Kitchen, covers food; and Fannan Taht al-Adwaa, An Artist in the Spotlight, covers arts and performers. The channel also appears within the network's collective programme planning: its Arabic reference record cites the IMN newspaper Al-Sabah and network announcements for the network's Ramadan programme cycles, the season in which Iraqi broadcasters traditionally concentrate their biggest productions. Frequency-guide write-ups of the channel add that its content spans political, social, cultural and religious topics of concern to Kurdish viewers, presented by its own media presenters as Kurdish-affairs coverage for audiences across the Arab world.

Audience: Kurdish speakers and the Kurdistan Region

The audience Al Iraqiya Kurd exists to serve is substantial. Media-sector references for Iraq, drawing on CIA World Factbook figures, put Kurds at roughly 15 to 20 per cent of the population, with Kurdish official in the Kurdish regions alongside Arabic. The channel's stated orientation is to the citizens of the Kurdistan Region in particular, and its coverage addresses Kurdish and Iraqi affairs together — a federal framing, in which Kurdish viewers are addressed as citizens of Iraq whose regional concerns belong on the national network. That distinguishes its editorial premise from that of Kurdistan-based broadcasters, whose reference points are the Kurdistan Regional Government and the Region's parties. For Kurdish-speaking viewers outside the Region, including those in Baghdad, Kirkuk and the disputed territories, and for the wider Arab-world audience within its satellite footprint, the channel offers Kurdish-language news and entertainment from an Iraqi state source rather than from a regional or party one.

Distribution: satellite and online

Al Iraqiya Kurd is a free-to-air, unencrypted channel. Satellite frequency guides list it on the Nilesat position at 12562 horizontal, with a symbol rate of 27500 and forward error correction of 5/6, in standard definition — the same IMN multiplex on Eutelsat 8 West B that carries its sister Al Iraqiya services, including the general, news, sports and Turkmen channels. Listings describe twenty-four-hour broadcasting and an online presence: the channel's reference entry records internet availability, and guide write-ups note live streaming through the network's official channels, so that viewers can follow it on ordinary receivers and online alike across the Arab world. Its official web home is the Iraqi Media Network's site, imn.iq, which the network uses as the portal for its channel family. As with all channels on shared multiplexes, frequencies change from time to time, and the listings cited here reflect the guides consulted for this profile rather than a permanent technical guarantee.

Sister language services and the multilingual model

Al Iraqiya Kurd belongs to a deliberate multilingual pattern inside the federal network. The main Al Iraqiya service is recorded as broadcasting in Arabic, Kurdish, Turkmen and Neo-Aramaic, and Arabic channel listings also record an earlier, now-stopped IMN service, Al Iraqiya Atyaf, which broadcast in Kurdish, Turkmen and Syriac — evidence that Kurdish had a place in the network's output before it received a dedicated channel of its own in 2017. The dedicated services were built out language by language: the Turkmen channel alongside the Kurdish one, and, as network context, the Syriac service whose official launch the network announced in April 2023 under its then president Nabil Jassim, presented by the network as uniting Iraq's ethnic components. Within that pattern the Kurdish channel is the service for Iraq's largest non-Arab linguistic community, and its general — rather than purely news — format mirrors the Turkmen and Syriac services' general remits: each community receives not a translated news bulletin but a channel of its own, with talk, culture and entertainment made in its language under the Al Iraqiya name.

Position among Kurdish broadcasters

Iraq's Kurdish-language television landscape is crowded, and almost all of it is based in the Kurdistan Region and tied to its politics: party and regional channels such as the KDP's Zagros TV and the Gorran movement's KNN, based in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah respectively, are the familiar reference points in media monitoring of Kurdish broadcasting. Al Iraqiya Kurd is the exception in both geography and ownership. It broadcasts from Baghdad, it belongs to the federal state network rather than to any Kurdish party or regional institution, and its loyalty framework is the Iraqi state and the 2015 IMN Law rather than a regional government or movement. That gives it a particular role in the ecology of Iraqi media: it is the channel through which the federal broadcaster speaks Kurdish, carrying Baghdad's account of national events into Kurdish-speaking homes in the same language — and with some of the same programme grammar — as the regional channels it sits alongside on the satellite dial. Whether individual viewers prefer it to the Region's own channels is a question the published record does not answer; no independent audience measurement for the channel was found in the sources consulted.

The record and its limits

An honest profile must end by noting how much of this channel's life is undocumented in open sources. There is no dedicated English-language article about Al Iraqiya Kurd; its launch date, programme list and broadcast details rest mainly on its Arabic reference entry, on the IMN channel listings that entry cites, on satellite guides, and on network-level reporting by bodies such as the State Media Monitor and the Washington Institute, which discuss the parent network rather than the Kurdish service itself. No staffing figures, budgets, presenter names or audience data specific to the channel were found, and none are invented here. What the record does establish is clear enough: a Kurdish-language general channel, owned by the Iraqi Media Network, headquartered in Baghdad, on air since 17 October 2017, broadcasting around the clock free to air by satellite and online, with a named slate of news, talk, cultural and community programmes aimed at the Kurdistan Region and Kurdish-speaking Iraqis. Within the Al Iraqiya family it is the federal state's Kurdish voice, and one of the clearest working examples of the multilingual public-service idea written into the network's post-2003 design.