About Draw Media

Draw Media

Draw Media is an independent Kurdish web-based news outlet in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, based in Sulaymaniyah. It publishes news in Kurdish and reporting on press freedom, and it is grouped by analysts — together with Peregraf and KirkukNow — as part of a new generation of independent online media that has taken up the role once played by the region's independent newspapers. Draw Media's editor-in-chief is Mohammed Rauf, and the outlet receives support from the National Endowment for Democracy. Its public record is a revealing one: it appears in the literature of Kurdish media both as a publisher of news and as a documented case in the region's ongoing argument over how journalists may lawfully be treated.

Draw Media's website is drawmedia.net. In Kurdish, the outlet's name is rendered Draw Media, and its reports are cited in press-freedom documentation under that name, including a major study of the state of press freedom in Kurdistan covering 2008 to 2022, which draws on Draw Media's own reporting of violations against journalists. That dual role — reporting the news, and reporting on the conditions under which news is gathered — gives Draw a distinctive place among Sulaymaniyah's online outlets.

An independent outlet in a partisan media system

To place Draw Media, it is necessary to understand the system around it. The Middle East Institute's analysis of the Kurdistan Region's media, titled around the dominance of party-backed press, explains that the region's two ruling parties and other political movements operate extensive media of their own, and that viewers and readers commonly understand major channels as party-funded operations. Against that background, the analysis identifies a counter-current: while newspapers Hawlati and Awene have lost their influence, several web-based outlets have stepped in to take up the mantle of independent news coverage, including Peregraf, KirkukNow and Draw Media.

Draw Media therefore belongs to a small, named cohort whose significance is out of proportion to its size. These outlets do not have satellite channels, print plants or party treasuries. They publish on the web, in Kurdish, for readers who want news that is not issued by a political organisation. The Middle East Institute adds two facts that define their working lives: some independent outlets are actively harassed by the authorities, and their main challenge is securing funding, because unlike their party-affiliated counterparts they do not have access to deep-pocketed patrons. Draw Media's history illustrates both points in concrete, dated episodes.

Funding and the National Endowment for Democracy

Analysts record that both Peregraf and Draw Media receive support from the National Endowment for Democracy, the United States-based foundation that funds democracy and independent media work internationally. KirkukNow, the third outlet in the same independent cohort, is supported in part by the European Endowment for Democracy and Free Press Unlimited. This pattern — European and American democracy foundations sustaining small Kurdish newsrooms — is the standard economic model for independent media in the Kurdistan Region, and it is openly acknowledged rather than hidden.

The model has consequences that readers should understand. Grant funding insulates an outlet from the two most common forms of local capture: a party's finance department and a business owner's commercial interests. It does not make an outlet wealthy, and it does not make it secure. Grants are project-based and time-limited, and as the experience of Kurdish independent media during United States foreign-aid reviews has shown, decisions taken in distant capitals can unsettle a Sulaymaniyah newsroom's budget without warning. Draw Media's journalism is therefore produced inside a permanent funding effort that party media never have to undertake.

Leadership: Mohammed Rauf and the board of editors

Draw Media's editor-in-chief is Mohammed Rauf. His name appears in press-freedom records at the head of the outlet's editorial leadership, alongside members of its board of editors. The Metro Center for Journalists' Rights and Advocacy, the Sulaymaniyah-based organisation that monitors media freedom in the Kurdistan Region, records Mohammed Rauf together with Fazil Hama Rafaat, Namiq Rasul and Niyaz Abdulla — described as editor-in-chief and board of editors of Draw Media — among journalists summoned to court in a case arising from their reporting. A Kurdistan Regional Government follow-up report on human rights likewise lists cases involving Mohammed Rauf, Fazil Hama Rafaat, Namiq Rasul and Nyaz Abdullah of Draw Media in connection with published reporting.

That the outlet's leadership is documented mainly through legal proceedings is itself information. In the Kurdistan Region, the public record of an independent editor is often written by the complaints filed against him. Draw Media's editors are named, dated and placed in court records because they published stories that officials chose to contest through law — a form of visibility that party-media editors, whose outlets rarely investigate their own patrons, seldom experience.

The Turkish diplomat report and the misuse-of-devices case

The best-documented legal case involving Draw Media arose after it published reporting about the killing of a Turkish diplomat in Erbil. According to the Kurdistan Regional Government's own follow-up report on the United States State Department's human rights reporting, after Draw Media published a reportage about the killing, a complaint was filed against Mohammed Rauf and his colleagues in an Erbil court. They were arrested under the Law on Misuse of Telecommunication Devices — the law of misuse of media and electronic devices in the Kurdistan Region — and then released on bail set at five million Iraqi dinars.

The Metro Center's account of journalists' treatment adds the professional objection. It records the Draw Media summonses among cases in which journalists were pursued under laws other than the Kurdistan Region's 2007 press law, and it reiterates the principle pressed by Kurdish journalists' advocates: the press law provides for journalistic offences without apprehension or prison sentences, and detaining journalists at police stations and security offices is a form of revenge on media workers that the centre condemns. Draw Media's case thus became part of the standard evidence in the Kurdish press corps' argument that a special law exists for journalists and should be applied to them — an argument also made, from his own experience, by Peregraf's editor.

A billion-dinar lawsuit

Legal pressure on Draw Media did not end with the earlier case. KirkukNow's reporting on freedom in the Kurdistan Region records that on 8 October, the Minister of Reconstruction filed a lawsuit against Draw Media and its editor-in-chief, Mohammed Rauf, demanding one billion Iraqi dinars over a routine news report. The description — a routine news report — is the detail that press-freedom observers seize on: a cabinet minister responding to ordinary reporting with a claim for a sum far beyond any small newsroom's means is, in effect, a financial threat to the outlet's existence, whatever the case's eventual outcome.

The same KirkukNow assessment places Draw Media's lawsuit in a sequence of actions against Kurdish media in a single season, alongside the storming of another outlet's offices, a national-security suit against Westga News editor Sirwan Gharib, and the suspension of a television broadcast. Its conclusion is about climate rather than about any single case: journalists, activists, writers and independent thinkers across the Kurdistan Region now operate under growing pressure, in a climate of self-censorship and fear in which speaking freely has become dangerous. Draw Media's experience is presented as one documented instance of that general condition.

Press-freedom monitoring and the Draw reports

Draw Media is also a source for the study of press freedom itself. A substantial report on the state of press freedom in Kurdistan from 2008 to 2022 — published with Draw Media's material — cites Draw Media's own published counts of violations against journalists, including its reporting that violations in a single day exceeded those of the previous six months, and its count of dozens of violations against journalists in a four-day period. In other words, Draw does not only endure the environment it covers; it helps to measure it, publishing running accounts of violations that researchers and monitoring organisations then use.

This monitoring role fits the outlet's position in Sulaymaniyah's media ecology. The city hosts the Metro Center, founded in 2009 by journalists and human rights advocates with support from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting to monitor the free-press situation in the Kurdistan Region, and the Kurdistan Journalists Syndicate, the official professional body operating under the region's press law. Draw Media's violation counts circulate in the same documentary world as those institutions' reports, and are cited alongside them. For a web outlet, becoming a cited source in the fifteen-year record of Kurdish press freedom is a substantial form of institutional presence.

What Draw Media publishes

Draw Media's day-to-day product is Kurdish-language news from the Kurdistan Region and Iraq, published at drawmedia.net in the continuous rhythm of a web newsroom: politics, government, security, society and the affairs of Sulaymaniyah and the other Kurdish governorates. Its stories are the kind that can draw official complaints precisely because they report, promptly and by name, on ministers, security incidents and public controversies. The lawsuit over a routine news report and the case over reporting of a diplomat's killing both arose from this ordinary news function, not from opinion or campaigning.

Alongside news, the outlet publishes its press-freedom reporting: tallies and accounts of violations against journalists in the Kurdistan Region. That beat is unusual for a small outlet to sustain, and it reflects a newsroom judgement that the conditions of journalism are themselves news for its audience. Readers of Draw Media are, in part, the same journalists, activists and civil-society workers whose treatment the outlet records, which gives its monitoring an immediacy that an outside organisation's annual report cannot match.

Working conditions for independent Kurdish media

Draw Media's record lets a reader see, in one outlet, the three pressures that define independent Kurdish journalism. The first is legal: arrests under misuse-of-devices provisions, summonses of an entire editorial board, and civil claims of a billion dinars. The second is financial: dependence on international grants, with no party patron and no large advertising market to fall back on. The third is atmospheric: the self-censorship that monitoring organisations describe when every routine report risks a lawsuit. Party-backed outlets face none of these pressures in the same form, which is why analysts treat the survival of outlets like Draw as an indicator of how much independent space the Kurdistan Region's media system still contains.

It is equally important to record what has not happened. Draw Media continues to publish. Its editor remains its editor, its website remains its platform, and its violation counts remain part of the cited record. In the Kurdistan Region's recent media history, other outlets have been closed, burned, suspended or bankrupted. Continuity, for an independent web outlet under legal and financial pressure, is an achievement that should not be taken for granted.

Why Draw Media matters

Draw Media matters for two reasons. First, as a newsroom, it is part of the small independent cohort — with Peregraf and KirkukNow — that analysts identify as carrying independent news coverage in the Kurdistan Region after the decline of the independent newspapers. Its reporting gives Kurdish readers a source that is not a party's voice. Second, as a documented case, its experiences supply some of the clearest evidence available of how legal and financial pressure is applied to independent Kurdish media: the Erbil court case and five-million-dinar bail, the ministerial lawsuit demanding a billion dinars, and the syndicate and Metro Center arguments those cases provoked.

For researchers, journalists and readers outside Iraq, Draw Media is therefore both a source and a subject: a place to read Kurdish news and Kurdish press-freedom monitoring, and a name that recurs whenever the state of independent media in the Kurdistan Region is seriously discussed. That double presence, sustained by a small Sulaymaniyah newsroom, is the measure of the outlet's importance.

At a glance

Draw Media is an independent Kurdish web-based news outlet based in Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, publishing at drawmedia.net. Its editor-in-chief is Mohammed Rauf. It publishes Kurdish news and press-freedom monitoring, receives support from the National Endowment for Democracy, and is grouped by the Middle East Institute with Peregraf and KirkukNow as a new generation of independent online media in the region. Its editors have faced court summonses, arrest and bail in a case over reporting of a Turkish diplomat's killing in Erbil, and a ministerial lawsuit demanding one billion Iraqi dinars over a news report — episodes widely cited in documentation of press freedom in Kurdistan.