About Hona Baghdad Satellite Channel

Hona Baghdad Satellite Channel

Overview

Hona Baghdad Satellite Channel is an Iraqi Arabic-language satellite television channel based in Baghdad. Its name translates roughly as "Here is Baghdad," a title that signals its identity as a capital-city broadcaster speaking to an Iraqi audience at home and across the wider Middle East. The channel broadcasts a general entertainment and information schedule rather than a single-format service: its programming has included news programmes, drama series and comedy shows. That mixed schedule placed Hona Baghdad within the large field of Iraqi satellite channels that emerged after 2003, when the end of the former state broadcasting monopoly opened the airwaves to dozens of privately run stations competing for Iraqi viewers by satellite.

Although Hona Baghdad carried a broad schedule, it became best known nationally for one programme above all others. The political satire sketch show Wilayat Batikh, which premiered on the channel in 2015, turned Hona Baghdad into a household name and gave the station a cultural weight well beyond what its short published history might suggest. The channel later featured in international press-freedom reporting when Iraq's broadcast regulator ordered it closed during the protest crisis of late 2019, an episode that underlined both its visibility as a Baghdad news source and the vulnerability of Iraqi broadcasters to regulatory pressure.

Launch and identity

Hona Baghdad was launched in 2012, according to the channel's reference listings, and established its headquarters in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. It operated as a satellite channel from the outset, a model that had become standard for Iraqi television by that period because satellite distribution allowed a Baghdad-based station to reach viewers in every Iraqi governorate as well as the large Iraqi diaspora elsewhere in the Arab world. The channel's official website was published at honabaghdad.tv, and the station maintained an online presence alongside its satellite signal.

The channel's Arabic name, Qanat Huna Baghdad al-Fadaiya, frames it explicitly as a Baghdad station. In a media market where many prominent Iraqi channels broadcast from Amman, Dubai, Cairo or London, a headquarters in Baghdad itself was a distinguishing feature, and it later mattered in regulatory reporting: when the Communications and Media Commission moved against a group of broadcasters in November 2019, Hona Baghdad was listed among the Baghdad-based outlets affected, alongside Al-Rasheed TV, Al-Fallujah and the radio stations Radio Al-Nas and Radio Al-Youm.

Headquarters and reach

Hona Baghdad's headquarters is in Baghdad, and its availability was described as covering the Middle East by satellite. The channel was available to Arab audiences throughout the world via satellite, and online streaming was available through its website, extending its reach beyond the satellite footprint to viewers watching on connected devices. Satellite carriage reference listings, including LyngSat, recorded the channel during its early years on air, reflecting its place in the standard regional satellite line-up of the period.

Distribution by satellite and streaming rather than by terrestrial transmission shaped the kind of channel Hona Baghdad could be. Its audience was not limited to Baghdad or to Iraq; Iraqi expatriate communities across the Middle East and further afield formed part of its potential viewership. That regional reach is one reason a comedy programme launched on the channel could become a pan-Iraqi cultural reference point rather than merely a local success, and why the channel's treatment by the Iraqi regulator in 2019 attracted the attention of international organisations that monitor broadcasters serving Iraqi audiences from inside and outside the country.

Programming

Hona Baghdad's programming was described as including news programmes, drama and comedy shows. That combination is characteristic of the generalist Iraqi satellite model, in which a channel mixes current-affairs coverage with serial drama and light entertainment in order to hold audiences across the day and across audience groups. Drama is a central pillar of Arabic-language television schedules, particularly during Ramadan, while comedy has an especially strong tradition in Iraqi broadcasting, where satire has long served as a vehicle for commenting on politics and everyday life under pressure.

Within that schedule, comedy proved to be the channel's defining strand. Hona Baghdad gained its popularity after airing the political satire comedy show Wilayat Batikh, whose success eclipsed the rest of the schedule in public recognition. The relationship ran both ways: the show needed a channel willing to carry pointed political sketch comedy in a difficult media environment, and the channel gained, from the show, a national profile that a three-year-old station could not otherwise easily have achieved. News programming, meanwhile, kept the channel inside Iraq's contested information space, a role that became consequential during the unrest of 2019.

Wilayat Batikh and national fame

Wilayat Batikh, also rendered in English as Melon City Show or Melon State Show, is an Iraqi sketch comedy television show created by the Iraqi television presenter and comedian Ali Fadel. It premiered on Hona Baghdad on 30 July 2015. Each episode consists mainly of several pre-taped sketches, running in total to around fifty to sixty minutes. The sketches cover a variety of societal topics, often focusing on Iraqi popular culture and politics, and the programme's genre is described as political satire and black comedy. The title itself is drawn from an Iraqi Arabic proverb: "melon city" describes a place without regard for the law, a situation with no organisation or control because there is no effective government — a pointed joke about the condition of the Iraqi state that the show's sketches repeatedly explored.

The show ran on Hona Baghdad from 2015 to 2017, its first two seasons forming the core of its run on the channel. After the success of the show, its cast also presented live on-stage performances before live audiences, extending the programme's reach beyond television. Across its whole life on successive channels the series reached four seasons and 136 episodes, produced by the Melon City Company, but it was the Hona Baghdad premiere and early seasons that established its reputation. For Hona Baghdad, hosting the launch of what became one of Iraq's best-known satire programmes remains the central entry in its history: reference works on the channel introduce it, before anything else, as the station that aired Wilayat Batikh.

The departure of its signature show

The association between Hona Baghdad and Wilayat Batikh ended in 2017. On 18 May 2017, Ali Fadel, the show's star and presenter, announced that the programme would be moving to another channel for its next season. The third season premiered on Dijlah TV on 14 July 2017, and on 11 August 2017 Asia Satellite Television also acquired broadcasting rights to the show. The programme later continued on Dijlah TV until 2020 and then on UTV, remaining on air long after leaving its original home.

The move illustrates a recurring pattern in Iraqi television, where a successful programme is a portable asset owned by its creators and production company rather than by the channel that first carried it. Hona Baghdad lost its signature show but retained the historical credit for launching it: the programme's reference listings still record Hona Baghdad as its original network for the 2015 to 2017 period. The channel continued broadcasting its general schedule of news, drama and comedy after the departure, though no subsequent programme is recorded as matching the national impact of Wilayat Batikh.

Threats during the 2019 protests

In October 2019 Iraq entered a period of mass protest, with demonstrations across Baghdad and the south over a lack of basic services, unemployment and government corruption. Iraqi media covering the protests came under severe pressure, and Hona Baghdad was among the outlets affected. A monitoring report on violations against Iraqi media channels' headquarters during the demonstrations recorded that on 5 October 2019 anonymous threats were directed at the Hona Baghdad and Al-Rasheed channels. The same period saw far worse attacks on other broadcasters, including raids on offices, arson and the storming of channel headquarters, which formed the backdrop against which threats against a Baghdad channel had to be taken seriously.

The protests were the largest to hit Iraq since 2003, and press-freedom organisations documented a sharp deterioration in conditions for journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists noted that the broadcasters later ordered closed had critically covered the protests, according to its review of their broadcasts. Hona Baghdad's news output during the unrest therefore placed it in the group of channels whose protest coverage brought them into confrontation with the authorities, first through threats and then through formal regulatory action the following month.

The November 2019 closure order

In November 2019, Iraq's Communications and Media Commission ordered the closure of twelve broadcast news outlets, and Hona Baghdad was one of them. The decision, documented in a Communications and Media Commission paper sent to the prime minister's office, listed Amman-based Dijlah TV and Anb TV, Dubai-based Al-Sharqiya TV, Saudi-funded Al-Arabiya Al-Hadath, the United States-funded Radio Sawa, Sulaymaniyah-based NRT News and Radio Nawa, and the Baghdad-based Al-Rasheed TV, Al-Fallujah, Hona Baghdad, Radio Al-Nas and Radio Al-Youm. The Journalistic Freedoms Observatory likewise reported that the commission's board had voted to suspend a list of channels including Hona Baghdad for allegedly violating articles of the media broadcasting regulations.

The Committee to Protect Journalists called on the commission to reverse the order and allow television broadcasters, radio stations and journalists to do their jobs, arguing that Iraqi authorities were using the means at their disposal to intimidate outlets in order to prevent them from covering the ongoing protests. The decision also warned five further outlets, among them Sky News Arabia, Al-Sumaria, Rudaw, Asia TV and Ur TV, to adapt their discourse to the broadcasting rules or face possible suspension, and it recommended approaching the home countries of the foreign outlets listed and the management of the Egyptian satellite provider Nilesat. The International Press Institute, reporting that press freedom in Iraq had fallen to its worst level in over a decade, also recorded Hona Baghdad among the outlets ordered closed, and noted that a related ban on the United States-funded broadcaster Al-Hurra was extended for a further three months during the same crackdown.

Place in Iraqi satellite television

Hona Baghdad's history compresses several defining features of post-2003 Iraqi television into a single small channel. It was a privately run satellite station launched from Baghdad in a crowded market; it built its reputation not through news or drama but through satire, the genre in which Iraqi audiences have most readily recognised their own political frustrations; it lost its defining programme to rival channels in a market where formats and stars move freely; and it ended the decade named in an international press-freedom case after covering anti-government protests. Few Iraqi channels of its size appear in both entertainment reference works and the reports of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and that dual presence is the measure of the channel's significance.

The channel also demonstrates the limits of the surviving public record for Iraqi broadcasters of its generation. No detailed corporate history, ownership filing or audience measurement for Hona Baghdad has been published in the sources available, and its own reference entry is brief. What is documented — its 2012 launch, its Baghdad base, its satellite and streaming availability, its news, drama and comedy schedule, its role as the original home of Wilayat Batikh, the threats of October 2019 and the closure order of November 2019 — is nevertheless enough to fix its place in the record of Iraqi media as the channel that gave Iraq its defining political satire show of the 2010s.

Legacy

Hona Baghdad's legacy rests principally on 30 July 2015, the night Wilayat Batikh premiered on its air. The programme went on to run for years on other channels and to stage live performances, but its creation and first success belong to Hona Baghdad's schedule, and accounts of the channel continue to lead with that fact. The proverb in the show's title — a city without law or effective government — became a widely repeated shorthand in Iraqi public life, and the channel that first broadcast it is inseparable from that history.

Alongside that entertainment legacy stands a documentary one. Because Hona Baghdad was named in the Communications and Media Commission's November 2019 decision, its name is preserved in the reporting of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Press Institute and Iraqi monitoring organisations as part of the record of the 2019 protest-period restrictions on the press. For a channel whose own archive is thin, those two trails — the satire it launched and the closure order it was subjected to — together constitute its verified place in Iraqi television history.