About NRT News

NRT News

NRT News is the news channel of Nalia Radio and Television, a media network headquartered in Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, founded in 2010 by businessman Shaswar Abdulwahid under the slogan Courage, Balance and Truth. Broadcasting in Kurdish and Arabic in high definition, owned by the Nalia Media Corporation and flanked by sister channels NRT2, NRT3 and NRT4, NRT built its reputation as the Kurdistan Region's leading independent television voice, the first independent Kurdish satellite station, in a landscape otherwise dominated by the channels of the two governing parties. That independence has been tested more severely than that of any comparable Kurdish outlet: its headquarters were burned down days after launch in 2011, its founder was shot and wounded in 2013 and repeatedly arrested in later years, and its offices and channels were raided, suspended or closed by Kurdish authorities in 2017, 2020 and again in later disputes, each time after coverage the authorities disliked. NRT's history is therefore both a broadcaster's profile and the central case study in the argument over press freedom in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Foundation in Sulaymaniyah in 2010

Nalia Radio and Television was founded in 2010 in Sulaymaniyah by Shaswar Abdulwahid Qadir, owner and founder of the Nalia Media Corporation and chief executive of the Nalia Company, a businessman whose interests were built in property and investment in the city's German Village development, where the station was based. Contemporary reporting describes NRT at its 2011 television launch as a free satellite station and the region's only independent TV station, a description the Committee to Protect Journalists echoed in calling it the first independent Kurdish satellite station in the Iraqi Kurdistan region. The network's slogan, Courage, Balance and Truth, was chosen to state the proposition plainly: in a region where the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan each operated their own channels, and where most other outlets depended on party money, NRT would be financed by a private company and edited independently of both ruling parties.

The channel at the centre of the network, catalogued as NRT News and broadcasting as NRT HD in 1080i high definition, serves the whole of Iraq from its Sulaymaniyah headquarters, with Kurdish and Arabic services. Around it the Nalia group built a family of channels: NRT2 as a general entertainment service with drama and family programming in Kurdish, NRT3 as a children's channel and NRT4 as a religious channel, alongside Nalia FM radio and a trilingual website in Kurdish, Arabic and English. The structure deliberately mirrored the party networks it competed with, a full portfolio rather than a single news feed, so that a household could stay inside NRT's channels for news, entertainment and children's viewing, while the journalism of the flagship carried the group's public identity.

Fire three days after launch

NRT's independence was answered with violence almost immediately. The station was set on fire by armed men only 72 hours after its official launch in 2011, an arson attack that destroyed the television station in German Village, one of the most affluent and heavily guarded residential areas of Sulaymaniyah. The case was never solved. When CPJ researchers visited the rebuilt station in August 2013, they found the headquarters renovated, the reporters determined, and the inner walls of the new offices decorated with pictures of the debris of the destroyed workplace, a deliberate memorial to the attack. The station's leadership told CPJ they believed those responsible were part of a group bigger than the government, and a deputy interior minister, asked why the attackers remained at large, answered in terms that implied some people were above the law. The unsolved burning became foundational to NRT's identity: the channel that had quite literally been burned for launching, and had rebuilt and carried on broadcasting, could claim a credibility no party channel could manufacture.

The pressure on its founder was personal as well as institutional. On the evening of 26 October 2013, gunmen in a grey unlicensed car shot and wounded Shaswar Abdulwahid in Sulaymaniyah, hitting him in the right leg; he survived, and, as with the arson, no investigation produced a public result. Reporting of the period places both attacks in a wider pattern in which independent Kurdish journalists who documented corruption faced threats and, in the cases of Sardasht Osman, Soran Mama Hama and Kawa Garmyani, assassination. NRT operated inside that pattern as its largest institutional target, and its continued broadcasting through it is the main reason Kurdish media histories treat the network as the standard-bearer of the region's independent media era that began around 2011.

Editorial position and the move into politics

Editorially, NRT positioned itself against corruption and against the dominance of the two governing parties, covering public-sector salary crises, austerity and protest movements that party channels underplayed, and giving airtime to opposition voices. That stance eventually carried its founder into politics himself. Abdulwahid campaigned, through NRT, for a no vote in the Kurdistan Region's independence referendum of September 2017, arguing against the timing and leadership of the project, and in 2017 he founded the New Generation Movement, an opposition political party that went on to win seats in the Kurdish and Iraqi parliaments, with NRT remaining his media platform. The dual role, station owner and party leader, complicates any simple description of NRT as non-partisan after 2017, and critics of the network make that point regularly. What did not change was the direction of its fire: NRT remained an opposition broadcaster, but now the opposition had a name, a leader and a parliamentary bloc of its own, and the authorities' responses to the channel increasingly treated it as a political adversary as much as a news organisation.

The referendum year: raids, suspension and closure in 2017

The year 2017 brought a concentrated campaign against the network. In August, as NRT prepared referendum programming, security forces raided its Erbil bureau in the Ainkawa district just as it was about to open a new studio for referendum coverage, and the Kurdistan Regional Government's Directorate of Media, Printing and Publishing then suspended all local broadcasting of NRT for a week beginning 28 August 2017, stating that the channel had not complied with the law and had acted against the regional referendum. NRT accused the KDP of standing behind the decision, and the Association for the Defence of Press Freedom in Iraq condemned the ban as a violation of the constitution and of Kurdistan's own laws. On referendum day itself, four NRT journalists were prevented from entering voting stations in Erbil and barred from the hotel where senior politicians voted, an NRT crew was stopped from covering President Masoud Barzani's arrival in Sulaymaniyah on 20 September, and pro-referendum gunmen threatened NRT employees in Duhok and tore down the channel's poster.

In December 2017 the confrontation escalated again. After NRT livestreamed and reported on protests against corruption, unpaid public-sector salaries and austerity that broke out on 18 December, Kurdish security forces, the Asayish, entered its Sulaymaniyah headquarters at about 7 p.m. on 19 December without showing a warrant, according to the broadcaster and press-freedom groups. NRT's deputy newsroom manager, Soran Rashid, told the Committee to Protect Journalists that the forces vandalised the office, destroyed broadcasting equipment, held staff in the building for an hour, suspended the broadcast of NRT and its subsidiaries and closed the office for a week without explanation, with Asayish forces stationed outside. CPJ condemned the closure and called on the Kurdish authorities to allow journalists to work without fear of reprisal. NRT's founder, meanwhile, was arrested at Sulaymaniyah airport as he returned from abroad, on a court order connected to his encouragement of the protests. The sequence established the pattern that would repeat: protest coverage, then a raid or closure framed by officials as a legal or guidelines matter and by press-freedom organisations as retaliation.

Protests, raids and closures in 2020

The pattern repeated in 2020. On 11 August 2020 Abdulwahid used NRT to call for public protests demanding better education, employment opportunities and anti-corruption measures, and protests followed across the region for about a week from 12 August. Human Rights Watch reported that NRT, with its Kurdish and Arabic channels, was the only outlet to cover those protests in any detail. On 19 August, Asayish forces raided NRT's office in Duhok, held staff there for several hours and ordered them home, in what staff described as a response to the protest coverage, and the network's Erbil office was closed in the same period. Human Rights Watch, reporting in October 2020 that the two offices had by then been closed for over a month without a court order and only in KDP-controlled areas, concluded that the closures appeared politically motivated and unlawful. In December 2020, during a further wave of protests in Sulaymaniyah, NRT was closed again, with security forces stationed in front of its building, the network's channels ordered off air alongside two other outlets accused of violating ministry guidelines, and social media platforms blocked in the province; Kurdish parliamentarians objected that the Region's 2007 press law contains no provision allowing authorities to stop a channel's broadcast at all.

Pressure also reached the channel's working journalists directly. In June 2021, for example, NRT correspondent Karzan Tariq was live on air by phone and then on camera from outside a hospital in Sulaymaniyah, covering an armed clash between Asayish units and the bodyguards of a regional vice-president, when a patrol of four Asayish members took the crew's microphone, headphone and phone, threatened to break the phone and stopped the broadcast after about two minutes, an incident the correspondent recounted in detail to local media. Such episodes, individually minor beside arson and closure, describe the working environment in which NRT's newsroom has habitually operated.

Later disputes and the founder's legal battles

The entanglement of the channel with its founder's political and legal position continued into the mid-2020s. Abdulwahid was arrested in Sulaymaniyah in August 2025 and sentenced to five months in prison in a case arising from a 2019 lawsuit by a former lawmaker of his own party, while the Kurdistan Regional Government's finance ministry announced the seizure of dozens of properties belonging to companies associated with him over large government debts. When NRT sought to broadcast a recorded phone interview with him from prison ahead of Iraq's November parliamentary elections, unnamed parties threatened the channel with shutdown if it aired the voice and image of a convicted person, according to the network's account, and the interview was blocked. Separately, Erbil's governor announced the closure of all NRT offices on a public prosecutor's order following complaints accusing the channel of insulting national symbols, insisting the step was legal and not political, while the network said it had received no prior official notification. Opposition figures and press-freedom organisations condemned that closure as they had the earlier ones. The facts of each dispute differ; the structure, a channel owned by the main opposition leader and a succession of closures justified on legal grounds, remained constant.

Programmes, services and reach

Through all of this, NRT has continued to function as a broadcaster, not only as a cause. Its flagship provides rolling Kurdish and Arabic news, political talk and protest and parliamentary coverage from Sulaymaniyah, with bureaus and correspondents across the Kurdistan Region and Iraq, a live stream distributed through its website and social channels including its official Telegram webcast, and radio through Nalia FM. NRT2 carries entertainment, NRT3 children's programming and NRT4 religious content, giving the Nalia Media Corporation a channel for each major audience segment. The network's audience is concentrated in the Kurdistan Region, particularly in Sulaymaniyah and Halabja, where the governing-party channels it criticises are weakest and its own history resonates most strongly, but its satellite signal and Arabic service carry it across Iraq, and its coverage of Kurdish protests is routinely the source other regional and international media cite when party channels are silent, as Human Rights Watch noted of August 2020.

Significance in Kurdish media history

NRT's significance is out of proportion to its size because it proved a possibility and paid the price for it in public. Before 2010, Kurdish satellite television in Iraq meant party television; NRT demonstrated that a privately financed station could launch, survive an arson attack that destroyed it within days, rebuild, and become a leading voice by criticising the authorities who licensed it. Every serious account of press freedom in the Kurdistan Region, by the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and Iraqi press-freedom associations, runs through NRT's file: the 2011 fire, the 2013 shooting of its founder, the 2017 suspension and December raid, the 2020 office closures and the closures and threats that followed. Critics are entitled to note that its founder's transformation into an opposition party leader after 2017 blurred the line between independent journalism and political platform. Audiences are equally entitled to the observation that, when protests filled Kurdish streets and other channels looked away, NRT was repeatedly the outlet that broadcast them. Both truths belong in its record, and together they make NRT News the most consequential independent broadcaster the Kurdistan Region has produced.