About Xendan

Xendan

Xendan is a Kurdish online news site operated by the Xendan Foundation for Broadcast and Publishing, founded in Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in 2004. The website itself started work on 1 January 2010 and publishes an electronic newspaper in Kurdish and Arabic. Academic studies describe Xendan as a Sulaymaniyah-based media organisation that presents itself as independent, while researchers and the BBC have reported it as directed or funded by figures of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the PUK — a tension between self-description and external assessment that has made Xendan a favourite case study for scholars of Kurdish media, translation and political communication.

The name is spelled both Xendan and Xandan in transliteration, and both spellings appear in the academic literature and in reference guides. Its website is xendan.org. Xendan is one of the projects of the Xendan Foundation, which has also operated a sister radio channel, and studies of the organisation record dozens of media workers across the website and its sister outlet. To understand Xendan is to understand a particular Kurdish media form: the foundation-backed, party-adjacent online newspaper that emerged in the decade after 2003, before social media reorganised the region's news habits.

The Xendan Foundation and the 2004 founding

The Xendan Foundation for Broadcasting and Publishing was founded in the city of Sulaymaniyah, in Iraqi Kurdistan, in 2004. That date, given consistently in academic studies of the website's news sources and in analyses of its translation practice, places the foundation's creation in the first wave of institution-building after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, when the Kurdistan Region's media expanded rapidly and its two governing parties and their leading figures sponsored newspapers, broadcasters and cultural foundations.

Sulaymaniyah is the natural home for such a foundation. The city is the Kurdistan Region's centre of publishing and letters and the historic base of the PUK. A broadcasting and publishing foundation created there in 2004 entered a crowded but growing field, in which print newspapers still carried prestige and the web was becoming the fastest way to reach Kurdish readers in the region and the diaspora. The foundation's projects, as described by researchers Muhedeen and others, were intended to provide an objective media information service, focus on democratisation and the development of civil society, and spread a culture of moderation in order to create a climate in which diverse views are accepted and tolerated. Those stated aims — objectivity, democratisation, civil society, moderation — are the vocabulary of the post-2003 Kurdish public sphere, and Xendan was created to speak in it.

The website from 1 January 2010

The Xendan website started its work on the first of January 2010, according to the analytical study of the site's local news sources published in the International Journal of Advanced Research. From that date, Xendan operated as an electronic newspaper: a continuously updated online daily publishing in Kurdish and Arabic. The distinction between the foundation's 2004 founding and the website's 2010 start is worth keeping, because it marks the organisation's shift from a general broadcasting and publishing foundation to a digital news operation whose main public face is its website.

By the middle of the following decade, the site was publishing at a scale that allowed academic content analysis. A study of the local news Xendan published in March 2016 examined 767 news items in a single month, classifying their sources in detail. Whatever else that figure shows, it demonstrates a working online newsroom producing a daily file of dozens of items, sourced mainly from its own correspondents — the operational reality behind the foundation's stated aims.

How Xendan gathers its news

The March 2016 study remains the most precise public account of Xendan's newsgathering. Of the 767 local news items analysed, 53.7 percent — 412 items — came from correspondents and reporters within the Kurdistan Region; 16.4 percent from other media; 15.1 percent, or 116 items, from news agencies; 13.2 percent, or 102 items, from official and unofficial statements; 1.5 percent from social media; and 1.1 percent, nine items, from correspondents outside the region. The study also records the structure behind those numbers: a reporter in each of the provinces of the Kurdistan Region, no reporters in government ministries, and reliance on agencies including Reuters, Agence France-Presse and the Turkish Doğan agency for wire material.

Read carefully, those findings describe a recognisably professional online newspaper. More than half of its local news originates with its own correspondents rather than being rewritten from other outlets; official statements are a significant but minority source; agency copy fills the international and regional file; and social media, in 2016, was still marginal as a source. The study's summary of the site's commitments — to truth and neutrality in the dissemination of news, adherence to the principles of moral journalism, and regard for personal rights and freedoms and the public interest — records the standards the website publicly professed. Scholars have debated how fully those standards survive the organisation's political connections, but the workflow the study documents is that of a staffed newsroom, not a propaganda sheet assembled from handouts.

The independence question: shadow media and the PUK

No profile of Xendan is honest without addressing its disputed status. The site describes itself as free from party political bias and proprietorial influence. External assessments are more sceptical. Researcher Sabir, writing in 2013, described both Xendan and Erbil's Rudaw as shadow media — a term drawn from Reporters Without Borders for outlets created to fill the gap between partisan media and independent media, claiming independence while remaining subservient to political parties: Xendan, in that account, to the PUK, and Rudaw to the Kurdistan Democratic Party. The category is sometimes phrased as semi-independent media, indirectly affiliated to the parties rather than formally owned by them.

Other sources name the connection personally. The BBC's guide to Kurdish media described Xendan as a media site funded by a leading PUK figure, Barham Salih, the Kurdish politician who served as prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government and later as president of Iraq. Scholar Hataw Hussein, cited by Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board, goes further, describing Xendan as completely directed by the PUK. Muhedeen's research, discussed in Canadian Social Science, records that the Xendan Foundation belongs to Barham Salih, that he established it formally when he was prime minister of the KRG, and that through that support he is able to influence Xendan's policy — while also noting Xendan's counter-claim that it is independent because it does not receive funding from the PUK's finance department. The careful conclusion the evidence supports is this: Xendan's connection to Salih and the PUK is reported by the BBC, by academic researchers and by reference guides alike; the outlet's independence is its own claim, maintained alongside that connection, and the argument between the two is precisely what makes the outlet instructive.

A case study in translation and ideology

Xendan's bilingual publishing has made it a case study beyond media studies. A doctoral-level analysis of ideological mediation in the translation of geopolitical texts, using an English-Kurdish case study, examines how Xendan handles material across languages, including its republication and translation of a prominent article by Iraqi politician Adil Abdul-Mahdi about Jalal Talabani, and its uploading, with translation summaries, of Sky News and BBC interviews with Barham Salih about the battle for Kobane. The study uses Xendan to explore a serious question: when a news outlet translates between Kurdish and Arabic, or summarises English-language interviews for its readers, the choices it makes shape how geopolitics is understood by its audience.

That scholarly attention is a form of significance in itself. Most Kurdish websites are never examined at this level. Xendan is studied because it sits at a junction — Kurdish and Arabic, Sulaymaniyah and Iraq, claimed independence and reported party direction — where the mechanics of Kurdish media can be observed in a single organisation. Students of translation, of media ownership and of the PUK's public communication all have reason to read it closely.

People, scale and sister media

Research on the organisation records that around forty media workers worked for the Xendan website and its sister radio channel at the time Muhedeen's account was written. That scale placed Xendan well above the small web start-ups of its period: it was a mid-sized media house, with a foundation structure, a radio sibling and a province-by-province reporting network inside the Kurdistan Region. Its lack of foreign correspondents — the 2016 study found only one reporter in Iranian Kurdistan and no representatives abroad — kept its focus deliberately local and regional, dependent on the major agencies for the wider world.

The foundation structure also explains the outlet's durability. A website owned by a foundation created by a senior political figure does not depend on advertising sold month by month, nor on a proprietor's daily enthusiasm. It persists as institutions persist. Xendan's long presence in Sulaymaniyah's media landscape — foundation in 2004, website from 2010, a heavy daily file documented in 2016, and correspondents still appearing in Kurdish press reporting years later — reflects that institutional base.

Xendan in the Kurdish media landscape

Reference guides place Xendan consistently among the Kurdistan Region's notable media organisations. Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board, synthesising the BBC, Courrier international and academic sources for decision-makers who must assess Kurdish media claims, lists Xendan — spelled Xandan — as a Sulaymaniyah-based media organisation, in the same breath as the region's party newspapers, satellite channels and independent papers. Asylum and research professionals, in other words, are told that to understand a Kurdish news claim they may need to understand Xendan and its reported affiliations. That is the practical meaning of the outlet's prominence: it is large and connected enough that outsiders must reckon with it, and contested enough that they must reckon carefully.

Within the region, Xendan occupies the middle ground its critics named: neither a formal party organ like the PUK's or KDP's historic newspapers, nor an independent outlet of the Peregraf or KirkukNow type, which define themselves against party money. It is better understood as part of the patronage media system that characterised the Kurdistan Region's first post-2003 decades, in which leading politicians built foundations and outlets around themselves, and those outlets published real newsrooms' work under the shadow of their patrons. Kurdish readers, well practised in reading affiliations, have always been able to place it on that map.

Presence in later Kurdish press life

Xendan's name continues to appear in the working life of the Kurdish press. Kurdistan Parliament reporting by KirkukNow lists Xendan, at xendan.org, among the licensed social-media and web outlets whose access to parliament was restricted in a dispute over coverage permissions, alongside Esta, Sharpress, Zhyan, Politic Press, Westga News and Standard. Its correspondent in Sulaymaniyah, Shahen Wahab, appears in reporting on security directives to media, describing how correspondents have read the authorities' decisions and discussed them with security bodies, and noting the effect of teargas on a Xendan correspondent and camera operator during protest coverage in February 2025, as recorded by the Committee to Protect Journalists' reporting on that day's events, in which Xendan's Shahen Wahab and camera operator Garmian Omar suffered asthma attacks from teargas exposure. These later references confirm that Xendan remains an operating, staffed news organisation whose journalists cover protests and parliament and share the risks of the Kurdish press corps.

They also show the outlet in the company of the newer digital generation — listed beside Westga and Esta among web outlets negotiating access with the Kurdistan Parliament. The foundation newspaper of 2010 now works in an environment dominated by exactly such sites, and its survival among them is part of its story.

Why Xendan matters

Xendan matters as evidence. For readers, it is a long-running Kurdish and Arabic source of news from Sulaymaniyah and the Kurdistan Region, produced by a staffed newsroom whose sourcing has been independently measured. For researchers, it is one of the clearest documented examples of the Kurdistan Region's shadow or semi-independent media — outlets founded by senior politicians, professing independence, and assessed by the BBC and academics as party-directed — and of how such outlets gather, translate and publish news. Both things are true at once, and holding them together is the correct way to understand the outlet.

Its history also traces the region's media development in miniature: a publishing foundation in the hopeful institution-building of 2004; an electronic newspaper launched on the first day of 2010, as the web became the Kurdish public sphere; a heavy, correspondent-led daily file by 2016; and a continuing presence in the access disputes and protest coverage of the 2020s. Few Kurdish outlets offer so complete a cross-section of their era.

At a glance

Xendan — also transliterated Xandan — is the online newspaper of the Xendan Foundation for Broadcast and Publishing, founded in Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan Region of Iraq, in 2004. Its website, xendan.org, began work on 1 January 2010 and publishes in Kurdish and Arabic. Academic studies document a correspondent-led newsroom sourcing most local news from its own reporters in the Kurdistan Region's provinces, supplemented by international agencies. The outlet describes itself as independent; the BBC reported it as funded by leading PUK figure Barham Salih, and academic sources describe it as PUK-directed — the defining and much-studied tension of its public identity.