in iraqi kurdistan nobody knows what’s happening on frontlines- media to blame?
Over the past two weeks, Sunni Muslim extremists have been fighting pitched battles against military from Iraqi Kurdistan. Reports coming from the front lines have been confusing and often it was unclear who controlled which territory. While the extremists put out false information regularly, the Iraqi Kurdish media have also come in for criticism – they are publishing rumours and propaganda, media analysts said.
At the beginning of this week, NIQASH’s correspondent in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah entered a store in the central shopping district.
One of the best known news sites in the semi-autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan had just published the following information: “Today 500 militants from the Sunni Muslim extremist group, the Islamic State, were killed by Iraqi Kurdish forces,” the website proudly proclaimed.
Around the same time another local news website boasted that: “More than 100 corpses from the Islamic State group are now in the hands of the Iraqi Kurdish military”.
The owner of the store, Yassin Sharif, had been browsing the Kurdish-language news sites on his smart phone. He looked up and laughed. “If things continue like this, then Daash [the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, or IS] group are going to have to start importing fighters from China,” he joked, referring to the grand total of dead extremists, if one added all of the victories mentioned by local media together.
The recent attacks on territory controlled by Iraqi Kurdish forces have been an interesting lesson in media impartiality for local audiences. If the Iraqi Kurdish media was to be graded for balance and accuracy by an independent observer, it would most likely get pretty low marks.
Over the past week, locals have come to realize that they can trust neither their own media nor the reports coming out of the IS group’s media machine.
Many locals have commented on it. Biryar Sadiq was also in Sharif’s store. “Our media think they are raising people’s morale by hiding the facts,” he commented. “They don’t know that they will become the new Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhafand that nobody will believe anything they say.”
Al-Sahhaf was the Iraqi Information Minister in 2003 when a US-led invasion toppled the regime led by Saddam Hussein. He was busy telling Iraqis that the Iraqi army were winning battles in Baghdad when in fact, US troops were nearing the city.
The Iraqi Kurdish media has been reporting that Iraqi Kurdish forces, also known as the Peshmerga, were in full control of certain areas when in fact, at one stage, IS fighters were getting close to the region’s borders; Iraqi Kurdistan is part of Iraq but it has its own borders, military and parliament. Even when the Peshmerga were defeated in an area, there would be conflicting reports with some media saying that they had been victorious.
Local media also seemed to be around 24 hours late with actual events.
In fact, at one stage, when IS fighters were within striking distance of Iraqi Kurdish borders on August 3, the Iraqi Kurdish media barely reported this. The following day it was clear that the IS group had taken the town of Sinjar and that the lives of thousands of locals from the ethno-religious Yazidi group were in danger. But Iraqi Kurdish media kept saying that the Peshmerga would be able to re-take the town in a matter of hours. In reality the IS group were in full control of the area.
The same thing happened toward the end of the week when IS fighters made it to Makhmour and Qwer, which lie even closer to Erbil’s borders. While tensions rose inside the region’s capital and some families considered leaving town, the Iraqi Kurdish media were still talking about the progress made by their forces.
“Almost all local media outlets forgot about the principle of impartiality during these battles,” admitted one editor-in-chief of a local news site; he would only comment off the record. “But they forgot that it is not possible to hide information from the people.”
The misinformation got so bad that earlier in the week, the Kurdish media rights watchdog, Metro Centre, issued a statement. “Media outlets are publishing a lot of news from the battlefronts,” it said. “Much of this news is unconfirmed by official military sources, it is unofficial and it is misleading. We should wait for official statements issued by the responsible authorities from the Iraqi Kurdish military before we publish.”
This was obviously the most responsible thing to do. However as a number of journalists have pointed out, there is hardly any information coming from official sources. Since the start of increased tensions and conflict around the Iraqi Kurdish borders, authorities have not held a single press conference.
In fact, they did the opposite, issuing a set of guidelines and rules that actually make it harder for local journalists to find out what is going on. Then authorities also blocked Facebook in different parts of the region, along with several other forms of social media. The blockages came and went but apparently there are plans to continue with this practice.
A member of Iraqi Kurdistan’s Asayesh, or military intelligence, told NIQASH off the record that the social media sites were being blocked because the authorities believed it was being used to spread negativity and lower morale and also because it was being used to pass on sensitive military information to the extremists.
It’s relatively easy for Iraqi Kurdish authorities to shut down social media – they only need to implement the region’s 2006 Anti-Terrorism law which says that anyone intentionally broadcasting news or information or propaganda encouraging terrorism and terrorist crimes, that spreads panic, undermines public security or threatens the region’s political entities can be punished.
At the time the law was passed – and every time it’s been extended – it has come in for criticism from journalists and activists because it makes it easy to accuse any media producer of terrorism.
It is a great pity, they say, that such a law cannot be used against the Islamic State group. Much of what they publish and the information they spread is false. For example, last week supporters of the IS group published information alleging that they had captured the Mosul Dam. However at the time, the Iraqi Kurdish military were still in charge of the dam.
As IS fighters were attacking targets around Iraqi Kurdistan, many media producers were attending a roundtable discussion in Erbil organized by a local training organisation, the Media Academy Iraq, at which they discussed how to deal with information coming from the IS group and the local authorities.
While all participants at the meeting agreed that the IS group were a terrorist organisation and should not be supported, they also agreed that this was not enough to justify the publication of misleading information.
A week after the discussion, Hakim Othman, the head of the media department at Sulaymaniyah’s Technical College, noted that some of the local media had been unsuccessful in complying with the principles of impartiality discussed during the meeting in Erbil.
"The media should be giving people the correct information and allowing them to make their own decisions based upon this information,” Othman argued. “If media keep giving inaccurate information, people will lose faith in them.”
Disclaimer: Niqash.org and the Media Academy Iraq both operate under the auspices of a German NGO, Media In Transition And Cooperation (mict-international.org).
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