Kurdish news outlet shuts down print edition in Turkey
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan 24) – A Kurdish publication operating from the Kurdistan Region announced on Monday it will stop publishing its printed edition in Turkey due to tensions between Erbil and Ankara.
Bas News Agency printed its last issue on Monday, Nov. 27 in Istanbul according to Botan Tahseen, the head of the Agency’s administrative council.
The printed edition had run for several years and Tahseen explained that the situation in Turkey has drastically changed since Bas News first launched its operations in Istanbul. At the time “relations between Ankara and Erbil were strong in every field,” he said.
“The general political atmosphere in the region shifted from bad to worse, and the deterioration of relations between [the two capitals] have made it impossible for the Bas Weekly Paper to continue publishing,” he noted, adding that they had increasingly faced pressures and obstacles running their publication in Turkey.
Bas Media will continue to publish on its website, which covers events and news on the Kurds in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and the Kurdish areas of Turkey, also known as Bakur.
A government crackdown on the press has seen the closure of over 150 media outlets under a state of emergency since last year's botched coup attempt against Erdogan's rule, according to Human Rights Watch and Freedom House.
There are over 160 journalists in prisons across Turkey, according to the Turkish Journalists’ Association.
Turkey's state regulatory body of media shut down the transmission of three Kurdistan Region-based news channels from the national satellite provider Turksat, among them Kurdistan 24, Rudaw and Waar TV the same day the people of the Kurdistan Region headed to the polls in a referendum on independence from Iraq.
A December 2016 report by the UN's Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression David Kaye described the crackdown as “the government decimation of Kurdish media.”