Kurdish Women Journalists Who Work Under Constant Threat Have Lessons to Share

This January, a Turkish court sentenced Sofya Alağaş, a Kurdish journalist and elected co-mayor of Siirt municipality, to six years and three months in prison on charges of membership in a terror organization.

“I honestly don’t know how it will end,” Alağaş told Truthout. “The sentence was not a legal decision but a political one. If the Turkish state takes some steps towards democratization, the case will end with an acquittal. If it doesn’t, it will be approved and I’ll be arrested.”

The sentence was the culmination of an operation by the Turkish state that began in June 2022, when she and more than a dozen other journalists were arrested for activities the government alleged were linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a militant group founded in 1978, which Ankara considers a terrorist organization. Kurds are Turkey’s largest ethnic minority group, but their traditional homelands also stretch across parts of modern Syria, Iraq and Iran. They’ve been targeted by state violence in all of those countries since the end of the Ottoman Empire, especially in Turkey.

The situation in Turkey grew more dire after July 15, 2016, when a faction within the Turkish military attempted a coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Though the coup attempt was over by the next day, the government soon imposed what would become a two-year state of emergency, which allowed for harsher crackdowns on opposition media and rights groups, as well as mass arrests: The U.S. State Department estimated that more than 312,000 people were arrested in relation to the attempt through 2021. The state also began to replace elected mayors from the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, known today as the DEM Party, with “trustees” loyal to Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Alağaş said she quit her communications job for a municipality of Diyarbakır, the largest Kurdish-majority city in Turkey, because she refused to work for a trustee. But by December 2016, the state had closed nearly 170 media outlets. “Hundreds of journalists were left unemployed. A group of unemployed female journalists had founded the online newspaper Şujin. I started working there,” Alağaş said.

When the government shut down Şujin in 2017, the group founded Jin News, a women-run news agency focused primarily on Kurdish women’s issues.

Alağaş served as a news editor and reporter. Though Jin News is still active, it remained a target. “While working there, I was subjected to pressure from the state many times because of the news we published. Lawsuit were filed against me three times on charges of making propaganda,” Alağaş said. “Access to the agency’s website was blocked 45 times.”

Alağaş remained at Jin News until 2024, when she was elected as co-mayor for the DEM Party in the Kurdish-majority municipality of Siirt in southeast Turkey, where she was born. She said her election sped up the case against her. After her conviction and sentencing for terror charges in January, Alağaş joined the list of dozens of pro-Kurdish and opposition mayors replaced by officials loyal to the AKP.

According to a report by Turkey’s Media and Law Studies Association, the charges against Alağaş stem from an investigation citing “Jin News’s editorial policies, reporting style, headlines” as proof Alağaş was promoting “violence, criticism of the state, and sympathy for the PKK.” Alağaş said those accusations were made over 103 of the 73,413 Turkish-language news items Jin News published during her tenure, including articles about the isolation of imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, Turkish operations against Kurds in Syria and International Women’s Day — Turkey has in recent years imposed bans and restrictions on March 8 protests, in addition to barring Istanbul’s annual Pride march. “The prosecutor cherry-picked news items and added them to the file against me,” she said.

By December 2016, the state had closed nearly 170 media outlets.

Alağaş says articles published about her were also cited — specifically about her winning the Maria Grazia Cutuli Award, an Italian prize for international women journalists. “It was interesting that the news reports regarding an international award were added to the file as evidence of a crime,” she said.

Alağaş told Truthout she has never been subjected to bullying or harassment by the public: “It is the government that does not accept our journalism. The news we produce disturbs the government.”

Gülistan Korban, who runs the women’s center at the South East Journalist Association in Diyarbakır, agrees that state repression makes basic reporting a challenge. “At first, when you mentioned ‘press freedom,’ I thought it was funny. What press freedom in Turkey?” she told Truthout. She said the restrictions on media are a nationwide problem, but that it’s worse for those working in Kurdish cities, where repression tends to be harsher and more violent than in western Turkey.

“Imagine, while you’re writing a report, or doing an interview, even while writing what someone else has said,” Korban explained, “In the future, we could be exposed to an investigation, just because we wrote that report.”

“This is always a big problem for us while writing the news. We feel our thinking is restricted, that our thoughts are shackled,” Korban said. “We, as journalists, are not free,” and between the potential for male violence and entrenched cultural norms, “as women, we are not able to do our work in a sufficient way under this pressure.”

But Korban said she has also received threats and harassment from members of the public for the kinds of news she reports. Most recently, she said her outlet was threatened by the family of a 32-year-old man for reporting that he had kidnapped a 12-year-old girl with the intent to forcibly marry her. It wasn’t enough to deter Korban and her team. “I have a small daughter; how could we not write about this?” she said, adding that the girl’s family had reported the incident to police days earlier, and they hadn’t started the investigation. But it turns out, they didn’t miss the help: “Thank goodness, she was found, she was found immediately after we wrote the report.”

Korban added that she’s been reporting and editing from home due to concerns about how a potential prison stint or worse would affect her daughter. “You can imagine how difficult it is to do this job as a woman journalist in a country,” she says, “where women are killed every day.”

Journalists Under Threat

The repression against media by Turkey is part of a global trend. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) confirmed that 2024 was the deadliest in its history for media workers worldwide. Nearly 70 percent were killed by Israel, but others “were or may have been targeted by Turkish drones in Iraq and Syria.” They include several Kurdish women journalists who were covering Turkey’s attacks on primarily Kurdish forces in northern Syria and Iraq, such as Jihan Belkin and Gulistan Tara, who were from Turkey, as well as Hêro Bahadîn of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Within Turkey, repression against women and other journalists persists, though the state of emergency ended in 2018. At least 30 journalists were in prison in January 2025. Last month, police violently detained Jin News journalist Öznur Değer; in Istanbul, former Bianet editor Elif Akgül, as well as Kaos GL’s Yıldız Tar, who covers LGBTQ+ issues, were detained on terror charges. Meanwhile mainstream TV anchor Özlem Gürses was released from a 52-day house arrest for “insulting state institutions” after she seemed in a broadcast to compare Turkish-backed forces in Syria to ISIS (also known as Daesh) over their fighting with Kurdish-backed militants.

“I was subjected to pressure from the state many times because of the news we published. Lawsuit were filed against me three times on charges of making propaganda.”

Repression and violence against women journalists has come against the backdrop of Ankara’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention in 2021, part of what one Amnesty International official called “the tip of a dangerous anti-rights iceberg.” In 2023, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance ranked Turkey in the “bottom 25 percent of countries in most factors of democracy performance,” with “significant declines” across those indicators over the last decade. The 2011 treaty offered a blueprint for legislation and awareness-raising measures to protect women from violence and rights violations. Killings of women were already high when Turkey pulled out of the agreement, but in the first 11 months of 2024, there were at least 359 reports of men killing women nationwide. Erdoğan has said the convention is antagonistic to “family values” and normalizes homosexuality. More recently, he’s said his party is “against the LGBT,” and last summer, Turkey deported a trans woman refugee to Syria over her HIV status. There, she was reportedly killed by her family and members of the Free Syrian Army.

Part of the “anti-rights iceberg” in Turkey is linked to the state of its democracy. Erdoğan has been in power for more than 20 years. The AKP has grown increasingly authoritarian, especially after the coup attempt further eroded already weak democratic institutions. The government remains among the top jailers of journalists, though Turkey has long targeted media. In 2007, Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was assassinated on a main street in central Istanbul, part of a long pattern of anti-press violence that goes back to military rule in the 1980s and ‘90s. Exiled journalists from Syria in Turkey have often been caught up in xenophobic attacks, spurred on by rhetoric from the secular opposition, the far right and the ruling party. These xenophobic forces exploded in a pogrom against Syrians last summer in the central Turkish city of Kayseri and elsewhere. Crackdowns on the press usually most affect leftists and minorities, but they also transcend identity. Insulting the Turkish nation has been a crime since 2005 — Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk has been charged under that law twice — and opponents have labeled a 2022 law on disinformation a “censorship law” for the potential it has to allow additional state interference in social media and independent news content.

As Alağaş says, “If you do not publish biased news that praises the AKP, you are definitely a target.”

Yet, when the government and PKK entered peace talks in 2013, Korban remembers that “reporting the news, doing your job even as a woman, was so easy.… There were 20 to 30 women journalists working in the field in the region. Now, I can count them on one hand.” But repression reemerged quickly. When the Gezi Park protest movement broke out in May of that year, police used water cannons, beatings and tear gas to break up demonstrations, while at least two sexual assaults by authorities were reported. The truce between the government and PKK broke down by 2015, leading to efforts to oust Kurdish parliamentarians as the economy and currency began to falter. Major shifts are likely again on this front: On February 27, PKK leader Öcalan called on fighters to lay down their arms, leading the group to declare a ceasefire, dependent on his release from an island prison.

Can It Happen Here?

Some analysts have drawn parallels between Erdoğan and U.S. President Donald Trump — during a diplomatic spat in 2019, Trump even called himself a “big fan” of the Turkish president. From the cults of personality that propelled them to power, to their reliance on “lifestyle issues” to, as Xavier University’s Nazan Bedirhanoğlu wrote for Democracy Seminar, their attempts to “reinforce symbolic boundaries” among the public, their strategies hinge on sowing divisions: “Polarization thrives when enemies … are established as the main pillars of political discourse.”

Katherine Jacobsen, the CPJ coordinator for the U.S., says the perspective that “it can’t happen here” is a dangerous one.

“Comparative politics has many pitfalls … but I think there are many examples globally we can learn from,” says Jacobsen. “This kind of sense of American exceptionalism, especially around media — that we won’t have those types of problems that are in Turkey or in Hungary or Brazil — doesn’t work anymore. We’re long past the point of having any sort of exceptionalism in that realm.” In fact, all of the journalists Truthout spoke to for this article, from Turkey and the U.S., reported some sort of official or public threat related to their work.

Like Erdoğan, Trump is antagonistic to the press: By one count, he verbally attacked the media more than 100 times ahead of the 2024 election, and he’s threatened to throw reporters in jail. The Coalition For Women in Journalism wrote in a report last year that Project 2025 poses major challenges for an independent press and democracy, as Reporters Without Borders notes that repression of women journalists is growing worldwide and tends to be worse under authoritarian regimes. According to a report from October 2024 from the International Women’s Media Foundation, journalists across the U.S. were already facing increased levels of harassment and threats of violence.

Since his inauguration in January, Trump has banned the Associated Press from White House events and attacked reporters by name. One administration official accused a Voice of America reporter of being “treasonous” and called for his dismissal over a quote he used in his coverage. Meta has ended fact-checking efforts, which will likely allow misinformation to flourish, as it does on Elon Musk’s X, which reports have shown is flooded with content from neo-Nazis and white supremacists. In February, Musk also complied with a request from Turkey to block “scores” of X accounts connected with its opposition, including Kurds and leftists, as well as “a number of prominent journalists and news outlets.”

Women journalists — and especially those who are also journalists of color and LGBTQ+, disabled, or otherwise marginalized journalists, and those who have been writing about race or other kinds of inequality — are among the most vulnerable to harassment and violence.

In February 2020, a man was charged with hate crimes and harassment after he spat on and threatened trans woman journalist Serena Daniari in New York. While covering an Oregon MAGA rally that autumn, journalist Beth Nakamura recorded Trump supporters harassing her and screaming “the press is the problem.” In 2021, one Los Angeles-area news anchor told Prism that as a Black woman journalist, she’s received near constant online harassment, mostly from anonymous accounts. “If they thought they weren’t doing anything wrong, they wouldn’t hide their identity. That takes time and thought, and that makes it even more twisted,” she said. And in 2023, Trump supporters physically assaulted a woman journalist who was trying to question him in Miami. Meanwhile, ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott reportedly received death threats after interviewing Trump at a meeting of Black journalists in Chicago in July.

Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents blog founder Sue Kerr has been covering the LGBTQ+ community for more than 20 years. Throughout her career, she says she’s been a target. “I’ve experienced a lot of harassment, rudeness and [been] targeted by TERFs [trans-exclusionary radical feminists] several times. I’ve had three men stalk me. I was doxxed by Stormfront,” one of the earliest white supremacist hate sites on the internet. But she says the harassment got worse for her after Trump’s inauguration in January.

“This was an actual death threat by someone using their real Facebook account. That was unnerving. They weren’t hiding their identity and that’s unusual. The threat mentioned other people — admins and people affiliated with me,” Kerr told Truthout, adding that she has contacted police but has yet to hear back. Kerr says the threat was over her support for and coverage of the trans community. “The dehumanizing rhetoric from the current administration empowers people to let their worst sides show.”

Jacobsen sees the precedents the Trump administration is setting, for example by suing media outlets and journalists, as likely to embolden other politicians. “If the president is lobbing defamation suits against lots of different news organizations, who’s to say a local official can’t sue a local journalist?” That could have a chilling effect on journalists’ willingness to report, especially in local newsrooms. “It pollutes the entire media ecosystem,” she says. “Distrust in the media has been growing for a while now. Trump did not invent the concept of denigrating the media in the U.S. But he did tactically decide to ride on the growing wave of mistrust … and capitalize on that for his own political ends.”

Still, Kerr says she thinks the dangers facing marginalized journalists in the U.S. will force media workers to “be creative in how we share our stories.”

Facing Repression, Journalists Won’t Back Down

Award-winning journalist and educator Stephanie Manriquez is from Mexico City but has long worked in Chicago. She is the director of Lumpen Radio, an independent FM community station based on the city’s South Side. The station is multilingual and trains community members to do radio, allowing them to take part in operating the volunteer-run outlet.

Lumpen Radio is part of the Public Media Institute (PMI), an independent media nonprofit focused on mutual aid and local stories. Manriquez says the station has worked to connect migrants to resources, and has been recording their oral histories, which will become a podcast series.

“We are fighting with our own stories and hoping that cannot be censored — we’re just speaking truths,” Manriquez told Truthout, but she admits there is some worry about how the current political climate could affect Lumpen. The station produces shows for Spanish speakers, including “Boletín Migrante,” which she says aims to change the narrative around the migrant experience by creating spaces that go beyond fear, and countering misinformation with stories of resilience.

Manriquez says that because PMI has long been a critical voice, “portraying what the community feels and fears in a radical and creative way,” its contributors are already “alert about who’s watching us.” For Lumpen, the major challenge posed by the current climate may be financial. “We know that the funds will be cut at some point, in general for nonprofits,” she says. “But I hope we can resist and continue creating.”

And that’s a sentiment shared by journalists in Turkey. When we spoke on the phone, Korban told me from Diyarbakır that the risks women and other vulnerable groups take to report on their communities can be worth it.

“Otherwise, if we never step up, we can only dream of good days, right?”