ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A journalist working for a Kurdish media outlet was released Tuesday after spending a night in a Sulaimani prison, the city’s police spokesperson told Rudaw, with the arrest taking place nearly two weeks after a rights group report blasted Kurdish authorities for targeting critics.
Soma Khalid, a reporter for Change Movement (Gorran) affiliated KNN TV, was arrested on Monday after making a Facebook post criticizing the management and staff of Sulaimani’s Shar Hospital, referring to them as a “herd” for their allegedly poor treatment of patients.
The hospital’s staff “from the doctors to the regular workers should be sent home and the health ministry must open courses on the methods and techniques of speaking, so that they learn how to deal with patients and not insult them,” Khalid wrote on Facebook.
The journalist was subsequently summoned to a police station after the hospital’s representative filed a complaint, leading to the police arresting her inside the station, according to Sulaimani police spokesperson Sarkawt Ahmed.
He added that the woman was released the next day on a 1 million IQD bail.
Khalid is a member of the Kurdistan Journalists’ Syndicate (KJS), according to the committee, who said that she failed to notify them before going to the police station or else a KJS representative would have accompanied her.
“I think the journalist was not detained according to the law on journalism, but the judge detained her on another article that is going to be amended and she was released on bail today,” Ahmed said.
An annual report by US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) earlier in January slammed the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) for using “vaguely worded laws to target critics for expressing criticism and opinions they object to.”
Over 400 violations were committed against journalists and media outlets in the Kurdistan Region over the past year, the Metro Center for Journalists Rights and Advocacy said in its 2022 annual report.
Kurdish authorities repeatedly face harsh criticism for their treatment of journalists as well as imposing restrictive measures on the press.
According to an RSF report, Iraq ranks 172nd out of 180 countries in the 2022 World Press Freedom Index, falling even further from 163rd in 2021. The lives of journalists in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region are at risk while covering protests and investigating corruption, according to RSF, who further stated that journalists are at risk of being "harassed, abducted, physically attacked, or even killed by unidentifiable militias."
