Iraq Training Linked to Career Success

Iraqi journalists say the skills they have acquired from IWPR training and mentoring have played a crucial role in helping them get good jobs in local media organisations.

A straw poll of journalists trained by IWPR since 2003 have said the lessons they’ve learnt has helped them advance in Iraqi print, television, radio and online news operations. IWPR has trained at least 900 journalists in reporting, editing and management over the past few years.

Former IWPR trainee journalist Frman Abdul-Rahman now heads the documentary department at the Kurdish News Network, KNN, a prominent satellite news channel based in Sulaimaniyah, in Iraqi Kurdistan. He has authored a journalism handbook based on IWPR’s training sessions and currently sits on the editorial board of Wusha, the media company that runs KNN and other news outlets.

Abdul-Rahman was first trained by IWPR in 2004. He began his journalism career in 1999, but had “very local and limited” exposure to media.

“I had no opportunities for career development prior to IWPR training,” he said. “Before IWPR courses, I thought journalism was just [about] writing. Everything I’ve learned about journalism I’ve learned from IWPR.”

“Today there is a generation of journalists in the [Kurdistan] region called the ‘IWPR generation’,” he said. “They work at different news organisations, and are known to be highly professional, paying attention to editing and accuracy. They practice professional journalism.”

IWPR-trained journalist Ali Kareem, who serves as Baghdad Radio’s newsroom manager, first attended an IWPR training course in 2005. Since then, he has participated in four workshops and noted that “after IWPR’s courses I developed great feature-writing skills and wrote many stories that were published online. At that time, I was working as a correspondent for Baghdad Radio, but after proving myself as a good reporter through IWPR’s courses, I was promoted to newsroom manager in March 2010.”

Samah Samad, an IWPR-trained reporter in Kirkuk, who is editor of Warden, a women’s magazine, said IWPR’s courses have helped to develop her career.

“I was one of the luckiest people because I began working with IWPR right at the beginning of my career, so I had the opportunity to really develop my skills,” she said.

“I'm very proud that I'm an IWPR reporter. Wherever I go, [journalists] immediately notice my unique style of writing stories and the skills I gained from IWPR’s helpful courses.

Uthman al-Mukhtar, an award-winning Washington Post special correspondent in Anbar and a regular IWPR contributor, has worked as a journalist with local, Arab and international news organisations since 1998.

"The most important thing I’ve learned from working with IWPR is accuracy,” he said. “Reporting the news accurately and fairly was a central problem for the Iraqi media before and after 2003. In the time of the former regime, reporting was subject to selective and sectarian tendencies.

Meanwhile, IWPR’s Metro Centre to Defend Journalists has emerged as a leading press freedom watchdog in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Since it was launched in August 2008, the centre has campaigned on media rights issues; documented scores of attacks on journalists; assisted those who have been detained; and issued dozens of statements that are widely cited in the local press.

While Iraqi Kurdistan has made headway in improving media freedoms– including approving a press law lauded as one of the most liberal in the region – journalists maintain they are frequently subjected to violence and lawsuits and continue to face restrictions.

Following the kidnapping and murder of journalist Sardasht Osman in early May, Metro Centre helped spearhead a committee of local organisations under the name We Won’t Be Silent.

The committee has organised more than a dozen press freedom demonstrations in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Metro Centre has worked closely with Osman’s family to call for justice in the case.

Kwestan Mohamed, a legislator on the Goran list, the largest opposition faction, said she has used Metro Centre’s reports to push for journalists’ rights.

“After Sardasht Osman’s killing, we sent [a] memo to the parliament speaker about the status of press freedom in the region in which we cited Metro Centre’s reports,” Mohamed said.

Metro Centre recently helped organise a memorial for Osman, and has written op-eds and letters to officials calling for a thorough investigation into his death. The centre’s coordinator Rahman Gharib, a veteran local journalist and media rights activist, is serving as an advocate for the family.

Metro Centre has documented at least 70 cases of violations against journalists this year, including physical and verbal assaults, arrests and restrictions on covering events.

During the election campaign for the Iraqi parliament in March, Metro Centre published a series of special reports that documented and publicised nearly 50 cases of press freedom violations in Iraqi Kurdistan. One week after the election, Metro Centre organised a meeting for journalists with Qadir Hama Jan, Sulaimaniyah province’s security chief, to discuss the incidents. Fifty journalists and the Kurdistan journalists’ association attended the meeting, which was widely covered by the local press.

Hama Jan pledged to end the violence by ordering security personnel not to mistreat journalists under any circumstances and in June he issued a 75-page handbook for security forces, titled No to Violence, No to Violating Journalists’ Rights.

“Our meeting with journalists was important to solidify our relation and solve any problem or shortcoming that might face us,” Hama Jan said.