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Kurdish media has a storied history of coverage from exile. Kurdistan—the first Kurdish newspaper, published by the son of an ousted emir—debuted in Cairo in 1898. A century later, the rise of the internet, mass displacement of Kurds, and pressure from states governing Kurdish-majority regions fueled the growth of Kurdish news outlets across Europe. But unlike much of the Kurdish press, both in the diaspora and in the Middle East—which is often aligned with political parties that oppose the governments of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria—a new outlet, The Amargi, aims to fulfill a long-standing mission of covering Kurdish affairs without state or party interference. Started in Germany in September by a Kurdish journalist named Kamal Chomani and several colleagues, *The Amargi *emerged from a repressive Kurdish media environment to establish an independent, grassroots-funded, nonprofit digital newsroom. It takes its name from the Sumerian word for “freedom.”

The outlet’s creation has personal stakes. In 2008, Chomani was attending a journalism training course in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq when an instructor announced news that would shape a generation of Kurdish journalists: Soran Mama Hama, a twenty-three-year-old reporter who was investigating corruption among Kurdish officials, had just been murdered by unidentified gunmen in Kirkuk. The killing would remain unsolved and draw criticism from Mama Hama’s family, colleagues, and press freedom groups over Kurdish authorities’ failure to conduct a sustained investigation. Advocates noted that Mama Hama had received threats before his death.

Chomani, now forty-one, had turned to journalism after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, with the hope that a democratic Iraq might also sustain a free press. Mama Hama’s murder shattered that belief. Chomani started to doubt that the Kurdistan Region, frequently held up as a post-invasion success story, was democratic at all. He went on to report for Hawlati, Awene, and Lvin, independent outlets, driven by the conviction that watchdog journalism was, as he told me, “the most powerful weapon we have to fight corruption, to fight injustice, to fight inequalities, discrimination.” He later served as a correspondent for Reporters Without Borders, covering the 2010 assassination of Sardasht Osman, a Kurdish investigative journalist. But in 2018, after receiving death threats and facing a lawsuit over his reporting under a controversial telecommunications law, Chomani fled to Germany. He is now a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Leipzig.

The Amargi** comes **at a time of profound political and social transformation for Kurds. As the world’s largest stateless ethnic group, numbering about forty million, they have long faced persecution, forced displacement, linguistic repression, and violent crackdowns on dissent in Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria—the four countries that divide their homeland. In those states, which consistently rank among the world’s worst for press freedom, Kurdish journalists face acute risks.

Operating from Germany allows The Amargi to report on Kurdish affairs with relative safety. Since Mama Hama’s and Osman’s deaths, other Kurdish journalists—including Kawa Garmyane andWedad Hussein—have been killed in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Amargi team consists of sixteen staff and volunteer journalists, academics, and activists from around the world and commissions work from freelancers based in the Middle East.

In 2025, the Metro Center for Journalists’ Rights and Advocacy, a press freedom watchdog focused on the Kurdistan Region, documented 315 violations against 252 journalists. They included physical assaults; obstruction; confiscation or destruction of equipment; arrests; cyberattacks; the shooting of a journalist; and an apparent Turkish drone strike that killed four people, including a Kurdish journalist named Aziz Koyluoglu. The Committee to Protect Journalists has similarly documented suspected fatal Turkish drone strikes targeting Kurdish journalists in Syria. In Turkey, Kurdish and non-Kurdish journalists face imprisonment or death, while Reporters Without Borders ranks Iran among the world’s most repressive media environments.

Despite its focus on the Kurdish world, Chomani and his colleagues insist that The Amargi is not “pro Kurdish” in the sense that it does not promote an ethnonationalist view of the Middle East, an approach they said has fueled political divisions and undermined the region’s diversity. “We don’t want to be a mouthpiece for any political party,” Chomani said. “We will also be a voice for the Kurdish people to criticize the Kurdish leadership wherever they are.”

A few months in, The Amargi has already produced powerful coverage, examining rising sectarian violence against Syria’s Druze and Alawite minorities; Iran’s water crisis; Turkey’s controversial new mining law; Iraq’s parliamentary election; renewed peace talks between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK); and negotiations between Syria’s transitional government and Kurdish authorities in the country’s north, where Kurds control roughly a third of the territory yet remain excluded from the transitional constitution. When fighting broke out this month in Aleppo between the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Syrian Army, The Amargi’s Syria correspondent reported from the scene.

One early analysis covered tribal dynamics within the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, arguing that the administration had prioritized its own political ambitions over meaningful engagement with influential Arab tribes. As a result, some tribes that had previously aligned with the SDF, the administration’s military arm, have since defected or realigned with Damascus.

The story was reported from Syria by Sylvain Mercadier, a thirty-seven-year-old Arabic-speaking French journalist and veteran Middle East correspondent who serves as a part-time editor at The Amargi. It’s the kind of reporting that *The Amargi *wants to continue supporting, Chomani said—journalism that eschews the partisan pressures that shape much of Kurdish media and reflects local realities.

The outlet also draws on the expertise of exiles such as Ahmet Akkaya, a Turkish journalist and academic, who helped launch Özgür Gündem, Turkey’s first daily newspaper devoted to Kurdish affairs, and the London-based Med TV, the first Kurdish satellite channel. Akkaya, fifty-nine and based in Ghent, serves as The Amargi’s managing editor, a role he shares with Sushobhan Parida, thirty-three, a University of Leipzig PhD candidate and former Amazon engineer from India who oversees operations.

The work is published in English—a deliberate choice, Chomani said, to reach Western policymakers who shape regional politics, as well as to address gaps in how Western outlets cover the Middle East and to provide Kurdish journalists, experts, and political figures a space they are all too rarely afforded in Western or Turkish, Arab, or Iranian media. “Everyone can talk about Kurds but the Kurds,” said Elif Sarican, a thirty-four-year-old London-based Kurdish writer, editor, and translator who hosts The Amargi Mosaic, a video interview series. “If you’re a Kurd talking about Kurds, you’re treated with suspicion,” she said. To date, Sarican has interviewed guests including Choman Hardi, the Kurdish poet and genocide scholar, and Elbashir Idris, the Sudanese human rights activist.

The decision to work in English is also practical: decades of linguistic repression have left many Kurds speaking Turkish, Arabic, or Farsi, while younger generations in the diaspora often do not read Kurdish, which spans multiple dialects and scripts. English, then, functions as both a global medium and a shared Kurdish lingua franca.

The Amargi is already resonating with young, geographically diverse audiences, according to Rebaz Majeed, a twenty-nine-year-old Berlin-based Kurdish social media editor and fact-checker, who oversees distribution across eight platforms. Much of the outlet’s audience consists of English-speakers in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria; members of the Middle Eastern diaspora in Europe and North America; and Western audiences interested in the region.

Majeed, a fact-checker for Lead Stories, a third-party TikTok contractor, attributes that engagement to the outlet’s visual storytelling on Instagram, where The Amargi has more than twenty-seven thousand followers. The account features short-form video, including a viral video of the first graduating class of a Kurdish university founded during wartime in northeast Syria and clips of interviews with politicians, intellectuals, and artists, like Bachtyar Ali, the Kurdish novelist, and Emel Mathlouthi, the Tunisian singer.

Growing audiences on X, Bluesky, and Threads has proved more difficult, Majeed said, in part because The Amargi does not prioritize breaking news. He also said that some of The Amargi’s content has faced moderation challenges that he believes may be connected to the outlet’s coverage of Kurdish stories: in October, Instagram removed three reels featuring excerpts from an interview with Zagros Hiwa, a PKK spokesperson, about Turkey-PKK peace talks and disarmament. Majeed submitted a written appeal explaining that The Amargi is a journalistic outlet, and Instagram reinstated the reels within twenty-four hours. But by that point, Majeed said, the posts’ reach had stalled. (In an emailed statement, Meta said it had mistakenly removed the reels before restoring them.) And, Majeed said, Instagram rejected advertisements, including one promoting The Amargi’s reporting on challenges facing the Kurdish language in Turkey, citing noncompliance with Meta’s advertising policies. (The company told me that the rejected ads were categorized as political, which require authorization unless they are placed by news publishers registered in Meta’s News Page Index. The Amargi, per Meta’s statement, is not currently registered in its News Page Index.)

The United States has long designated the PKK a terrorist organization—a label that, combined with Turkey’s status as a NATO ally, Chomani told me, has distorted Western media coverage of the plight of Turkey’s Kurds. Many Western outlets, he said, filter Kurdish stories through the lens of Turkish national security, framing it as “a terror question” rather than a political and legal concern that takes into account the oppression of Kurds. That framing, he observed, casts Kurds in Turkey as “bad Kurds,” in contrast with the “good Kurds” in Iraq.

Reporting on non-state actors rather than excluding them outright is central to The Amargi’s editorial approach. When Western media relies almost exclusively on state officials to frame conflicts involving Kurds or non-state actors, Chomani said, it does a disservice to news consumers by reproducing one-sided narratives shaped by power and geopolitics—particularly when the non-state actor is one of two parties engaged in negotiations.

Funding remains a challenge, Chomani and his staff said, as does reporting from exile. Operating with a core staff scattered across the globe and largely outside the Middle East has forced The Amargi to be especially careful about who it works with, which stories it green-lights, and how it verifies information. The outlet is also working to recruit more female staff and contributors.

Supporting local freelancers with limited resources has proved difficult. The Amargi has declined assignments it deems too risky and allows journalists in repressive press environments to use pen names. Eventually, The Amargi hopes to offer training programs and internships aimed at expanding the pipeline of Middle Eastern journalists able to report on the region in English—an effort Akkaya and Chomani said is particularly important given the unequal relationship between Western outlets and local Middle Eastern journalists. “They’re correspondents or editors. We are fixers,” Akkaya said.With The Amargi, he hopes to reset that dynamic. The outlet has already published work by Middle Eastern journalists who once served as fixers and are now seeing their bylines in English for the first time. “We would like to tell our story, edit our story,” Akkaya said.

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**Seyma Bayram is an assistant professor of journalism at Hunter College in New York City. **