AKnews will stop broadcasting and at the time of writing these words it has already been shut down. I'm deeply sorry that due to heavy financial burden, we had to close down AKnews. During my carrier I have worked in many cultural foundations and established many by myself. Among all the foundations I established, I was happy with AKnews. I believed it would, most than all foundations, serve a message which I carried since a very young age: rescuing my country from the oppression and establishing a prosperous and free community. At the beginning I thought expending money for this high goal should not be measured. However, the cost for running this news agency was beyond the capacity of Aras Publishers which founded AKnews.
AKnews was a completely independent news agency. In the almost four years of operating, we never bent, even slightly, for a political party, unless there was something which passed through by mistake. In a country which, head to toe, is overwhelmed with narrow political conflict, where everything is shaped and measured according to contracted and narrow partisan measures, it's an impossible and difficult task for one to work independently. This in itself is the best evidence for AKnews's success. Kurdish journalists, maybe not now but in the future, will take complete pride in AKnews's competence and independence. Certainly, one may comment on the quality level and little information in our news, and sometimes I may also back the comment, but this is a general situation and no one could access the news sources any better than us. It was a great pride for AKnews that it decided decisively and implemented the decision not to publish any news with an anonymous source, even if the agency is certain about its truthfulness. This is while the Kurdish media is full of falsehood and fiction.
In the circumstances it was released in, AKnews could not immediately begin with selling news to provide for its sustenance. Media in our region does not make profit. All receive financial support, especially if a respected news agency does not publish provocative and vilifying news which the majority of public yearns for. Our aim was to send the world and Iraq the maximum number of professional and unbiased news about Kurdistan and Iraq. And in this we were successful and no one can say anything else in this regard. Thousands of our news were published by the foreign newspapers across the world. We were the most honest outlet across Iraq, a country in which honest voices are rarely heard.
Last word, the hundreds of journalists, either reporters or editors, who matured in AKnews are working professionally. Most of them left AKnews in tears. I thank them for their sympathy, for our ethnical work which is professional journalism. Certainly, wherever they are, they will maintain the experience they acquired in AKnews and will promote it so that Kurdistan News Agency (AKnews) always breathes.
