For Turkey, no news from Mosul is good news
A Turkish court's ban on reporting about events in Mosul, purportedly to protect the hostages taken from the Turkish consulate, has raised even more questions about Turkey’s approach to the crisis.
If Al-Monitor were a Turkey-based publication, I couldn’t write this article. Yet another problematic press freedom issue has cropped up after a court in Ankara imposed a gag order on all reporting about Mosul.
The court order comes only two days after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized the media over reports on the Turkish citizens kidnapped by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) from the Turkish consulate in Mosul. Speaking at a rally in Trabzon, Erdogan said, “About 100 Turkish citizens are in the hands of ISIS elements. What are you trying to achieve by provoking [ISIS] at a time when we are trying to rescue them? This is my request to written and visual media: Please, we want you to follow the process not by agitating, without writing or talking too much about it.”
Although just what the gag order covers wasn’t very clear, Erdogan’s appeal signaled that he wanted to avoid his government getting entangled in political polemics about ISIS capturing the Turkish consulate in Mosul.
A prosecutor and a court in Ankara made the prime minister’s appeal an official gag order. T24 reported, “Prosecutor Durak Cetin, who requested the ban on reporting of Mosul events by visual, print and Internet media based his justification on 'continuing unnecessary, not factual reporting that points to shortcomings of the state and to secure the safety of the consul general and other personnel.' Durak Cetin, who was standing in for prosecutor Sadik Bayindir in charge of the Mosul case, expanded the gag order beyond the ongoing investigations to 'other events in Mosul.'”
