Firat News Agency
| Formation | 2005 |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
Official languages | Turkish, Kurdish (Kurmanji, Sorani, and Kirmancki dialects), English, Arabic, German, Spanish, Russian and Persian |
| Website | anfenglish |
The Firat News Agency (ANF) (Kurdish: Ajansa Nûçeyan a Firatê, Turkish: Fırat Haber Ajansı) is a Kurdish news agency that gathers and broadcasts news from the Middle East, broadly concerning Kurdish matters. The news agency has offices in Amsterdam and journalists around the world.
It has been variously described as pro-Kurdish, pro-PKK, or PKK-affiliated. The CBC and Reuters have described the ANF as being "close" to the PKK, and Deutsche Welle states the two entities have "links". The BBC have alternately labelled the ANF "pro-Kurdish" and "pro-PKK".
Because of the ANF's alleged links with the PKK, access to its websites from Turkey has been repeatedly blocked by Turkish courts in what has been described by Danny O'Brien of the Committee to Protect Journalists as a "cat-and-mouse" game. ANF social media accounts active in Turkey have been closed, and its journalists have been detained in Turkey. In addition, Twitter has blocked the ANF at the request of the Turkish government.
In 2011 it was the target of a cyber-attack which removed access to the site.