And that was it. There was no further news about where the volunteers went, how they fared in their training and what happened to them once they were sent to the front line. If they even ended up there. Nobody knows.
In fact, Iraq’s media became so intensely involved in this aspect, that an actual militia was formed by Iraqi journalists from central and southern Iraq. Some of them volunteered to fight ISIS, others presented the news in military uniforms.
On the “other side” of the media, the opposite was happening. Various media organisations began to promote the idea that the extremist fighters were revolutionaries and that they were leading a popular uprising. These media organisations began to celebrate the “liberation” of Mosul.
In many ways, this side of the media was more successful when it came to their core mission: Actual news gathering. They managed to show pictures from the battleground. These included shots of Iraqi army vehicles under the control of groups of young men who didn’t wear uniforms. These young men were then described as “sons of the Iraqi revolution”. These shows also focused on influential Sunni Muslim Iraqis who had “joined this revolution”.
Over the past week or so, many local journalists have started saying that they were pressured to cover the news in a biased way.
Some journalists resigned. “Offices of Al Arabiya, Al Arabiya Al Hadath and ANB channels in Iraq witnessed mass resignations yesterday, as many employees protested what they called 'these channels’ policy toward the Iraqi people and their support for the ISIS',” Beirut based news website, Al Akhbar, reported.
Al Arabiya itself said that the Iraqi government threatened “to close the Baghdad office of Al Arabiya News Channel and ban correspondents of both Al Arabiya and sister news channel, Al Hadath, from reporting in the country” because of an alleged bias. And apparently similar threats were made to BBC Arabic and Al Sharqiya for spreading rumours and false information.
Between these two very oppositional points of view, there was a huge gap – what was missing was real information.
What made getting information even more difficult was the fact that the Iraqi authorities then decided to block social networking sites in the country. Additionally services on various mobile phone applications that allowed people to share messages, like Viber and WhatsApp, were also disrupted.
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