A respected correspondent for the Wall Street Journal became the latest victim of Turkey’s politicized justice system when a Turkish court sentenced her to two years and one month in prison for engaging in what it called terrorist propaganda in support of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
The sentence, handed down Tuesday to dual Finnish-Turkish national Ayla Albayrak, was based on an article she wrote for the Journal describing bloody clashes between the PKK’s urban youth wing, known as the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), and the Turkish army that raged throughout the summer of 2015 in the mainly Kurdish southeast region. In quoting YDG-H members she interviewed for the piece and its accompanying video, Albayrak was deemed to have propagated terrorism, a charge she stoutly denies.
