This week’s episode: An American murder in Istanbul: Justice for Halla

An American journalist and her mother are found murdered in Istanbul. Our investigation found the official story doesn't add up.
 

This Week 

The recent foiled domestic terrorist plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has punctuated a fact from a Reveal investigation published over the summer about domestic terror in the age of Trump: The primary source of domestic terror incidents, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, comes from far-right groups. But many journalists covering the kidnapping plot shied away from using the word “terrorist,” instead opting to describe the group as a “militia.” Which leads us to a question – what are the best ways to characterize these groups? When I do a Google image search for “terrorist,” the top images that come up are brown-skinned men in ski masks with black-and-white checkered scarves resembling keffiyehs wrapped around their heads. But in the United States, terrorists are far more likely to be polo-shirt-wearing White nationalists. Whitmer was clear on where she stands. She tweeted, “They’re not ‘militias’. They’re domestic terrorists endangering and intimidating their fellow Americans. Words matter.” Where do you stand?  – Sarah Mirk 
 

Justice for Halla

Halla Barakat, a 23-year-old American citizen, was a journalist working in Istanbul who contributed to ABC News. Her mom, Orouba, was a journalist-turned-activist who was famous for being an outspoken critic of Syria’s bloody Bashar al-Assad regime. Both women were murdered in their apartment in September 2017. Turkish police arrested a relative for the crime, but family and friends say the investigation was suspiciously shoddy and question why the U.S. government was not involved. 

Freelance journalist Fariba Nawa and ABC News investigative reporter James Gordon Meek  teamed up with Reveal to dig into the circumstances of the Bakarats’ murder. 

After reviewing our findings, Agnes Callamard – the U.N. investigator who determined Saudi Arabia was behind the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi – opened a case on the Barakat murders. 

From Istanbul and Washington, respectively, Fariba and James talked about reporting this difficult story.   

How did you get interested in investigating the murder of Halla and Orouba? 

James Gordon Meek: My connection is through the story of an American hostage of ISIS. Back in 2014, I started digging into the story of Americans being held captive by jihadis in Syria. I ended up doing dozens of stories about Kayla Mueller, who was a humanitarian aid worker from Prescott, Arizona, who was being held by ISIS in Syria. Over the years, I became close to her parents, who I consider to be very dear friends of mine today. And after their daughter was killed in 2015, they were devastated. At some point, they heard from these two women in Turkey – it was Halla and Orouba Barakat. They had befriended Kayla Mueller before she was kidnapped. They said, “You've got to talk to these two women who were friends of Kayla's. They're amazing people.” So I called them and we realized their story was so compelling that we needed to send a correspondent to Turkey and have them show us where Kayla lived and worked. 

We sat them down to interview them, and it was incredible. Halla was so impressive in that interview – she was poised, brilliant, well informed and passionate about Syria and her friend Kayla – that ABC decided to hire her as a freelancer. She came to New York in early 2017 and worked in our offices for about a week, and then spent months stringing for ABC’s investigative unit. She worked with me on a war crimes project. 

Fariba Nawa: I saw a friend of mine who went to university with Halla write a very cryptic message on Facebook, something like, “So you can just kill whoever you want now in Istanbul.” I immediately messaged her and said, “What's going on?”  

Why do you think that their murder got less attention in American media than the murder of Jamal Khashoggi?

James: I think part of it was that this story wasn't clear cut. A cousin was arrested, the police were telling reporters that this was a family squabble over money. It was downplayed as some kind of petty squabble that results in slashing two women to death. I think that there was a perfect storm of indifference because she was young, she was female, and she wasn't famous.  Halla Barakat was a 23-year-old American citizen, but outside of Istanbul, nobody knew who she was. She didn't know anybody in Washington, D.C. Jamal Khashoggi was not a U.S. citizen, but as a D.C. guy, he was connected to a lot of really powerful people. Former secretaries of state came out and denounced what had happened to him. While it is commendable that the State Department put out a statement condemning the killings of these two women, they misspelled their names and they didn’t note that Halla was a United States citizen.  

Fariba: I think the press in Istanbul is partially to blame. They just took the official narrative and didn't dig. And that's our job. Also, international media kept saying these women are not important enough. I heard that from so many journalists: They're not big enough. They were not active enough. I've covered women's rights for the last 22 years in every part of the world, so my initial reaction is, “OK, if they were men, would it be different?” It made me feel a justified rage. They were women, and they were trying to do something. It's very hard in this part of the world to stand up for things. If you are a woman, it's very hard. You're often told, “Don't even laugh out loud.” And when you do, there are consequences. 

What do you want Americans to understand about this story? 

Fariba: Some of the comments I saw on YouTube from the story were, “So what? She was over there, why should we care? We have enough problems at home.” This is awful. I often hear this about news outside of the U.S. Despite the fact that she was an American, she stopped mattering because she left America. Now that's wrong. This pandemic is a daunting reminder of how connected we are and how things travel. So to think of ourselves in that bubble, and to dismiss anyone who's been killed, especially an American on foreign soil and say, “That doesn't matter,” is really inhumane. We Americans like to think of ourselves as people who believe in justice. If that's the case, then we need to step up to that. 

James: The media has become such a punching bag. And some of it is deserved. But, you know, people put their lives on the line to bring you the news. And when they are killed, we all ought to pay close attention, because killing journalists is a way to silence bad news. These were women who were pretty fearless, and they could have just kept their mouths shut and they probably could still be living a quiet life. They didn’t do that. They decided to speak up, and they paid the ultimate price. 

Read the story: An American journalist was killed in Turkey. Why didn’t the US Investigate? 
 

In the Field

Music is an essential part of the storytelling for each episode of Reveal. Now, listeners can delve into the original music from Reveal’s American Rehab serial on Bandcamp. For each episode of Reveal, sound designers Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda compose an original score – writing, performing and editing 20 to 35 minutes of brand-new music that helps set the tone for the reporting. “Music is like poetry,” Fernando says. “It’s the part of storytelling that words cannot really tell. If we do it right, it will support and envelop the facts and the writing, allowing the listener to ‘experience it’ instead of just ‘understanding it.’ ” The American Rehab theme song, “Lifeline,” was inspired by Jim receiving the gift of a Yamaha guitalele, which he describes as “a cheap little nylon tenor-guitar-size instrument that’s easy to just pick up and play.” Keep an ear out for the guitalele riffs – and many other interesting instrumentations – on the American Rehab album on Bandcamp.

Reveal Recommends 

Data reporter Mohamed Al Elew adds to Reveal’s investigations by using data analysis, web design and software development skills. For example, he recently helped make the interactive database detailing injury rates at Amazon warehouses around the country. 

Reading 

“How to Do Nothing” by Jenny Odell. Although “How to Do Nothing” is titled in the style of a self-help book, it is an argument against an always-on attention economy advising readers to cultivate their relationship with their local, physical reality.

“The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity” by Lewis Raven Wallace. Wallace deconstructs the myth of journalistic “objectivity” by rejecting extractive journalism in favor of journalism focused on truth and transparency.

Listening 

“How to Save a Planet.” This podcast from Gimlet Media presents the climate crisis not simply as an existential threat, but also as an opportunity to build a more sustainable future.

Watching 

“Over the Garden Wall.” It’s spooky season! This 2014 Cartoon Network mini-series is a cute and thematically dense autumn-themed show replete with pumpkins, frogs, werewolves and more “Halloween special” regulars. I love a cartoon that doesn’t shy away from complexity, even when its audience includes children.
 

Do you have feedback for Reveal? Send it over! This newsletter was written by Sarah Mirk, who will share your thoughts with the team.