It was shut down on 28 August 2016 when police raided the newspaper's headquarters in Diyarbakir, taking all 27 staff into custody.
[1] The paper was first published as a weekly newspaper with the name Welat in Istanbul on 22 February 1992.
[2] In 1996 it began to be published with its current name, Azadiya Welat.
[4] Kurdish inmates in some Turkish jails were not allowed to receive the newspaper in 2007.
[6] In 2015, the European Court of Human Rights rules the unpredictability of how the law is applied is a violation of article 10 of the Convention.