By Meryem Goktas
ANKARA (AA) – Anadolu Agency’s 13th intensive war journalism program, organized by agency’s News Academy in collaboration with Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) and Turkish Police Academy, continued Wednesday.
The 12-day program began on Sept. 3 and will continue until Friday.
Participants are being trained by Turkey’s military, police force, emergency services and public institutions based in Ankara.
A total of 24 journalists from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Philippines, Cameroon, Montenegro, Kenya, Niger, Pakistan, Serbia, Somalia, Sri Lanka and Yemen are participating in the program.
Completing an intensive two-day program at special operations department of the police on Tuesday, the correspondents continued their training at the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) on Wednesday.
Asili Nasra Galgalo, participating from Kenya, said the training was “awesome and tough at the same time “.
“In the field or not, these are things you will apply at home — also if you are not at work. For instance, natural disasters, self defense, the water survival, ” she said.
Attending the training from Afghanistan, Farad Khairzad thanked Anadolu Agency and TIKA.
“I am looking forward to go back to Afghanistan and use the information I learned during this training in my job, ” he said.
Drazen Radulov from Serbia, for his part, said the training helped him plenty of things he could make use of during his work as a journalist as well as in his daily life.
“We learned how to protect ourselves with the exercises such as crawling, laying down and the camping during the night. We needed to watch our guards.
“We slept barely, one or two hours only and then marched back. It was an amazing experience. I would do it again if I could,” Radulov said.
“This sort of training will exactly give the potential what we will need in journalism and also provide the guidelines how we should work in the future in coping with challenges when we are in the field,” Dhammika Wickramage Don from Sri Lanka said.
As part of the program, several subjects, including journalism, personal security, first aid, advanced driving techniques, water-survival techniques, survival during chemical and biological attacks and media management in hostile environments — are being taught.
The program differs from other training programs in terms of duration, theoretical and practical course hours.
Successful participants will be awarded internationally-recognized certificates at the end of their training.
