A Language Specialist

Ismayilova was born on May 25, 1976 in Baku. At the time, Azerbaijan was a Soviet republic. Its oil wealth made it valuable to the Soviet Union, and Baku’s harbor on the Caspian Sea bristled with oil rigs and associated machinery. Her father, Rovshan Ismayilov, served as the state minister of oil machinery from 1992 to 1996. She had two sisters and a brother. Although her parents were not religious, her brother was a conservative Muslim. Ismayilova herself was an atheist.

After graduating from Baku State University in 1997 with a degree in Turkish language and literature (she spoke fluent English, Turkish, and Russian), Ismayilova in short order held a sequence of jobs. The first was at Evrasia (Eurasia), a daily newspaper, which hired her as a translator. When the editor found himself short-staffed, he sent Ismayilova out on stories. She was swiftly promoted to editor, but quit the job within four months. Next came Hürriyet (Liberty), which published twice a week and had the widest circulation of any paper in the country. Ismayilova lasted two weeks, because the owner fired the editor-in-chief and the entire staff resigned in protest. The editor started a new weekly publication, Günaydin , where Ismayilova remained for 2 ½ years. There she gained her first real experience as a reporter and editor.


© Khortan, Wikimedia Commons
A view of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan

In 1999, she resigned to take a better-paid job at a tabloid, Uch nokta . The paper, which published three times a week, hired Ismayilova in an attempt to make its coverage more serious. She stayed only nine months, however, before moving to a Russian-language paper, Zerkalo (Mirror). As if her presence were enough to jinx matters, within two weeks the editor resigned—taking the staff with him.

In 2000, she teamed up with the former Zerkolo editor to start Ekho . The daily, Russian-language publication developed a reputation as a reliable news source. Ismayilova was director of the political reporting department in the lead-up to the 2003 presidential election. “I’m proud to say that I had a role in building a very good audience, readership an d reputation for the newspaper,” she says. [1] In 2002, while at Ekho , she won an internship through the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) and spent a month in the US, including two weeks at the Washington Times . It was an eye-opening experience, and her first trip to the US.

Resigned . Ismayilova was dismayed, however, that in the final days of the 2003 campaign Ekho endorsed Ilham Aliyev, the son of the outgoing president, to succeed his father. The son won the October vote by a landslide. But she was angrier about the treatment of her own stories, some of them edited beyond recognition. In particular, she had reported on the treatment of an 11-year-old boy called out in public by his school principal because his father was an opposition activist. The principal instructed all the students to ostracize the boy. The entire incident was stricken from the story Ismayilova wrote for Ekho , except for a reference in the final sentence to “unpleasantness” at the school. Two days after the election, she quit.

Ismayilova was developing a pattern. She was 27. She knew that she did not want to work for the opposition newspapers. “I didn’t know where to go, because basically I didn’t know what to do,” she recalls. After four days, however, the English-language Caspian Business News (CBN) hired her. She had never written in English on a regular basis before, so she took the job with some trepidation. She stayed a year, improved her language skills and learned the tools of business reporting.

In 2004, she resigned to go freelance and simultaneously work as a grants manager for IREX, an international non-profit with education and media programs. “I decided to do freelance writing for whoever would publish it, and to have a 9-6 job that would bring more financial stability to my life,” she recalls.


[1] Author’s interviews with Khadija Ismayilova on November 16 and 17, 2013, in Istanbul, Turkey. All further quotes from Ismayilova, unless otherwise attributed, are from these interviews.