Ayşe Önal

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Ayşe Önal (born 1955) is a Turkish journalist and writer. She trained as a psychologist and worked as a counselor for condemned children in a prison, but was fired for her left-leaning views. She began her journalism career at Nokta in 1984 as a political reporter and later became editor-in-chief.

In February 1994, she and another Nokta journalist were shot at in an attack. Önal had started writing about JİTEM in July 1994 after meeting Veli Küçük through Tuncay Güney, and she was fired along with many coworkers. That same year she received a death threat from Turkish Hizballah and hid in Cyprus for three months.

From 1995 to 1997 she hosted Minefield, a TV show on Kanal 7 that connected Jews, Armenians and Turks. She won the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation in 1996. The foundation described her as a controversial journalist who was targeted by both leftist and Islamic radicals, and who faced a government blacklist in the mid-1990s.

In 2000 she moved to London to work as foreign correspondent for Kanal 7, later working for Akşam and Show TV in 2003. Her best-known book is Honour Killing: Stories of Men Who Killed (2004 in Turkish, 2008 in English).

Önal’s daughter, Şafak Pavey, was elected to Turkey’s parliament in 2011.