ing to Wajd Waqfi, who has been working at Al Jazeera’s Washington bureau for more than a decade, the Network’s strength and the essence of its achievements lie in “the spread of its bureaus around the world, along with the readiness of each, as well as the head office, to start live coverage, any time during major events” (1) . Endorsing the same idea, former managing director of Al Jazeera Satellite Channel, Yasser Abu Hilala believes the Network’s strength lies in its “broad flexibility and sweeping agility in movement, and the ability of its reporters to quickly relocate and attend any event at any point in time around the world” (2) . AJE’s journalist Melis Woodham thinks the source of Al Ja- zeera’s strength lies in its presence in places that other news channels tend to ignore (3) . The experience of Al Jazeera’s Jamal Demloj who was deployed to Kosovo in March 1999, proves these testimonies. Dem- loj had to overcome logistical obstacles he encountered in Cyprus and Greece, both of which, at the time, were outside the traditional cover- age areas of Al Jazeera. However, he successfully managed to reach Macedonia on 23 March 1999, a day before NATO started its bombing of Yugoslavia, when Kosovo was still part of it. He managed to send his first report from Skopje. When NATO expanded its operations to Kosovo as of 2 April 1999, Demloj and his team succeeded in reaching Pristina, coming this time from Belgrade. With an arrangement and dil- igent follow-up from the channel’s administration in Doha, he managed to obtain an SNG transmitter from the Associated Press (AP), which allowed him to record the first video footage of the wave of civilians fleeing through the green valley, between the village of General Jan- kovic in Kosovo towards the nearby Yanzi village in Macedonia. By so Al Jazeera America, which closed down later in April 2016. Salem Al-Nuaimi, International Services Department Manager, explains, “By the time of establishing the channel, the section that provided logistical support used to operate under the name ‘External Operations Section’. The technical section in charge of coordinating satellite bookings and receiving images and reports from correspondents via satellite or the Internet is known as the ‘News Gathering Sec- tion’”. (1) Wajd Waqfi, “Your Story with Al Jazeera”, a questionnaire distributed by Al Jazeera to its employees, July 2020.
(2) Yasser Abu Hilala, personal interview, Doha, November 2020.
(3) Melis Woodham, “Your Story with Al Jazeera”, Ibid.
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