By Mustafa Begich
On this hidden front, Washington-aligned media outlets have launched coordinated attacks against Sahar Balkan, a world outlet affiliated with the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) World Service serving the Balkans.
Their goal is twofold: to delegitimize Tehran's voice in the region, while shielding Western audiences from the grim realities of the unprovoked and unjustified war of aggression, as well as the wave of popular resistance it has ignited across the West Asia region.
Now in its sixth week, the ongoing US-Israeli military aggression against Iran has not been confined to missile strikes and naval engagements. From the very first day, American officials have sought to control the narrative, manipulating media outlets to justify an illegal war and whitewash horrendous war crimes being committed against the ordinary Iranian people.
In the Balkans, this propaganda offensive has taken a distinct form: a concerted effort by Western government-funded outlets to discredit Sahar Balkan. Operating out of Sarajevo for nearly three decades, the Bosnian-language television service has been a rare Iranian media presence in Europe's southeastern flank.
Only days after the aggression was launched, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a media network bankrolled by the US Congress as a Cold War propaganda tool, launched a scathing attack on the Sahar Balkan, questioning IRIB's presence in Bosnia.
It was soon joined by Danijal Hadzovic, a local commentator writing for the pro-American website Dnevni Avaz. Both sought to portray Sahar Balkan as a sinister influence operation. Yet both conveniently ignored the far more extensive propaganda machinery of their own sponsors in Washington and elsewhere.
Their claims unfold in the context of a war where truth has become the first casualty, and where the American-led information machine is working overtime to silence any voice that dares to offer an alternative perspective.
Western media have dangerously normalized the situation. As investigative journalist Julia Kassem revealed, some of the most influential outlets are now casually discussing a war against Iran, as though it were a matter of routine rather than a breach of international law.
Context of aggression: Why the attacks on Sahar Balkan intensified
The timing of the media vilification campaign against Sahar Balkan is no coincidence. The attacks began in mid-March 2026, less than three weeks after the US and Israeli regime launched their unprovoked aggression against Iran, assassinating the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, and hundreds of civilians in strikes on residential areas, schools, and hospitals.
After that, Iranian media outlets, including Sahar Balkan, reported on spontaneous and massive mass gatherings of people across Iran expressing unity and support for their ruling establishment and armed forces as they defend the country's sovereignty.
These reports, sent to media outlets in Sarajevo via email, presented a narrative that directly contradicted the Western portrayal of a “collapsing regime.”
According to the Western narrative, this constituted propaganda. Yet what the RFE/RL piece failed to mention was the broader information environment in which these reports were being disseminated, and the war that had been imposed on the Islamic Republic by its sponsors.
As documented by multiple international observers, the United States and its allies have imposed a near-total information blackout on the war, fearing that the real numbers would cause a major embarrassment to the so-called "world's biggest military force."
In Persian Gulf Arab states hosting American bases, filming damage from attacks has been banned, and people who defy the orders are being arrested in large numbers.
The Trump administration has pressured broadcasters with threats of license revocation for airing what it deems "false news" about the war, and War Secretary Pete Hegseth has openly attacked the press for questioning the progress and goals of the war.
He has gone a step forward, sacking some of the top-ranking military commanders, who were critical of the war strategy and warned against continuing it.
In this context, the decision to target Sahar Balkan, a relatively small outlet with a few hours of daily broadcast on a local Sarajevo station, appears less about genuine concern over media influence and more about suppressing any narrative that challenges the official Washington line, according to independent observers.
Deconstructing the RFE/RL narrative
The RFE/RL article made several claims about Sahar Balkan and IRIB that require careful examination.
The first is that IRIB is under sanctions by the European Union, the United States, and Canada on charges of “spreading propaganda and violating human rights.”
While it is true that sanctions have been imposed, largely in the aftermath of the 2022 riots, what the article omitted is the political nature of these designations.
The European Union is a party to the ongoing war of aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran, having aligned itself with American policy in the region for decades.
Sanctions imposed by a hostile bloc cannot be taken as objective evidence of wrongdoing.
Moreover, the same Western governments that sanction IRIB have their own state-funded media outlets—the BBC, Voice of America, RFE/RL itself—that serve identical functions: projecting national influence, shaping international opinion, and presenting a favorable image of their home governments.
The difference is that Western state media are celebrated as "public service broadcasting" while their Iranian counterpart is condemned as "propaganda."
The second claim is that IRIB has been operating in Bosnia for almost thirty years and that this constitutes a form of undue influence.
Yet the article acknowledges that Sahar Balkan's reach is relatively minimal—30,000 Instagram followers, 17,000 Facebook followers, 3,500 Telegram followers, and 500 on X.
The station broadcasts for only a few hours daily on a single local channel, TV Vogošća, on a commercial basis. If this is an “influence operation,” it is a remarkably ineffective one, independent observers and media analysts told the Press TV website.
By contrast, RFE/RL itself is funded directly by the US government, operates bureaus across the Balkans, and produces content in multiple local languages with budgets that dwarf those of Sahar Balkan.
The double standard is also glaring: American-funded media are presented as legitimate and public journalism, while Iranian media, operating on a fraction of the budget and focused on real public-interest journalism, are labeled propaganda.
Propagandist nature of RFE/RL: History of serving US interests
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was founded in 1949 by the US Congress as a propaganda outlet to broadcast anti-Soviet content behind the Iron Curtain.
Its mission, from its inception, was not objective journalism but psychological warfare against America's Cold War adversaries, according to media analysts who have followed its work.
Today, RFE/RL remains funded by the US government through the United States Agency for Global Media, a federal agency overseen by a bipartisan board appointed by the president.
The outlet's stated mission is to "advance American strategic interests" by promoting "democratic values" in countries where, in its view, press freedom is restricted.
In the context of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, RFE/RL has served as a mouthpiece for Washington's narrative, amplifying claims of Iranian “repression” while downplaying the scale of American and Israeli strikes against Iranian civilian infrastructure.
The attack on Sahar Balkan is consistent with this mission: delegitimize an Iranian voice in the Balkans to prevent alternative perspectives from reaching local audiences, according to observers, speaking to the Press TV website.
Yet as Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei noted in a recent statement, "American authorities are actively misleading the public and manipulating the media to justify their illegal war against Iran."
The documentary "The War You Don't See," referenced by Baghaei, observes that "propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a faraway enemy but at you at home."
RFE/RL's campaign against Sahar Balkan exemplifies this dynamic, media analysts say: an American-funded outlet attacking an Iranian media outlet for doing exactly what RFE/RL itself was created to do but has failed to do all these years.
Danijal Hadzovic and his anti-Iranian bias
The second prong of the media campaign against Sahar Balkan comes from Danijal Hadzovic, a commentator and editor at Dnevni avaz outlet who has published multiple anti-Iranian articles since the war of aggression began.
Within just two days of the February 28 attacks, Hadzovic published two pieces criticizing Bosnian politicians for their "silence" about the situation, suggesting they should unequivocally support the aggression primarily because Bosniaks depend on Western security architecture.
He also composed a biography of Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei based on Western propaganda clichés, treating Iran as a political one-man show rather than a complex revolutionary state with institutional decision-making.
Hadzovic's social media activity further reveals his bias. On March 1, 2026, he posted a video contrasting pre-revolution Iran with the Islamic Republic, writing that Iran "once danced—before the music was turned off."
This nostalgic framing of the Pahlavi dictatorship—a period marked by SAVAK secret police brutality, political imprisonment, economic inequality, and foreign domination—is a classic trope of anti-Iran propaganda.
It whitewashed a monarchical dictatorship installed by the US and Britain after the 1953 coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, presenting it as a “golden age of freedom” while ignoring the millions of Iranians who rose up in 1979 to restore their national dignity.
Hadzovic also dismissed Iran's support for the Axis of Resistance—Hezbollah, Hamas, and other groups resisting Israeli occupation—as "financing terrorists," a characterization that serves Israeli and American interests while ignoring the defensive nature of these alliances against colonial aggression.
Hypocrisy of Western-led media regulation in Bosnia
The hit pieces repeatedly invoke Bosnia's status as an EU candidate country, arguing that its institutions should align with EU sanctions against the Iranian national broadcaster, IRIB.
Yet as the RFE/RL piece itself acknowledges, the Communications Regulatory Agency of Bosnia and Herzegovina has not received instructions from relevant institutions regarding the implementation of the EU ban.
This legal vacuum has been exploited not only by Iranian media but also by a host of other international broadcasters, including Russian, Turkish, and Persian Gulf state outlets.
What the articles do not mention is the extensive Western funding of media and “fact-checking” organizations in Bosnia, which compromises journalistic principles.
For example, the platform "Raskrinkavanje.ba" has been financed with the support of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Embassy of the United States of America in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
According to the platform's own methodology page, it receives funding from the American government through NED, an organization that has historically funded regime change operations worldwide.
The irony is striking: American-funded fact-checkers are being used to discredit various independent and foreign, including Iranian media, while the fact-checkers themselves are presented as independent arbiters of truth.
Double standards: Sahar Balkan and Western media
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the campaign against Sahar Balkan is the double standard applied to Western media.
According to data from Raskrinkavanje.ba itself—despite its American funding—Sahar Balkan has been found to have published only six "factually questionable" articles, as per their own standards.
By contrast, RFE/RL has been cited for thirteen such articles.
The Iranian outlet, operating with minimal resources and a small team, has a better factual record than the well-funded American propaganda organ attacking it, as per observers.
With less than one questionable article per year, out of the many thousands published annually, Sahar Balkan is actually among a handful of the most reliable and professional media outlets in the region.
Moreover, while RFE/RL and Dnevni avaz obsess over Iranian "propaganda," they ignore far more egregious examples of Western media manipulation in the region.
In March 2026, TV Herceg-Bosne aired a report titled "The Sarajevo–Tehran Axis: An Islamist Viper in the Heart of Europe," a piece that media professionals and analysts condemned as stigmatizing, inflammatory, and one-sided.
The report was reported to Bosnia's Communications Regulatory Agency for violating professional standards. Yet no RFE/RL article was written about this inflammatory piece.
The selective outrage is telling: Iranian media are attacked, while Western-aligned outlets that engage in far more egregious rhetoric are given a pass.
Real threat to Bosnia's information space
The smear campaign against Sahar Balkan is not about protecting Bosnian audiences from foreign influence, but is meant to silence a media that seeks to cut the noise of propaganda.
It is about ensuring that only one perspective—the American and Israeli perspective—does not dominate the information landscape of the Balkans.
As the unjustified aggression against Iran continues, Western governments have demonstrated that they will spare no effort to control the narrative, suppressing voices that challenge their version of events while presenting their own propaganda as objective journalism, independent observers told the Press TV website.
The real threat to Bosnia's information sovereignty is not a small Iranian television station broadcasting a few hours a day from Sarajevo.
It is the vast, well-funded network of American and European media outlets that has turned the Balkans into a battleground for information warfare, shaping public opinion in the service of Western geopolitical interests while claiming the mantle of press freedom.
Iranian media, for all their flaws, at least operate transparently as voices of their government.
Western media, by contrast, present themselves as neutral arbiters while serving as instruments of state power—a deception far more dangerous than any state broadcast from Tehran.
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