After fourteen years of work in the Balkans, the regional television project Al Jazeera Balkans is closing, it has been confirmed to the Bosnian media outlet Klix.ba.

Al Jazeera Balkans (AJB) is the regional arm of the Al Jazeera Media Network headquartered in Qatar, while the Sarajevo branch was opened on November 11, 2011.

Broadcast in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, North Macedonia and even in the diaspora, AJB offered a mix of locally produced news, documentaries, live debates, business, technology and sports, complemented by broadcasts in AlJazeeraEnglish.

In the last 14 years, Al Jazeera Balkans has been known especially for its original content related to the documentary segment, but also for a number of other projects. It is the first television station to broadcast a program in a language other than Arabic and English, writes the Bosnian medium, Gazeta Express reports.

Al Jazeera Balkans has been present in Sarajevo since mid-September 2010, when it purchased the local television station NTV Studio 99 from the company “PEP” owned by Adil Kulenović for 2.3 million BAM, which was the amount of that television station’s debts to the state.

In 2018, Al Jazeera Balkans founded AJB DOC, a documentary film festival, which takes place in Sarajevo every September.

The reasons for the closure have not yet been announced, but it is assumed that it was a business decision by Doha due to financial reasons.