Sunni-Shiite Fight Flares in Broadcasts

TV, Internet Enable Iraq's Clashing Warriors to Reach Public Directly

It was the worst insult a Sunni Iraqi could give to a Shiite countryman.

"You Persian shoe!" politician Mishan al-Jabouri shouted at journalist Sadeq al-Musawi during a panel discussion earlier this month on al-Jazeera television. "I will do things to you that you cannot even imagine."

Musawi gave it back in kind. "You are a thief. . . . Your father killed Kurds. We will settle accounts with all of you," he warned before stomping off the set past the pleading al-Jazeera moderator.

The exchange between two middle-aged men in suits was an up close and personal look at the religious and ethnic divides -- Sunni Muslim vs. Shiite Muslim, Arab vs. Persian -- that President Bush now cites as the main impediments to peace in Iraq. Widely circulated on the Internet in recent weeks, the video clip has fueled sectarian jeers and cheers in chat rooms throughout the Middle East.

For Jabouri, who sparked the shouting by offering a Koranic prayer for "the soul of the martyred president Saddam Hussein," it was welcome free publicity.

"It's spreading around the world," he said of the video in a telephone interview Friday from Damascus, "showing all the people the truth" of what he called the criminal occupation of Iraq by the U.S. military and an Iran-backed Shiite government in Baghdad.

"I've received thousands of letters from this interview, all supporting me. If you go to any tiny village in Saudi Arabia, in the [Persian] Gulf, you'll find discussions about this interview."

Even more popular among the Arab world's majority Sunnis, if press accounts in the region are to be believed, is Jabouri's satellite television station, al-Zawraa. Its battlefield videos of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi Shiites being blown apart with roadside explosions, truck bombs and sniper bullets fired by Sunni insurgents mark the first time such fare -- long an Internet staple -- has had its own television station.

The Bush administration has long charged that mainstream Arab networks such as al-Jazeera provide a platform to terrorists. But communications technology now allows the warring parties in Iraq direct access to audiences in Iraq and beyond.

The Internet videos are ubiquitous. The al-Jazeera clip apparently was first posted, with English subtitles, by the Middle East Media Research Institute, which monitors and distributes audio and video broadcasts from the region, many of them unflattering to Arabs. Macabrely humorous to Western ears, the clip has become a favorite on YouTube and hundreds of other sites.

Al-Zawraa television may prove just as difficult to squelch as the Internet.

A Sunni politician twice elected to the parliament, Jabouri started the station, a mix of standard entertainment and pro-Sunni rants, after Hussein's fall. Last year, he fled to Syria after the Iraqi government charged him with siphoning money from an American-financed project in his native Salahuddin province. In November, security forces shut down the station's Baghdad headquarters.