Sunni-Shiite Fight Flares in Broadcasts

A month later, the station was back on the air, this time via the Egyptian satellite company Nilesat, with newly violent content featuring crudely recorded Sunni attacks on U.S. soldiers and what were said to be civilian Sunni victims of terrorism by Shiite militias.

Both the U.S. and Iraqi governments protested and asked the Egyptian government to force Nilesat to shut al-Zawraa down. "My understanding as of this weekend was that the broadcast had ceased," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said on Jan. 3.

A few days later, it was back on television screens across the Arab world, albeit with old footage of exploding Humvees and dead bodies looped over and over again, 24 hours a day. Egypt's Sunni government had blocked incoming video feeds to al-Zawraa but said free speech considerations prevented it from being shut off altogether.

Amin Basyouni, board chairman of Cairo-based Nilesat, said no government had asked him to cancel al-Zawraa. "We never interfere with content on any channel from any country in the world," he said. "We are like an airline. Passengers go on board. We never ask them, 'Why are you going to London or Paris?' "

Although conservative critics in the United States and the blogosphere have charged that al-Zawraa is a direct outlet for al-Qaeda in Iraq, Jabouri is most closely affiliated with the Islamic Army of Iraq, made up of ex-Baathists.

"We generally describe this as a Sunni Baathist insurgent media outlet rather than anything else," said a State Department official, who agreed to discuss the issue on condition he not be named. "It certainly isn't al-Qaeda broadcasting in Iraq." Jabouri, the official said, "is what our departed secretary of defense used to refer to as a 'dead-ender.' "

Jabouri denied supporting al-Qaeda and drew a sharp distinction between terrorists and what he called resistance fighters.

"The terrorists . . . the same people who bombed the Trade [Center] towers in New York and the civilian people in Iraq. . . . But there are honest resistance members fighting the invaders of their country," he said.

Despite his televised prayer for Hussein's soul, Jabouri said, he had little sympathy for Hussein. Yet "the way they hanged him and the words they said to him makes Saddam Hussein a semi-idol" to Sunnis, he said.

Jabouri said Friday that, thanks to a contract with Paris-based Eutelsat Communications, he expected to send new material from Iraq "in 48 hours." Eutelsat's Washington office said it had no record of a contract and referred calls to Paris, where no one could be reached late Friday.

The government of Syria, where Jabouri now lives, "does not allow" him to transmit from inside its borders, he said.

But the insurgents can download video images into computers and send them directly to the satellite transmitter via the Internet.

"With two, three or four computers in different places" not under U.S. or Iraqi control, he said, "I can send anywhere in the world."

Staff writer Joshua Partlow in Baghdad contributed to this report.