TV, Internet Enable Iraq's Clashing Warriors to Reach Public Directly
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 21, 2007
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.
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.
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