Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite channel which angered the US with its coverage of the Afghan war, has caused a new furore by broadcasting blood-and-guts images from the invasion of Iraq.
Millions of viewers throughout the Middle East saw pictures of Iraqi and American victims at the weekend that many Western news organizations would consider too shocking to publish.
One showed the head of a child, aged about 12, that had been split apart, reportedly in the US-led assault on Basra. Others came from northern Iraq, where American missiles targeted the Kurdish Islamist Ansar al-Islam organization.
PHOTO: AP
On Monday, al-Jazeera relayed footage of Iraqi television's interviews with five captured American soldiers, which the US defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, denounced as a breach of the Geneva convention. But the channel was unrepentant last night.
"Look who's talking about international law and regulations," said al-Jazeera spokesman, Jihad Ballout. "We didn't make the pictures -- the pictures are there," he continued. "It's a facet of the war. Our duty is to show the war from all angles."
During the 1991 Gulf War viewers in the Middle East relied on CNN and other Western outlets for breaking news. But since its launch in 1996, al-Jazeera's coverage has made it the most watched Arab channel. It made its name in the West during the war in Afghanistan and looks set to repeat this achievement in Iraq.
Al-Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar, which is cooperating with the US in the invasion of Iraq, but staff insist it has full editorial freedom.
The station, whose main studio in the Qatari capital, Doha, is a few minutes' drive from US General Tommy Franks's Centcom headquarters, was accused of irresponsibility during the Afghan war for broadcasting taped messages from al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
But as the only television station with a permanent base in Kabul, it also became a source of exclusive footage that other channels around the world were eager to buy.
Its office in Kabul was destroyed by American "smart" bombs two hours before the Northern Alliance took over the city, and many suspect the attack was no accident.
In Iraq, al-Jazeera is taking no chances. In the hope that its Baghdad office will not be mistaken for an Iraqi command-and-control center, it has supplied the Americans with the geographical coordinates of its office and the code of its signal to the satellite transponder.
Al-Jazeera has seven reporters and a back-up team of 20 working independently in Iraq, plus others "embedded" with the US and British forces.
Before the war, executives predicted that their team would have an advantage over Western journalists because of their familiarity with Iraq and fluency in Arabic.
Yesterday, the channel broadcast a lengthy interview an Iraqi general in Basra denying that US and British forces had taken the city, and also filmed the search in Baghdad for two Western pilots who had allegedly baled out over the city.
"Our success is a factor of our people's networking in Iraq, and their ability to anticipate events through contacts on the ground," Ballout said yesterday.
To some, this simply turns the channel into a mouthpiece for Iraqi propaganda. Yesterday's pictures of American corpses could affect western morale -- a rerun of the "bodybag syndrome" that was a major factor in Vietnam -- while images of Iraqi victims will fuel anti-war protests.
But others say Western TV coverage is far too sanitized.
The South African columnist Darrel Bristow-Bovey yesterday complained that the influence of reality TV made war reporting look like "Big Brother Iraq."
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