Cultures clash in media coverage of Iraq war

Cultures clash in media coverage of Iraq war

UPDATED AT 3:48 AM EST Friday, Apr. 4, 2003

Kuwait City — It is a tale of two wars.

On U.S. television, the war is a rout. American troops storm triumphantly into Baghdad airport with astonishing ease, leaving the battlefield littered with Iraqi corpses and bombed tanks.

In the Arab media, it is a wholly different war: a clash between an invading army and courageous Islamic fighters, fiercely resisting the American onslaught with suicide bombings and defiant martyrs.

Last night, as CNN showed American tanks rolling into the suburbs of Baghdad and encircling the city, the Arab television network Al-Jazeera focused on the two female suicide bombers, each with one hand on a Kalashnikov and the other on a Koran as they vowed to take revenge on the invaders.

"I swear to God and the Holy Koran that I will sacrifice my soul to the land of Iraq and teach the invaders a lesson," one of the women proclaimed in the videotape, as she clutched her assault rifle in an image strikingly similar to those of suicide bombers in the Palestinian territories. The report said the two Iraqi women were the suicide attackers who had killed three American soldiers near Baghdad the night before.

Arab networks also gave heavy coverage to pictures of Saddam Hussein strolling defiantly through the streets of Baghdad, mobbed by cheering Iraqis as he rallied the city to resist the invasion.

Al-Jazeera told its 35 million viewers that the U.S. capture of Baghdad's main airport was merely an unconfirmed claim. It gave equal prominence to Iraq's claim to have destroyed five American tanks and an American helicopter.

"The news of the U.S. capture of the airport made everyone depressed, but when the Iraqi leader appeared in the streets of Baghdad, everyone became happy, and the people have more energy and more positive feelings," the Al-Jazeera correspondent in Baghdad said in a report last night.

Arab newspapers have been unimpressed by the U.S. advance into the outskirts of Baghdad. Their stories, echoing their coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, prefer to emphasize the continuing Arab resistance and the mounting civilian death toll.

The daily Al-Ahram newspaper of Cairo reported that the Iraqis had halted the American advance on Baghdad. "It is obvious after two weeks of the American and British invasion of Iraq that the invading troops are facing major difficulties, not only from brave Iraqi resistance but also from the surprise that these troops faced from the land of Iraq," the Egyptian newspaper wrote in a front-page editorial yesterday.

"They thought that their invasion would be a picnic. They were told that the Iraqi troops will not fight back and will surrender at the first shot. Their imagination pictured that the only problem facing the invading troops would be to prepare a big enough place for all the surrendering troops."

Yesterday, Al-Ahram's pages were filled with photos of Iraqi civilians who had been killed or injured in the war. There was a front-page photo of a wounded child in a Baghdad hospital, along with other pictures of victims of the "barbarian bombing" of the Iraqi capital.

Another Arab newspaper, the London-based daily Al-Hayat, reported accurately on the U.S. march into Baghdad, but also emphasized the Iraqi resistance. "Arab volunteers are fighting bravely against the American and British troops, [who] are trying to advance from Abu Al-Khasib toward two towns to the north," the newspaper said in a report from southern Iraq.

A Saudi Arabian daily, Al-Madina, portrayed the U.S.-led coalition as a gang of murderers. "The whole world is undoubtedly seeing the American cowboys as having come only for one aim: killing, destruction and bloodshed," it said in an editorial Thursday.

"The scenes of killing and destruction coming out from Iraqi cities . . . recall the American massacres in Vietnam. . . . The war banner 'Iraqi Freedom,' made by the Pentagon strategists, appears to be in total contradiction with the massacres."


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