World | USA
Fury as website 'gloats' over US Iraq deaths
Graphic footage of United States soldiers being shot and blown up by terrorists in Iraq is being shown on a popular American website.
- By Toby Harden, The Telegraph
- Published: 00:00 September 18, 2006
Washington: Graphic footage of United States soldiers being shot and blown up by terrorists in Iraq is being shown on a popular American website.
In one clip, a soldier steps out of a Humvee and is engulfed in flames as a radio-controlled bomb explodes.
Another shows a sniper in Iraq killing an American Marine as he chats to children. The videos, made as propaganda by Islamist extremists, are being shown on YouTube.Com, a phenomenally successful video-sharing site, said to be among the 50 most popular in the world.
Outraged relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq are now calling for the videos to be removed, or the website shut down.
YouTube boasts that about 70 million of its clips are viewed each day mainly by young people.
In July, it registered 16 million American visitors and 3.5 million from Britain.
Executives at the California-based company, which was launched just 18 months ago and whose advertisers include The New York Times and the US Department of Health and Human Services, declined to comment on why the videos were being permitted on the site.
Its terms state that it "doesn't allow videos with nudity, graphic violence or hate". In another video, filmed just three weeks ago, a 16-tonne Stryker armoured vehicle is flipped over by a bomb buried in a road west of Baghdad.
Pte Daniel Dolan, 19, the driver, from the town of Roy, Utah, was mortally wounded in the attack, while the other soldier inside was killed instantly.
First issued by a Sunni insurgent group calling itself Jaish Al Mujahideen, or the Army of Holy Warriors, the video is accompanied by Islamic music and the recitation of Quranic verses.
Tim Dolan, Pte's father, said it was "deplorable" that YouTube was allowing such videos to be posted by its members.
Posting made by Mexican
By yesterday, the violent video had been viewed 346 times since it first appeared on the site a week ago.
It was posted by a person using the username ZEROMX87. In response to an e-mail from The Sunday Telegraph, he wrote that he was Jorge Hernandez, an 18-year-old from Mexico, and had been inspired by Michael Moore's anti-war film Fahrenheit 9/11.
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