Egypt gets warnings to pull the plug on Al Zawraa

Cairo: Sunni-Shiite power politics and US-Egyptian relations have come head-to-head in a dispute over a satellite television station that is the latest weapon in the arsenal of Iraq's insurgents.

Al Zawraa, a television version of the now-infamous jihadi websites, is being broadcast across the Arab world by Nilesat, a satellite provider answerable to the Egyptian government.

The Iraqi station features non-stop scenes of US troops being picked off by snipers, blown up by roadside bombs and targeted by missiles.

"We find the channel utterly offensive," said one US diplomat. Getting the Egyptians to pull the plug is "at the top of our agenda."

But the Egyptian government insists it's all just business.

"For us, it means nothing," Egyptian Information Minister Anas Al Fiqi told me. "It is a channel that reserved an allocation on Nilesat. They had a contract, paid the fees. There is nothing political for Nilesat. It's pure business. We have no concern what the channel is doing."

But, as is often the case in the Middle East, much more is going on beneath the surface. The diplomatic tug-of-war over the station comes as Sunni Arab governments in the region, increasingly worried about a resurgent Iran, are more overtly lining up behind Iraq's Sunni minority.

Just last month, a Saudi close to his government wrote in the Washington Post that Saudi Arabia would take steps "to stop Iranian-backed Shiite militias from butchering Iraqi Sunnis."

Those militias have something in common with the US and Iraqi governments; they, too, want the Egyptians to pull the plug on Al Zawraa, which laces its anti-American programming with attacks on Shiites.

In one montage, the Iranian flag is superimposed over the faces of Iraqi Shiite leaders - including Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki. Graphic "crawls" at the bottom of the screen contain such messages as, "The natural place for criminals and thieves is with the mafia of Moqtada Al Sadr," a reference to the militant Shiite militia leader.

Al Fiqi says Egypt received "a warning from certain Iraqis" that if they don't stop broadcasting Al Zawraa, the Egyptian diplomatic mission in Baghdad will be attacked. "We don't accept this type of warning," he insists.

"In other words," I asked the information minister, "even if you wanted to shut it down, you wouldn't because it would look like you were backing down?" "Exactly," he replied.

Despite Egyptian protestations that there is nothing political about their involvement, Cairo is doing more than just re-transmitting Al Zawraa's signal.

In early November, around the time Saddam Hussain was sentenced to death, the station shifted from pushing a hard-line Sunni political message to serving as an overt arm of the Islamic Army of Iraq, said to be dominated by former Baathists. Using a mobile transmitter, it began playing a cat-and-mouse game with Iraqi and US military authorities.

In mid-December, according to Nilesat chief Salah Hamza, the signal went dead. Since then, the Egyptian satellite company has been retransmitting the same few hours of tape at the request of Al Zawraa officials.

"They asked us, please when we don't send, loop for us what you have." Technically, this means that rather than just up-linking a signal originating in Iraq, Nilesat is actually transmitting Al Zawraa from Cairo.

It's a subtle, but very important distinction: An arm of the anti-American Iraqi insurgency transmitting from the capital of one of America's strongest Arab allies.

The implications are not lost on Hamza, who became cagey when asked what Nilesat would do if Al Zawraa provided it with new tapes, instead of just asking it to rebroadcast the old ones.

The failure of US officials to get the Egyptians to pull the plug on Al Zawraa underlines the complicated nature of the US-Egyptian relationship and the limits of American influence in the new regional equation. It is also another example of the emerging Cold War between Iran and Sunni Arab powers in the region.

The Egyptian information minister has appointed a team to monitor the channel and provide him with a report, but, he says, the government can only take action if the channel has violated "the major codes of ethics of the pan-Arab media" and it receives a formal request from the Arab League, which, not incidentally, is seen by Iran as a tool of Sunni Arab power.

Having failed to convince the Egyptians to act - Al Fiqi claims he was approached "in a friendly way" by the US ambassador Francis J. Ricciardone but has received no formal request -the Americans had hoped Iraqi President Jalal Talabani would raise the issue with President Mubarak, but the Iraqi leader's December visit was cancelled.

However, the man said to be the station's founder, former Iraqi Member of Parliament Mishan Al Jabouri, was recently in Cairo.

So for now, the insurgents have their voice and the Middle East has yet another of its countless inherent contradictions: The US, which is demanding freedom and democracy in the Arab world, wants a TV station muzzled; Egypt; whose prisons are crowded with home-grown Islamists and whose own media is tightly controlled, is defending the insurgents' right to their electronic pulpit.

Lawrence Pintak is director of the Adham Centre for Electronic Journalism at The American University in Cairo and author of Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America, Islam & the War of Ideas