Updates on Al-Zawraa TV

I first became familiar with Al-Zawraa TV during my overnight stay in the Deheishe Refugee Camp near Bethlehem. I was with a group touring the West Bank that had arranged for us to stay with local families in the Deheishe camp in order to get a better understanding of the reality of Palestinian refugees. Since the house we stayed in didn't have many spare rooms, my host, a single Palestinian male in his late 20's, gave me his bed and slept on the floor in the room. Before we went to sleep he was flipping channels on his television and alternating between an old Clint Eastwood movie, a racey Nancy Ajram music video, Al-Jazeera, before finally settling on what looked to me like a b-rated satellite news channel. There was a man in military fatigues reading angry communiques interspliced with unsuspecting military vehicles suddenly being blown up by improvised explosive devices. "What is this channel?" I asked him.
"This is the channel of the Iraqi fighters" he replied.

I later found out that this was Al-Zawraa TV, a satellite TV channel sympathetic to Iraq's sunni insurgency. The channel is funded by Mish'an al-Jabouri, an Iraqi Parliament member from the Reconciliation and Liberation Bloc which is supported by many former Baathists. He has currently fled to Syria under investigation that he stole millions of dollars intended to protect kirkuk oil pipelines from attack. This would be the second time he fled to Syria, the first being after he was implicated in an assassination attempt against Saddam Hussein in 1989 which makes his colorful and vigorous defense of the late dictator on Al-Jazeera all the more surprising.

Egypt has just announced that they will stop transmitting the channel on its powerful and widely viewed NILESAT which coincides with Jabouri's rather surprising recent rant against Al-Qaeda in which he states:

Despite all that the Al-Qaeda organization has contributed in challenging the occupation, but they have also broken the back of national unity in Iraq and they resulted in bringing great suffering upon Iraqis, and the Al-Qaeda organization bears [responsibility] for a large part of the bombings among civilians, and that [manner of] targeting does not differentiate between a Sunni or a Shi’i or a child, and the targeting of Shi'as is a crime in every respect, and we condemn anyone who has committed such acts.

These acts gave the excuse for the Safavid sectarian militias, of which we absolve our Shi'a [brethren], it gave the excuse for it to retaliate and go to the Sunni neighborhoods to kill 4 or 5 or 10 times the number that was killed of the Shi'as.

Some speculate that this move may have been orchestrated by his new Syrian hosts who have intelligence that Al-Qaeda may be contemplating new attacks on targets outside of Iraq and seek to mettle in Syrian, Lebanese, and Israeli affairs. One clue is the rather cryptic statement by Jabouri, "“We will not allow Iraq to turn into a dangerous place that threatens the countries of the region under any pretext." (Credit Talisman Gate)

Al-Zawra TV is however still carried by the powerful ArabSat which is owned by members of the Arab League but headquartered in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps this is consistent with former Saudi advisor Nawaf Obeid's op-ed in the Washington Post that announced that Saudi Arabia would support the Sunnis in Iraq should the US pull out.