About Al-Zawraa TV

Al-Zawraa TV

Overview

Al-Zawraa TV was a 24-hour Iraqi Arabic-language satellite television channel that became one of the most notorious broadcasters of the Iraq War period. Owned by the former Iraqi parliamentarian Mishan al-Juburi, the channel was known around the world for airing graphic video footage of insurgent attacks on United States-led coalition forces, accompanied by patriotic and martial music, and for news bulletins at times read by presenters wearing Ba'ath Party army fatigues. Iraqi officials described it as a mouthpiece for the Islamic Army in Iraq, a Ba'athist-dominated insurgent group. The Iraqi government ordered the station closed in November 2006 for inciting violence and murder; it nevertheless continued broadcasting from outside Iraq via a succession of satellite operators until it appeared to cease operations in July 2007, after its Arabsat transmissions were jammed. In January 2008 the United States Treasury Department formally sanctioned both the channel and its owner. The station is now banned in Iraq.

Ownership and founder

Al-Zawraa was owned by Misha'an al-Juburi, a Sunni Arab politician who led the Front for Reconciliation and Liberation (also rendered the Liberation and Reconciliation Party) and sat in the Iraqi National Assembly. Al-Juburi's background shaped the channel. In December 2005 he was indicted over the alleged theft of millions of dollars of government money that had been provided in 2004 to protect oil pipelines near Kirkuk against attack; Iraqi officials accused him of diverting the money toward the Iraqi insurgency, an allegation that was not proved. Following the indictment he fled to Syria. It was in exile that he founded Al-Zawraa TV as a twenty-four-hour satellite channel, broadcasting via Arabsat to an area that included the Middle East and North Africa.

Al-Juburi made no secret of the channel's sympathies. He said publicly that he supported the Iraqi insurgency, although he opposed suicide bombings, and he called for the multinational force in Iraq to be replaced by United Nations-led peacekeepers. After the execution of former president Saddam Hussein, he described Hussein in an interview as a brave martyr. The channel he created expressed exactly that political position: support for armed resistance to the coalition presence, nostalgia for the Ba'athist era, and hostility toward both the new Iraqi government and its Shia political leadership. In January 2008 al-Juburi was sentenced in his absence, in the embezzlement case, and was separately sanctioned by the United States Treasury under Executive Order 13438 for providing financial, material and technical support for acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq.

Programming

Al-Zawraa's typical programming consisted of footage of American troops being picked off by insurgent snipers, blown up by roadside bombs and targeted by missiles. In many cases these videos were shown with patriotic or anti-United States songs in the background — melodramatic Saddam-era martial music was a signature of the channel — and the network invited viewers to comment on the videos by e-mail. The channel gave extended exposure to attack footage produced by insurgent media units, functioning in practice as a broadcast distribution system for material that would otherwise have circulated only on the internet or on disc.

Beyond the attack footage, the channel carried commentaries against the United States invasion of Iraq and, for a short time, news bulletins read by presenters wearing Ba'ath Party army fatigues; its rare on-screen presenters were noted for wearing camouflage. It broadcast the compilation known as Hidden Camera Jihad, a video of insurgent operations against United States forces edited with a slapstick-style soundtrack and video effects, which drew international media attention, including BBC reporting on what it called Iraq's "jihad TV." Al-Zawraa was also known for airing anti-Shia propaganda, portraying Iraqi Shia as "Iranian stooges," and it broadcast songs eulogising Iraqi victims of "the American occupiers" and described the Iraqi insurgency as "freedom fighters." Its programmes were in Arabic, with occasional English subtitles. A Guardian report in January 2007 described the channel, then widely watched, as having turned into Iraq's newest cult hit — a measure of how far its mixture of combat footage and Ba'athist-era pageantry had penetrated popular viewing despite, or because of, its notoriety.

The November 2006 closure order

The Iraqi government ordered Al-Zawraa closed in November 2006. On Sunday 5 November 2006, hours after former leader Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death, the Interior Ministry ordered two Sunni-owned satellite channels closed indefinitely, and security forces raided Al-Zawraa TV in Baghdad and Saleheddin TV in Tikrit on the grounds that they were inciting violence. The Committee to Protect Journalists expressed concern at the decision. According to CPJ's sources, Al-Zawraa, owned by Mishaan al-Jubouri of the Liberation and Reconciliation Party, had received several warnings from the government to change its political coverage or face closure.

The immediate circumstances were disputed. CPJ sources said the channel had sought to avoid a confrontation on the day of the verdict by ignoring the demonstrations that erupted after Saddam's sentence, while Iraqi officials told the Associated Press that the stations were closed on broader grounds of undermining national stability and violating a government curfew by interviewing people on the street after the sentence. Al-Jubouri told the AP that Iraqi police had raided his station in retaliation for its criticism of the verdict against Hussein. Whatever the immediate trigger, the closure ended the channel's physical presence in Baghdad; it did not end the channel, which was already being run from exile and simply continued from outside the country.

Broadcasting from exile: the satellite carousel

After the Baghdad raid, Al-Zawraa re-opened and broadcast via the Egyptian-owned Nilesat satellite from an unknown location, one of the more striking demonstrations of how satellite distribution had weakened national governments' ability to silence a channel. The United States Treasury's January 2008 statement suggested the station was based in Syria, where al-Juburi had taken refuge, but BBC Monitoring was likewise unable to ascertain the location of the channel's broadcast facilities. The station's signals migrated across the satellite arc as operators came under pressure to drop it.

In January 2007 the station was noted broadcasting on the Eutelsat-owned Eurobird satellite and on the Arabsat Badr satellite, both at the 26 degrees east orbital position; the Eurobird outlet was closed after only a few days of operation. The station's transmission on the Nilesat 101 satellite was closed in February 2007 for "interference with other channels," according to the record. It then became available again at the 7 degrees west position via Atlantic Bird 4. Egypt's role was sensitive: the channel's carriage on the Egyptian state-influenced Nilesat system despite United States requests to remove it prompted commentary in the Columbia Journalism Review in January 2007 under the headline "Cairo Ignores U.S. Request to Pull Plug on Jihadi TV in Iraq." The channel's survival through the first half of 2007 was thus a running diplomatic problem involving Iraq, Egypt, satellite operators and the United States, fought transponder by transponder.

Closure in July 2007

Al-Zawraa appeared to close down in July 2007, after its transmissions via the Arabsat satellite were jammed. With the Arabsat outlet lost and the other satellite positions already closed or untenable, the channel had no remaining distribution of consequence, and it ceased broadcasting. The station is recorded as banned in Iraq. Its total life was short — it was founded in exile after al-Juburi's flight in late 2005 and was off the air by the middle of 2007 — but it coincided with the most violent phase of the Iraqi insurgency, and the channel's content made it a subject of sustained international reporting, from the Guardian and the BBC to the Committee to Protect Journalists and the United States Treasury.

The end of Al-Zawraa did not end al-Juburi's broadcasting career. In 2008 he launched Al-Rai TV from Syria, expressly as a replacement for Al-Zawraa, maintaining a similar militant editorial line; to get around the United States sanctions, the Jamestown Foundation reported, he registered the new channel under the name of his second wife, a Syrian national. Al-Rai later became known internationally as a platform for statements by Libya's Muammar Qaddafi after the fall of Tripoli in 2011. That successor history belongs to Al-Rai's own record, but it confirms that Al-Zawraa's disappearance in July 2007 was a matter of distribution and pressure, not of its owner abandoning television.

United States sanctions, January 2008

On 9 January 2008 the United States Department of the Treasury announced that it was blacklisting Al-Zawraa TV and its owner. In its statement the Treasury alleged that the station had received funding from Al-Qaeda and had broadcast open-coded messages, through patriotic songs, to the Sunni insurgent group the Islamic Army of Iraq. It further alleged that the station had broadcast recruitment videos for Al-Qaeda in Iraq and graphic videos of attacks on United States forces. The formal designation accused the channel of "broadcasting graphic videos of insurgent attacks against U.S. forces and advocating violence against Shia." The order prohibited all transactions between Al-Zawraa TV, its owner and any United States person, and froze any assets the channel might hold under United States jurisdiction.

The designation came some six months after the channel had already ceased broadcasting, which gave it a retrospective, record-setting character: it placed a television station, as an entity, on the United States sanctions list for its editorial content, alongside its owner. Arab Media and Society, reporting the BBC Monitoring account of the announcement, described the station in the past tense as an Iraqi satellite television channel known for airing video footage of insurgent attacks on United States-led coalition forces, often accompanied by patriotic songs inciting violence against United States troops, and noted its presenters in Ba'athist army fatigues. The Treasury also noted that al-Juburi had been sentenced to fifteen years in prison in his absence for embezzling Iraqi government funds.

Assessment and legacy

Al-Zawraa TV occupies a distinct place in media history as perhaps the purest example of an insurgency-supporting satellite channel: a station whose schedule was built around the combat footage of an armed insurgency, owned by a fugitive politician who openly declared his support for that insurgency, and sustained for months beyond its own government's closure order by the borderless economics of satellite carriage. Its story demonstrated, earlier than most, the practical limits of national media regulation in the satellite era — Iraq could raid its Baghdad studio and ban it, Egypt could be pressed over Nilesat, and operators could jam or drop its transponders, yet each step required international cooperation that arrived only gradually, in 2007 rather than 2006.

At the same time, the channel's content is inseparable from the sectarian catastrophe of its period. Its anti-Shia propaganda and its celebration of attacks on coalition forces and, by extension, on the Iraqis around them, placed it on the incitement side of the era's media landscape, a judgement embodied in the Iraqi closure order of November 2006 and the United States Treasury designation of January 2008. Al-Zawraa is therefore remembered neither as a suppressed journalistic voice nor as an ordinary opposition channel, but as a case study in the weaponisation of satellite television during the Iraq War — a channel that existed for roughly two years, was closed by one government, jammed off its satellite, and blacklisted by another, and whose name still anchors discussions of insurgent media strategy.