In Iraq, Everyone
Is Media-Savvy
BY
BORZOU DARAGAHI
This
tale begins in early February in the mountains of northeastern
Iraq, a few days after Secretary of State Colin Powell showed
the UN Security Council — and the world — a satellite
photo of what he said was a poison factory operated by Ansar al
Islam, a militant band of Islamic fighters with ties to al Qaeda.
A few of us journalists wanted to see the factory for ourselves.
After a morning of negotiation, Ansar agreed to take us past their
checkpoints and into the hostile terrain within the folds of the
Zagros Mountains. The leaders said they wanted to show us, as
representatives of the world media, that they were not manufacturing
chemical weapons. It struck me at that moment how crucial a role
journalists were playing in this crisis, and how media-savvy all
the players were. (A Kurdish politician told me recently: “In
the old days, if I had a dispute with a rival, I picked up my
Kalashnikov and went to visit him. Now, I pick up the phone and
call one of the international journalists in town.”)
When we finally reached the site pictured in the satellite photo,
the Ansar warriors let us roam about at will. The place was a
horrifying dump. The residents were dirt poor. The Ansar fighters
looked mean, disheveled, and somewhat confused. We tried to approach
them, but the leaders would let us speak only to the designated
spokesman. Each of the journalists began opening doors and drawers,
and shooting roll after roll of film. It was a bonafide media
circus, right there in those wilderness mountains.
Then things really got weird. The Ansar warriors showed us the
real purpose of the compound that Powell had labeled a poison
factory.
It was their media headquarters.
These back-to-the-land zealots planning their Islamic revolution
— high in the mountains, without electricity, running water,
or telephones — had set up a generator-powered film production
studio. There were video cameras and editing decks and miles of
wiring. They had even put some of their films on a multimedia
Web site, www.ansarislam.com.
One journalist swiped a pile of documents and floppy disks from
a trashcan. Recipes for mustard gas and nerve agents? No. They
turned out to be scripts for propaganda documentaries.
The Ansar fighters suddenly hurried us into a room. I was scared.
What if they wanted us as hostages, or planned to kill us? (Indeed,
later that same day, Ansar members assassinated a Kurdish leader,
killing a little girl and three other civilians in the process.)
Two of the Ansar leaders — Ayoub Afghani and Mohammad Hassan
— sat behind a table in front of a white backdrop, with two
television cameras trained on them.
It was a press conference!
In the runup to a war that
would make celebrities of such spokespersons as Brigadier General
Vincent Brooks and the Iraqi information minister, Mohammad Saeed
Al-Sahaf, the Ansar, in their rugged, remote mountain retreat,
wanted their share of the media spotlight.
“I want to set the record straight,” said the bearded,
wild-eyed warrior, as we in the press listened obediently. “There
are no chemical weapons here.”
We had come to this hideout in the hills on the chance of finding
a factory turning out weapons of mass destruction. What we found
instead was a studio cranking out a different sort of wartime
weaponry: propaganda.
Early in the war, after our visit, U.S. cruise missiles hit Ansar
positions in northern Iraq, just days before Kurds launched a
ground offensive and virtually wiped them out. The Ansar’s
“image war” wasn’t effective enough to save it
from the real thing.
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Borzou Daragahi is a Teheran-based reporter for print and radio
media.
