In Iraq, Al Jazeera Navigates Minefield of Press Freedom

The videotapes arrive by courier at the information desk in the shadowy lobby of the Swan Lake, a fading hotel in Baghdad’s battle-pocked downtown that now serves as the Iraqi headquarters for the television channel Al Jazeera.

Chillingly similar, the grainy videos of frightened hostages have become a defining image of Iraq’s new violence: tearful pleas for life and masked kidnappers, swords held aloft, laying out their demands.

For Al Jazeera’s journalists, who wrestle with how to use the exclusive and often bloody footage, the tapes pose the latest in a string of credibility tests. The current rules go like this: Show the hostages. Don’t show beheadings. The slaughter of two Pakistani hostages this week, for example, was deemed too gory -- Al Jazeera broke the news, but kept the pictures to itself.

“It gives me a headache every day we receive a tape,” said Ahmed Sheikh, the organization’s editor in chief.

Iraqi officials charge that Al Jazeera is colluding with kidnappers by giving them an international platform. The criticism is nothing new: U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, have complained that the station has incited violence against U.S. troops by erroneously blaming the soldiers for attacks on civilians. And Al Jazeera reporters have been accused of getting tips before bombing attacks and becoming unprofessionally close to insurgents.

Alongside the conflict in Iraq, Al Jazeera’s viewers are witnessing a second drama. The Arab channel is coming of age and struggling for respect while covering a war opposed by the Arab world -- and fending off a round-the-clock blitz of impassioned criticism from all sides.

In the midst of the mayhem, the young, influential and controversial Qatar-based news organization is setting its sights beyond the Middle East, breaking into English-language news and striving for a place among international institutions such as the BBC and CNN.

“My country is collapsing, and my job is to watch the collapse,” correspondent Audday Katib said. A government engineer under Saddam Hussein, Katib landed a job with Al Jazeera months after the U.S.-led invasion.

“Do you buy this idea that the U.S. came to bring freedom to Iraq? I don’t buy it, but it’s not our job to say that,” Katib said, lounging on a couch in the Baghdad bureau on a 115-degree day, an air conditioner humming behind him and a Cameron Diaz movie playing on the television. “We let the people say it, but we never say it, because we are neutral.”

The stakes are high for Al Jazeera because its reach is extensive. Washington is watching, along with the interim Iraqi government, which threatens to ban the satellite channel. An estimated 35 million viewers tune in, including just about everybody in Iraq, from the Kurdish mountains to the Sunni Triangle to the Persian Gulf coast. Viewers include foreigners who can’t understand the broadcasts, and even the people who hate it.

Sabah Kadim, an Interior Ministry official, sat in his Baghdad office in suit and tie this week and railed against the station. “They should be with the Iraqi people in their hour of need, and not against them,” he said. “And if they can’t see [their bias], they’re blind.”

The television set in the next room was tuned to Al Jazeera. “Of course, we’re always watching it,” Kadim said with a shrug. “I have to see what they’re up to.”

The creation of Al Jazeera by the Qatari government in 1996 was a revolutionary moment: A region in which rulers have long controlled the flow of information to the public was suddenly treated to an experiment in relatively unrestricted -- albeit government-funded -- news coverage.

From a group of squat offices and trailers in Doha, the capital of the sun-blasted Persian Gulf state, Al Jazeera has revolutionized Arab discourse with its vigorous political debates, willingness to criticize some Arab policies and insistence on including Israeli and American guests in the mix.

Al Jazeera quickly drew the wrath of Arab governments and the consternation of U.S. officials, who accused the station of fanning anger against the West and serving as a mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden, who has communicated with the world via tapes sent to the channel.

In Iraq, the organization has been forced to learn on the fly. After Al Jazeera quoted supposed witnesses who claimed they’d seen U.S. soldiers tie up Iraqi men and shoot them point blank, a U.S. military spokesman phoned the Al Jazeera bureau, Katib said.

“He said, ‘You just messed up. You accused us of a war crime -- and it never happened,’ ” Katib said, shaking his head. “So we have a lesson: You can’t listen to the eyewitnesses. Unless you have pictures, you keep your mouth shut.”

It comes from the other side, too: After a battle this week in the Iraqi hamlet of Buhriz, the U.S. military announced that 13 insurgents had been killed. Katib drove to the town, where residents told him only two men had died -- a policeman and a fish vendor. He visited the graveyard, and found only two fresh mounds. The truth was elusive, so Katib tried to strike middle ground.

“When I went on the air I said, ‘The Americans say 13, but I found two,’ ” he said. “And then the people in the town were attacking me: ‘We heard you. You said 13 on the air.’ ”

The constant pressure and gut checks have left their mark on the young reporters:

“When I go to hospitals and see children dying, I fight myself to be objective,” said Atwar Bahjat, a popular Baghdad correspondent who was a reporter for Iraqi state television before the war. “I’ve been affected mentally and psychologically, but if you’re not neutral around here, you can lose your job.”

The pressures have spawned self-evaluation and rapid evolution at Al Jazeera.

“I’ve tried to tone down the way we’re saying things,” Sheikh, the editor in chief, said during a recent interview in Doha. “You can say something crying and emotionally, or you can say it quieter.”

Plucked from the documentary department, Sheikh is part of a management team that took control in a reshuffling in November. Under the new leadership, reporters have attended training meetings with U.S. government spokespersons.

Doha regularly passes down new language rules -- reporters now refer to “multinational forces,” for example, not “invading army.” This month, the organization penned its first code of ethics. And, employees say, U.S. officials have begun to take note.

U.S. military spokesman Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt called, “saying, ‘What happened to you guys?’ ” Sheikh said. “But we’ve got to do this. If you face a storm with your chest out, you will be uprooted. You have to find shelter.”

Not to say that Al Jazeera has shed its taint of controversy. Reporters still anger Western viewers by calling slain Palestinian militants “martyrs” -- and irk some Iraqis by referring to Iraqi insurgents as simply “killed.” And one of its top war correspondents, former Afghanistan and Iraq reporter Tayseer Allouni, is under house arrest in Spain on suspicion of ties to Al Qaeda.

But the most common complaints are also most vague -- that Al Jazeera is biased, emotional or distorts the truth. “Between the lines,” Katib calls those gripes. They have to do with Al Jazeera being a staunchly Arab station, a collection of journalists who inevitably and unapologetically view the U.S. “war on terror” through Arab, and usually Islamic, eyes.

On Al Jazeera, Iraq was never “liberated” by a “coalition”; it was a “war on Iraq” waged by “invading forces.” Civilian casualties were paramount. To dissemble the ugly deeds of war was unthinkable.

It is from this perspective that Al Jazeera turns its sights to the West. An English-language website was launched just as the war began, and an English broadcast is to premiere as early as next year.

Feeding a keen Arab interest in U.S. politics, the station devoted hours of coverage to the Democratic National Convention, airing speeches and interviews with Western media figures such as Wolf Blitzer and Peter Jennings.

But when the station, which had rented a skybox at Boston’s FleetCenter, hoisted a banner with its logo to announce its presence, a minor controversy erupted. Convention organizers promptly ordered the banner pulled down. Al Jazeera was miffed, but undaunted -- it also plans to turn out in force for the Republican convention.

Al Jazeera has never had the luxury of oversensitivity: It is banned from working in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Tunisia. Jordan recently relented and allowed it to return, but its correspondents have been jailed in Sudan and restricted in Algeria.

Relations between Al Jazeera staffers and the U.S. military remain uneasy. In airstrikes, which the U.S. government insists were accidents, warplanes bombed the Al Jazeera bureau in Kabul, the Afghan capital, and fired missiles at the station’s headquarters in Baghdad. The Baghdad strike, in the midst of last year’s U.S.-led invasion, killed Tariq Ayyoub, one of the channel’s most popular correspondents. Many employees remain suspicious about the attacks; the station says it gave the Americans the coordinates for the Baghdad bureau well before the war to prevent just such a tragedy.

More recently, Al Jazeera journalists covering the violence in Iraq have been arrested by U.S. soldiers. Cameraman Samir Hamza was cruising the streets of Baghdad in October when his colleagues called his satellite phone with breaking news: A nearby police station had just been struck by a suicide bomb.

Hamza arrived 12 minutes after the blast and trained his camera on the wreckage. U.S. soldiers approached, suspicious about his speedy arrival. “They said, ‘Oh, you’re Al Jazeera, that’s bad,’ ” Hamza said.

The soldiers accused him of knowing about the attack ahead of time, Hamza said. They searched him, drove him to the airport and locked him up; he was held for two days while soldiers studied his footage. Finally, satisfied that he’d arrived after the explosion, they set him free.

To some degree, Al Jazeera is criticized because of its reach -- it has deep coverage of Iraq, thanks to scores of staffers installed around the country. Many are locals -- Iraqis with special insights and tribal links to places that Western reporters can’t penetrate. “This is our country, this is our work,” Bahjat, the Iraqi reporter, said. “We don’t have other options.”

Bahjat is 27 and lives with her parents in Baghdad. She giggles easily and dresses in bright slacks and blouses with matching lipstick and eye shadow. She roams all over Iraq to file stories; her war coverage has made her a rising star.

But she had to overcome her vanity, she said with a laugh, when she began to cover her hair with a colorful hijab, or headscarf, about six months ago. Asked why, she explained haltingly that the emotional tumult of the war gave her a new sense of reverence.

“I can’t say it’s religion 100%, but it’s a feeling of respect before God,” she said.

Once, her car ran over a roadside bomb and was destroyed, but she emerged unhurt. Another afternoon, she drove from the Al Jazeera bureau just moments before a car bomb exploded outside.

She, too, has been arrested by American soldiers, and she has watched fellow Iraqis dying.

“I have seen death now, I have been touched by it,” she said. Complaints from officials come and go, she said with a shrug -- the important thing is to tell Iraq’s story.

Maybe it’s a measure of Al Jazeera’s power that some officials choose it as the forum for complaining about the station.

During a recent interview with a correspondent in Moscow, interim Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari accused the station of inciting violence with its “distorted” and “one-sided” coverage of the fighting in Iraq.

Al Jazeera aired his complaints, along with a rebuttal that accused the foreign minister of threatening freedom of the press and expression. “We have heard the criticism before,” Bahjat said with a sigh. “And we will hear it many times more.”

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Times staff writer Nick Anderson in Boston contributed to this report.