IRAQ: Al Arabiya grows into lead role

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While U.S. news outlets might be scaling back the on-air minutes, column inches and front-page headlines devoted to Iraq these days, the same doesn’t go for Al Arabiya, the Arabic-language satellite news channel that was born just as the Iraq war began five years ago.

Despite its many setbacks, including the deaths of four journalists in the line of duty, it will continue to report and even expand its Iraq coverage for the Arab world.

The Dubai-based station has quickly reached the top of the Arab media world. It now rivals or beats its more well-known rival, Al Jazeera, across the Arab world. It’s the hands-down winner for audiences in Iraq, where Al Jazeera has been barred from operating. Just as CNN fame grew out of its coverage of the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraq conflict has become part and parcel of Arabiya’s identity.

Its journalists have always been more adventurous than their Western colleagues, and they’ve paid for it. On the wall of the Arabiya offices were images of Iraqi correspondents killed in the line of duty. The most famous is Atwar Bahjat (pictured at left). She was slaughtered by insurgents in her hometown of Samarra as she reported on the bombing of the shrine there on Feb. 22, 2006.

We paid a visit to the nearby Baghdad offices of Al Arabiya (a bundle of flowers in hand) to congratulate them on their five years in existence and have a chat with their bureau chief, Jawad Hattab. They reside in a drab hotel they’ve taken over outside the Green Zone.

Hattab welcomed us with tea and thick-brewed Turkish coffee. I asked him if management was pushing Arabiya to cut back on Iraq news and associated costs, now that violence was down.

On the contrary, he said. Since the 1990s, Iraq has been a very ‘vague’ country for the Arab world, and only now do people have a chance to get to know it.

‘Iraq is still the center of everything happening in the Middle East,’ said Hattab, himself an Iraqi native. ‘We’re expanding our work and duties in Iraq because we’re now covering areas we weren’t able to reach before.’

But what about the ongoing conflicts in Israel and Lebanon and the U.S. presidential campaign? Aren’t they bumping Iraq coverage off the news?

‘In the other regions, you get news every now and then,’ he said. ‘But in Iraq it is continuous.’

— Borzou Daragahi in Baghdad