Sunday, September 10, 2006

At the invitation of Iraqi resistance groups, Al-Jazeera's senior investigative reporter, Yusri Fudah, infiltrated into Iraq. His report was aired this weekend. Very revealing. The extent to which the groups are operating rather freely and with the use of advanced weapons and planning was surprising to me. You watch the report and realize the extent to which the US coverage of the "insurgency" is so flawed and so propagandistically influenced because the US media seems to imply that it is all about Zarqawi and his successors. The report focuses instead on the major groups that actually constitute the resistance and which restricts its attacks on occupation soldiers and Iraqi troops. The groups are a melange of Arab nationalist and Islamist organizations fused into one sometimes. Fuda inserts himself in his stories but meaningfully and interestingly. It is implied in the report that infiltration into Iraq takes place not from Syria but from...Turkey.
PS An American correspondent who met him in Iraq tells me that he entered from Syria.