<font size="5"><center>Website attacked over propaganda
videos of soldiers' deaths in Iraq</font size></center>
By Toby Harnden in Washington
September 17, 2006
Graphic footage of United States soldiers being shot and blown up by terrorists in Iraq is being shown on a popular American website.
In one clip, a soldier steps out of a Humvee and is engulfed in flames as a radio-controlled bomb explodes. Another shows a sniper in Iraq killing an American Marine as he chats to children.
The videos, made as propaganda by Islamist extremists, are being shown on YouTube.com, a phenomenally successful video-sharing site, said to be among the 50 most popular in the world.
Outraged relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq are now calling for the videos to be removed, or the website shut down.
YouTube boasts that about 70 million of its clips are viewed each day – mainly by young people. In July, it registered 16 million American visitors and 3.5 million from Britain.
Executives at the California-based company, which was launched just 18 months ago and whose advertisers include the New York Times and the US Department of Health and Human Services, declined to comment on why the videos were being permitted on the site.
Its terms state that it "doesn't allow videos with nudity, graphic violence or hate".
In another video, filmed just three weeks ago, a 16-ton Stryker armoured vehicle is flipped over by a bomb buried in a road west of Baghdad. Pte Dan Dolan, 19, the driver, from the town of Roy, Utah, was mortally wounded in the attack, while the other soldier inside was killed instantly.
First issued by a Sunni terrorist group calling itself Jaish al-Mujahedeen, or the Army of Holy Warriors, the video is accompanied by Islamic music and the recitation of Koranic verses.
Tim Dolan, Pte Dolan's father, said it was "deplorable" that YouTube was allowing such videos to be posted by its members.
"It's a propaganda tool, a recruiting tool and putting it on the internet like this is rubbing it in our faces," he said.
"It just infuriates me. Watching it was horrible. My son was hanging in there but he died eight hours after the explosion. He was only a kid.
"These videos stir things up here in America as well as in Iraq and Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East. The next thing is, there'll be another 9/11."
By yesterday, the video had been viewed 346 times since it first appeared on the site a week ago. It was posted by a person using the username ZEROMX87.
In response to an email from The Sunday Telegraph, he wrote that he was Jorge Hernandez, an 18-year-old from Mexico, and had been inspired by Michael Moore's anti-war film Fahrenheit 9/11.
"I post them so people in the world will be able to see that the US is not having a good time in Iraq," he wrote. "My message for the families of the soldiers would be: that's the kind of thing that happens when the heroic people of a country defend their own families from an invader country that only tries to make money from war."
Some relatives of soldiers declined to comment because they felt that giving the insurgents further publicity would only promote their cause.
But Mr Dolan said he hoped that speaking out would lead to the videos being removed. He added: "My wife says that it's just another form of terrorism."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/17/wirq117.xml
