BAGHDAD — In one video, a U.S. soldier blasts insurgent gunmen with a heavy sniper rifle as the room fills with smoke. In another, members of an Iraqi family throw their arms around soldiers, weeping and rejoicing, after learning that their kidnapped relative has been freed.
The U.S. military has opened a new front in the Iraq war: cyberspace.
Moving into a realm long dominated by Islamic militants, the military has launched its own YouTube channel offering what it calls a boots-on-the-ground perspective of the conflict. The move recognizes that the Internet is becoming a key battleground for public opinion at a time when domestic support for the war is dwindling.
Islamic militants use the Internet to promote themselves and recruit followers with videos of tearful hostages, exploding military vehicles and U.S. soldiers cut down by sniper fire. No longer confined to a few obscure websites, the footage is turning up on popular video-sharing sites such as YouTube.
Now the U.S. military is offering up its side of the war. Available for download are blistering firefights across rooftops, nighttime raids filmed through the green glow of night-vision devices and a "precision strike" that wiped out an insurgent antiaircraft gun in a huge ball of fire.
"This effort was not designed to combat what ends up on extremist websites," said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq. "But we understand that it is a battle space in which we have not been active, and this is a media we can use to get our story told."
Military commanders have long complained about the "negative" slant of Iraq reporting, with its focus on the violence that has claimed tens of thousands of lives since U.S.-led forces invaded in March 2003.
"There are moments when there is no violence going on in Iraq," Garver said. "Even Baghdad is a neighborhood-by-neighborhood story.... Unfortunately, news being news, you tend to get the car bomb of the day."
'The soccer ball story'
The YouTube channel is a way to get other stories told by linking directly to a generation that gets its news from multiple sources, Garver said.
Even on a quiet day, footage of soldiers handing out soccer balls to Iraqi children is unlikely to feature on most newscasts. But, Garver said, "the soccer ball story is part of what is happening in Iraq ... and that needs to be recorded somewhere."
