Following in the footsteps of Al-Jazeera and Al-Manar, the Arabic-language TV network Al-Zawraa is grabbing headlines in the West.

The station was founded by a Sunni former member of the Iraqi parliament, Mishaan al-Jabouri, who was indicted in February 2006 for allegedly embezzling millions of dollars designated to protect oil pipelines in Kirkuk but funneled instead to Sunni insurgents.

The channel, whose name means First Channel in Arabic, started out broadcasting music videos and other popular culture shows, but over the past two months it has become an anti-American propaganda outfit. Its programs are vehemently anti-Shiite.

Al-Zawraa — which has been misnamed as “Al Qaeda TV” by press outlets such as Fox News and the Weekly Standard — airs 24 hours a day on Nilesat, reportedly from a moving vehicle in Anbar province in western Iraq. Although Nilesat is under the control of the Egyptian government, the Egyptian information minister, Anas al-Faiki, has been quoted in the Arab press as saying, “We have no concern what the channel is doing.”

The best way to describe Al-Zawraa is as a channel devoted to airing the “jihadi porn” that can be found on every Islamist Web site. This includes music videos of terrorist attacks against American forces, with Islamic chanting heard in the background.

Many segments feature masked men shouting “Allahu Akbar” as they detonate bombs. One clip from last month included a long speech cursing President Bush, while another showed what was identified as the shelling of American troops at the Baghdad airport.

The infamous jihadi porn video “Juba: Baghdad Sniper,” which was produced by the organization Al-Jaysh Al-Islami Al-Iraqi and presented to viewers of Islamist Web sites as a holiday gift to believers in Allah’s unity (“ahl al-tawhid”), has been shown multiple times on Al-Zawraa.

The video opens with a masked sniper shooting someone and then entering a room and adding another name — no. 37 — to a hit list in his notebook. An announcer reads aloud what the sniper is writing, with simultaneous English translation. The speaker calls upon the Islamic nation to expel from Muslim lands the Crusaders and Jews, whom he accuses of destroying mosques, attacking the Koran, and violating the honor of Muslim women. He repeats a Koranic warning: “If you do not go out” to jihad, Allah “will punish you heavily and will replace you with other people.”

Throughout the video, the speaker emphasizes the importance of videotaping killings, and he shows footage of American soldiers being shot by snipers. At the end of the video, a chart appears, showing that 668 American soldiers have been killed by sniper fire over the last year, from Ramadan to Ramadan. In another program, a Zawraa host criticizes the Iraq Study Group report, calling it “naked” interference and saying it will take Iraq back to “point zero.”

A State Department official told Voice of America on January 18 that the American Embassy in Cairo has “raised concerns about Al-Zawraa” with Egyptian officials and asked that the station be removed from Nilesat.

But the chief of Nilesat, Amin Bassiouni, has said that as far as he is concerned, it is simply a business decision to air Al-Zawraa, and that Nilesat must honor its contract with the station’s owners. He said that neither the Iraqi nor that Egyptian government has requested that the channel be shut down.

According to Mr. Jabouri, Al-Zawraa is gaining viewers among Sunni Muslims.

Mr. Stalinsky is the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute.