Middle East dispatch

.iq test

As Iraq tries to rebuild itself, a struggle over the country's internet identity is on the cards, reports Brian Whitaker
A new battle for control of Iraq is looming - this time on the world wide web. It centres on the two-letter country code - ".fr" for France, ".ru" for Russia, etc - used for website and email addresses. More than 240 countries have these codes, and there is even one for Palestine (.ps), but the code assigned to Iraq (.iq) is in a weird sort of limbo.

Some of these codes are controlled by governments but in theory anyone approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) can become a country code manager and make money from websites that use the two magic letters.

That is what happened in 1997 when Bayan Elashi, a Muslim of Palestinian origin, looked at the list of country codes and found that Iraq was still available. He applied for it, and got it.

It is scarcely surprising that ICANN approved Mr Elashi's application, since he was well qualified. After arriving in the United States in 1977, he had taken a masters degree in computer science and played a key role in developing the first Arabic personal computer, known as Alraed. He later founded InfoCom Corporation, based in President Bush's home state of Texas, which became a world leader in Arabic-language databases as well as hosting about 500 websites, some of them belonging to companies in the Middle East and others to Muslim organisations in the United States.

Acquiring ".iq" was not one of Mr Elashi's brightest business ideas, however, mainly because of the sanctions enforced against Iraq at the time. According to Mr Elashi, the US state department sent him a list of "ridiculous" restrictions which for all practical purposes made ".iq" useless.

Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the lifting of sanctions, all that might have changed - except that 49-year-old Mr Elashi is now in jail and unable to administer any ".iq" websites.

On September 5, 2001 an 80-strong taskforce of FBI agents, secret service agents, diplomatic security agents, tax inspectors, immigration officials, customs officials, department of commerce officials and computer experts raided the headquarters of Mr Elashi's InfoCom Corporation.

They summarily turned off all the 500 websites that the company hosted and spent several days in the building, reportedly copying every hard disc they could find. (Just six days before al-Qaida's attacks on New York and Washington, one might argue that the efforts of the FBI and secret service could have been more profitably directed elsewhere, but that's another story.)

Among the websites that went blank as a result of the raid were those of al-Jazeera (the satellite TV station), al-Sharq (a daily newspaper in Qatar), Birzeit (the Palestinian university on the West Bank), the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Students Association, the Islamic Association for Palestine, and the Holy Land Foundation.

Although the FBI insisted the raid on InfoCom was "a criminal investigation, not a political investigation", some linked it to an article in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks earlier calling on the US to "support Israel in rolling back the forces of terror" by shutting down the websites belonging to the Islamic Association for Palestine and the Holy Land Foundation.

The article was written by Daniel Pipes, the bête noire of America's Muslim organisations. He is famous - or notorious - for his description of Muslims as "brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene" and for wrongly blaming the 1995 Oklahoma bombing on Islamist extremists.

Whatever the effect of the Wall Street Journal article, there is little doubt that the authorities' interest in InfoCom was aroused by its connections with the Holy Land Foundation, which went well beyond hosting the HLF website. Bayan Elashi's brother, Ghassan, was not only vice-president (marketing) of InfoCom but also chairman of HLF.

HLF, a tax-exempt charity established in 1989, had been under attack for several years from supporters of Israel who accused it of channelling funds to the Palestinian militant organisation Hamas.

HLF denied this, saying its role was to help Palestinian orphans and refugees, support medical projects in the occupied territories and send humanitarian aid to such places as Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya.

In December 2002, more than a year after the raid, Bayan and Ghassan Elashi, together with two other brothers, Basman and Hazim, were arrested on charges of dealing illegally with Mousa abu Marzook, a Hamas member who had been declared a "specially designated terrorist" by the US authorities in 1995, and illegally exporting computer equipment to Libya and Syria. A fifth brother, Ihsan, is also a defendant. Full details of the charges can be found in the 32-page indictment document.

The Elashi brothers' first trial, in relation to computer exports, began last month and a verdict is expected soon. A second trial, regarding their alleged dealings with Hamas, is expected in the autumn.

Whatever the legal rights and wrongs, the Elashi affair has strong political undercurrents and the Bush administration seems eager to make as much capital out of it as possible. Attorney general John Ashcroft took the unusual step of personally announcing the brothers' arrest.

The decision to prosecute for export violations is also unusual and looks like part of a witch hunt. Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, told the Associated Press last month that export violations are usually handled as a civil case. He suggested that the justice department turned it into a criminal matter in the hope of securing at least one conviction in case a jury later acquitted the Elashis on the Hamas-related charges.

"This is a signature prosecution for the Ashcroft justice department," Mr Turley said. "The case seems to be a continuation of a no-holds-barred prosecution against the Holy Land Foundation and anyone connected to the foundation."

In the meantime, ICANN is considering what to do about Iraq's ".iq" country code. It could be taken away from Bayan Elashi on the grounds that he has failed to manage it properly, and assigned to someone else, but that would be controversial in view of the political background to his arrest and trial.

If Mr Elashi does lose ".iq", there are several interested parties waiting to take it on. Last year a group called the Committee for Information Technology Reconstruction in Iraq claimed they could raise $10m (£5.5m) by auctioning off ".iq" domains worldwide and using the money to develop Iraqi internet facilities. One example they gave was www.high.iq which they thought might interest Mensa, the organisation for brainy people. Others, though, think the novelty value of ".iq" is limited and unlikely to raise much money from customers outside Iraq.

According to ICANN's rules, any transfer of the country code must have broad support from the local internet community. What this means in the case of Iraq is anybody's guess: who exactly are the Iraqi "internet community" and how can they be consulted? It is quite possible they will be ignored altogether.

Last month, the new Iraqi government made its own application to control ".iq". Past experience suggests ICANN will favour that idea though, again, it would be controversial. Taking the country code from a man who has been mugged by the Bush administration in Texas and handing it to a Bush-installed regime in Baghdad might be viewed as rather fishy.

But something similar has already happened in Afghanistan where the ".af" code was taken from a private citizen in Kabul last year and given to the US-backed puppet government.

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