The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq,the Washington Post reported Monday.

The report claims that the campaign has raised Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's profile, overstated his importance, and may have helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the 9/11attacks.

Quoting internal military documents and officers familiar with the program, the article said the U.S. campaign aimed to turn Iraqis against Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners.

For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly listed the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign, the account said.

Some senior intelligence officers, the Post report said, believed Zarqawi's role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist.

"The long-term threat (in Iraq) is not Zarqawi or religious extremists, but these former regime types and their friends," Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was quoted as telling an Army meeting last summer.

Zarqawi, who spent seven years in prison in Jordan for attempting to overthrow the government there, spent time in Pakistan and Afghanistan after his release, and then moved his base of operations to Iraq, according to the article.

Zarqawi has been sentenced to death in absentia for planning the 2002 assassination of a U.S. diplomat in Jordan, and U.S. authorities have placed a 25-million-U.S. dollar bounty on his head, the account said.

Source: Xinhua