Iraq photos split world's media

Middle Eastern commentators accuse the US of double standards

Washington's decision to release photographs of the bodies it says are Saddam Hussein's sons provokes mixed reaction in the world's media.

Several commentators in the Middle East accuse the US of hypocrisy, recalling the outrage that greeted the appearance of US prisoners of war on Iraqi TV.

An Iraqi paper heralds the release of the photos as the end of the Saddam era, while two European dailies warn that the pictures could may symbols of Iraqi resistance.

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The world has not forgotten the campaign launched by the US when Iraqi TV showed pictures of US and British prisoners and bodies of their soldiers killed in Iraq; the world has not forgotten the angry statements made by US and British officials referring exhaustively to the provisions of the Geneva Conventions to stress what they saw as an inhumane action... But all these humanitarian principles seem to have been overlooked or dropped with the US administration's release of the pictures.

Al-Arabiya TV - Dubai

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Iraqis happy at the news of the killing of Qusay and Uday, and those who were unhappy have the same question: Why has the US carried out the death sentence against the sons of Saddam, throwing down the drain all the international conventions they long championed?

Al-Arabiya TV - Dubai

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Yesterday the US administration affirmed once again its hypocrisy and dualism when it fell into a big political and ethical contradiction by broadcasting the corpses of Qusay and Uday Saddam Hussein on international TV screens.

Al-Quds Al-Arabi - London

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Everyone remembers how the US and Britain protested against the broadcasting of pictures of US POWs and those killed when the two began their war against Iraq... But now, Washington has given itself the right to publish pictures, and no-one is commenting on the violation of international conventions... This is a new world order based on the confiscation of human rights.

Al-Watan - Saudi Arabia

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It would be grotesque if there were to be a learned debate about human dignity with reference to, of all people, Saddam's two sons.

Berliner Zeitung - Germany

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Finally, Iraqis are convinced that they are about to begin a new era in which neither Uday nor Qusay will play a role... They have seen the corpses of these two manipulative adolescents lying on the ground with the marks of humiliation, terror and fear imprinted on their dead faces. It was the same fear that for a long time they struck into the hearts of the Iraqi people.

Al-Ayyam - Iraq

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The photos were released in an attempt to confirm the identities of Qusay and Uday... There is an exaggerated media fuss over this issue. It sounds like an attempt to establish it as a crossroads between two eras, two regimes, between the past and the future. It is not like that... The reality is that there has been no major change: if occupation continues, resistance will continue.

Al-Jazeera correspondent in Iraq

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The message that these photos are intended to convey is that the American forces will not withdraw before the guerrillas defying them for three months now... But did it not occur to the military photographers that... the picture of the bearded Qusay, vaguely reminiscent of the dead Che Guevara, might risk becoming a similar kind of icon for Arab youth?

Le Temps - Switzerland

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The occupation authorities are pondering the idea of plastering the pictures around Baghdad. Be sure, they will soon be used as martyrs' photographs on posters with a somewhat different message. The work of the Americans. The work of the occupiers.

Irish Independent - Ireland

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BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.