By Sarah El Deeb, Associated Press, 4/10/03

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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Arab chat rooms on the Internet brimmed Thursday with elation and wariness over U.S. successes in Iraq, while militant Islamic Web sites warned Muslims to prepare for a new "confrontation."

A day after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces, chatters at the Arabia.com Web portal insulted one another in capital letters followed by exclamation points.

Opinions swung wildly from cheering the U.S. forces as liberators to jeering the war and the Iraqis who danced in the streets of Baghdad. One poster refuted suggestions that Americans came to conquer the oil supply, while another warned that other Arab and Muslim countries are next on the U.S. hit list.

On militant Web sites, the tone was somber.

On one Yahoo Groups site that features slogans like "Come to jihad" and flashing pictures of Osama bin Laden, an article purportedly by a prominent Egyptian Islamist writer called the occupation "a great catastrophe that the (Muslim) nation should be prepared to face."

The article attributed to Talaat Rumeih stopped short of calling for jihad. Repeated calls to Rumeih in Cairo to confirm the posting went unanswered.

The site on Yahoo Groups is run by a group that calls itself Abu Banan Global Islamic Media Group. No information is available on the group.

Many other militant Islamic Web sites either were not updated Thursday or not functioning.

Many have been hacked, shut down by their Web hosting service or abandoned by their operators for fear of being traced. Sometimes they resurface later with a new Internet address.

One of the rare Islamic Web sites still up, The Right Word, accused Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority of "treason" for allegedly supplying false intelligence that undermined President Saddam Husseins's Sunni Muslim-dominated regime and attacking the "rear guard of Sunni fighters."

Iraq's Shiite Muslims were brutally oppressed by Saddam's regime and many see the U.S. forces as liberators.

Most Arab newspapers and TV channels are government-controlled, making chat rooms and other Internet forums a popular way to exchange opinions freely.

But with a mostly poor population and few phone lines, the Arab world lags behind Europe, Asia and the United States in Internet use. Only 1.7 percent of Arabs, or 7.4 million people, had Internet access late last year, according to the Madar Research Group of the United Arab Emirates.