Baghdad - Iraq ordered CNN's news team to leave the country on Friday, accusing the US-based cable television news network of being a propaganda machine.
CNN, on the air, said it was "sad to learn" that its four-person team in Baghdad was being expelled. CNN was the only American TV network with its own news team in Baghdad when the first US air strikes on the Iraqi capital began at dawn on Thursday.
"CNN has been ordered out of Iraq... because they have become a propaganda tool to spread lies and rumors," said an Iraqi information ministry official who declined to be identified.
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CNN, based in Atlanta, said its staff would probably have to travel overland to Jordan.
Overnight, CNN ran extensive live pictures of US military units racing across the southern Iraq desert after they invaded the country and headed toward Baghdad, with little resistance.
Iraqi government officials, at a news conference, said such pictures being shown on Western TV networks were fabrications.
Most US television networks left Baghdad before the war began on Thursday.
Two of CNN's four-person team, correspondent Nic Robertson and producer Ingrid Formanek, were in Baghdad for CNN at the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War.
Another news veteran of the 1991 Gulf War, former CNN correspondent Peter Arnett is reporting from Baghdad for NBC and its sister cable network MSNBC while on assignment there for the MSNBC series National Geographic Explorer.
Likewise, ABC has a freelance correspondent, Richard Engel, who is reporting from Baghdad.
Fox News Channel, CNN's chief competitor, had its correspondent kicked out of Baghdad by Saddam Hussein's government in February, after the United States expelled an Iraqi journalist assigned to the United Nations.
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