MAY the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits. It is an ancient Arabic insult, and in these troubled times it has been a joy to listen to the Iraqi Minister of Information, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, spitting modern insults at the Allies.

We see him daily holding forth with a lurid turn of phrase. He bobs and weaves behind a bank of throat-level microphones, giving the Iraqi view of the conflict - a view that bears little relation to that seen on Western TV and, quite probably, even less relation to reality.

The leaders of the coalition, he insists, are "an international gang of criminal bastards", "a gang of blood-sucking bastards", "ignorant imperialists", "losers and fools".

His piece de linguistic resistance, though, concerns the length of the Allies' supply lines, stretching from Kuwait to Baghdad.

"The imperialist invading US and British forces are like a snake that slithers all over the place but that doesn't control anything," he said. "Now its length is more than 500km. We would like to stretch it even further, and then start to chop this snake in pieces."

Yesterday, as he bobbed around in front of a peculiar back-drop that looked like a bottle of milk spilt on a tiled kitchen floor, he was particularly pleased with his gag about "Ayatollah Donald Rumsfeld".

But he has anger in his repertoire, too. On Thursday, he exploded in fury when asked if US troops were closing in on the capital: "Rubbish! Lies! Go and look for yourself. They are nowhere near Baghdad."

Twenty-four hours later, though, he was rowing back - flamboyantly. "The enemy is trying to enter Baghdad," he conceded. "Fight them brothers, hit them day and night and let the land of Muslims be a scorching fire for their feet."

Sometimes, he sounds mad, accusing the Allies of shaking the holy shrines of Najaf until their statues rattle by low-flying, or of firing booby-trapped pencils at Iraqi villages.

Still, though, he knows his stuff. Yesterday, he chillingly promised "non-traditional, unconventional" attacks on the Allies. "We will conduct a kind of martyrdom operations," he said.

Pressed further, he directed journalists to their history books to discover about Indo-China. Those history books tell of how in 1954, 16,000 French troops were surrounded by 50,000 members of Ho Chi Minh's army at Dien Bien Phu in French Indo-China (now Vietnam). After a 57 day siege, 8,000 Vietnamese were killed along with 2,200 French troops - but the French were defeated, and humiliated.

And before we dismiss Mr Minister as the master of the empty threat and idle insult, we should remember that this is war. All week, Allied commanders were denying they'd been using cluster bombs - huge bombs that cause a widespread shower of bomblets which can injure civilians.

Then on Thursday, Mr Minister screamed: "This morning, these criminals dropped cluster bombs on Baghdad and 14 people - men, women and children - were martyred..."

Hours later, drab Geoff Hoon popped up on British TV saying that cluster bombs were legal and legitimate - and being used.