Iraqis widely believe the U.S. is aiding ISIS, after apparently coordinated smear campaign

On Tuesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced a new deployment of U.S. special operations troops to Iraq to fight the Islamic State, but the news wasn't exactly welcomed in Baghdad. "There is no need for foreign ground combat troops," Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi said. And Abadi is apparently one of the few Iraqis — politicians, military fighters, or civilians — who doesn't believe a widespread conspiracy theory that the U.S. is aiding ISIS, The Washington Post reports. And that will make any future ramp-up of U.S. involvement in Iraq much more difficult.

"It is not in doubt," Mustafa Saadi, commander of one of the Shiite militias fighting ISIS alongside the Iraqi army, tells The Post. He says a friend saw U.S. helicopters supplying bottled water to ISIS, helping explain how the "weak" and "almost finished" insurgency is still around. "If only America would stop supporting them, we could defeat them in days," he said. Similar allegations are regularly raised in parliament and repeated in "friend of a friend" anecdotes, and videos purporting to show U.S. helicopters dropping weapons for ISIS are common on Facebook.

The U.S. is exasperated by what it suggests is a coordinated disinformation campaign. "The Iranians and the Iranian-backed Shiite militias are really pushing this line of propaganda, that the United States is supporting ISIL," says Col. Steve Warren, the U.S. military's Baghdad spokesman. "It's part of the Iranian propaganda machine." The allegations are "beyond ridiculous," he said, but they're effective. "There’s clearly no one in the West who buys it, but unfortunately, this is something that a segment of the Iraqi population believes."

Regardless of who is spreading the conspiracy theory, Iraqis are apparently buying it. Mustafa Alani, director of the Gulf Research Center in Dubai, says that's because most Arabs have a hard time believing that the mighty U.S. military isn't throwing everything it has at ISIS. "The reason is that the Americans aren't doing the job people expect them to do," he said. "Mosul was lost and the Americans did nothing. Syria was lost and the Americans did nothing. Paris is attacked and the Americans aren’t doing much. So people believe this is a deliberate policy." Read more at The Washington Post.