Under pressure, a lot of Iraqi media outlets abandoned any pretence at neutrality. Often they would report major victories by pro-government forces that saw hundreds of IS fighters killed. Local Shiite journalists embedded with the Iraqi military or travelling with Shiite militias were required to focus on the positive. Afterwards Iraqi audiences would discover that these reports were just lies.
Nonetheless all the half-truths and lies have created an ongoing state of confusion about who and what to believe.
Media controlled by Shiite Muslim interests are obviously not the only outlets to spread their side of the story. Some Iraqi Kurdish and Sunni Muslim-dominated media have also put undue emphasis on their own successes or pushed talking points that might further their own agendas.
And there are other more specific rumours. One that seems to be getting the most play and causing problems inside Iraq is about how the US-led international coalition has actually bombed Shiite Muslim militias from above and how they had been helping the IS group.
These rumours started when leaders of militias – in particular, the more extremist militias like Iraq's Hezbollah and the League of the Righteous, or Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq - said they saw US aircraft dropping weapons to the IS fighters by parachute. There were also some pictures posted on social media by IS fighters where they displayed several wooden boxes with US army logos on.
As UK newspaper, the Guardian, reported: “The Pentagon admitted on Wednesday that one of the airdrops of weapons intended for Kurds in the besieged Syrian town of Kobani almost certainly ended up in the hands of the Islamic State fighters. The Pentagon blamed the wind for possibly blowing the supplies off course and argued that one cache was not enough to make a significant difference”.
However without any further evidence, some Shiite Muslim politicians kept repeating the claims that the US was actively supporting the extremists.
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