The rumours then moved online - nobody knows exactly which websites were first to publish them – and went as far as Al Alam, an Iranian state-owned news site. It was also repeated on various Iraqi channels.
Similar rumours about other campaigns in places like Tikrit, Samarra and Salahaddin, have gone further. On February 23, the Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi met with a group of Iraqi journalists and said that after a fact-finding mission, the government had confirmed that the rumours were exactly that: rumours. “And those who are spreading them are just trying to achieve certain aims,” al-Abadi said.
Members of the Iraqi army and police, as well as several other senior politicians, including Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Defence Minister Khaled al-Obeidi, also denied that there was any truth to the rumours. In fact, the rumours became so prevalent that even the US government had to deny them in official statements.
None of that seems to have helped though – ask around and the majority of Iraqis still believe the rumours. The pro-Shiite and pro-Iran media appears to have been successful in convincing ordinary Iraqis that US planes are killing Iraqi soldiers, supporting the IS group and preventing the Shiite Muslim militias from liberating Iraqi cities. And you can see this just by checking comments on various social media platforms. Meanwhile anyone who questions the veracity of these stories is called a traitor and a supporter of the IS group.
There have also been other targets for the misinformation that has plagued the current security crisis. Another one concerns former Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein's eldest daughter, Raghdad. Despite the fact that Raghdad has been living in exile in Jordan for years now, rumour had it that she was in Tikrit this March supporting the IS group – she is well known to be supportive of the group, which initially allied itself with leaders of Hussein's outlawed Baath political party. The same stories said that Raghdad had offered to bribe members of the Shiite Muslim militias with the wads of cash she is known to carry around, so that she be allowed to leave Tikrit unharmed.
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