In fight for Tikrit, U.S. finds enemies on both sides

BAGHDAD — As the United States opens another front of battle in Iraq, it finds itself on the same side as an array of armed groups that not only consider the United States an old enemy but also accuse it of actively supporting Islamic State militants they are fighting on the battlefield.

After the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State launched its first airstrikes in the city of Tikrit on Wednesday night, Kitaeb Hezbollah, which was responsible for numerous bombings and rocket attacks against U.S. soldiers during the Gulf War, was quick to say it would treat their planes as targets.

Since then, the threats have grown. Several Shiite militias accused coalition planes of bombing a headquarters for pro-government fighters at Tikrit University on Friday, promising retribution. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad released a statement rebutting the charge, saying no coalition airstrikes took place in the vicinity at the time. The Iraqi government also said no such attack to place.

However baseless, the accusations highlight the United States’ precarious position of being considered an unwelcome guest for many groups on the ground as it attempts to assist in the battle against Islamic State militants. They feed threats that leave U.S. personnel and planes open to attack from both sides of the battlefield.

“We will respond with force while they are within our firing range,” Shibil al-Zaidi, a leader of the Kitaeb Imam Ali militia, said in a statement about the alleged strike. “We have the ability to face these American attacks.”

It comes after Kitaeb Hezbollah showed off surface-to-air missiles in a video earlier this month in what analysts said is likely an attempt by Iranian backed-militias to reduce the willingness of the international coalition to participate on the battlefield as the United States and Iran vie for influence.

“If the threats succeed in that goal, it would grant more responsibility and control for Iran and its proxies on the battlefields of Iraq,” Philip Smyth, a researcher at the University of Maryland specializing in Shiite militant groups, wrote in an analysis last week.

But while enmity from the Shiite militias that fought the United States may be expected, it is also a view that permeates more widely after being regularly raised in parliament and in the Iraqi media, even reaching the highest ranks of the official armed forces that the United States is aiding.

“Everybody knows that the Americans are dropping supplies to Daesh,” said Brig. Abed al-Maliki, a senior Iraqi army commander based in the city of Samarra, 80 miles north of Baghdad, using a term for Islamic State derived for its Arabic acronym.

He goes as far as to claim that in some the fiercest fighting around Samarra last year, U.S. Special Operations forces dropped in behind enemy lines to assist Islamic State militants in the battle.

“They came in with parachutes and they were helping to bomb the city,” he said.

U.S. airstrikes against the Islamic State, he contends, are likely just a cover for efforts to support the group.

“It’s just a show,” he said, sitting in the city’s army command headquarters. “If the Americans want to finish something, they will finish it. If they wanted to liberate Iraq, they could.”

Such accusations regularly appear in the Iraqi media, normally accompanied with an image from Islamic State video from Kobane in Syria last year, showing the militants showing off a load of weapons accidently dropped from a U.S. plane – an incident the U.S. admitted.

Visiting U.S. officials are left to fend off questions about whether they support the group. The topic was the first to be broached in questions when Gen. John Allen, special envoy for the coalition to counter the Islamic State, met with the local press in January.

“The story, I think, is that we’re supplying the Islamic State,” he said. “And that, in fact, is not correct.”

The conspiracy theories are stoked by the U.S. involvement in the wider region, where Sunni states such as Saudi Arabia battle for influence against Shiite Iran. While the United States has backed the same side as Saudi in conflicts in Syria and Yemen, in Iraq it finds itself on the other side of the battle.

A wildly popular television trailer for a show launched last year mocking the Islamic State played off that popular conspiracy – showing the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, hatching out of an egg after a marriage between characters representing Israel and America.

“The information that we have is that Daesh was created by the United States and Israel,” Maliki said.

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