A number of Iraqis believe that the U.S. has extended an invisible helping hand to the ISIS to destabilise their already wrecked motherland even further. According to the Iraqis, by funding and supporting the ISIS the Americans are ensuring that the Iraqis become more reliant on the west.

The beliefs stem from videos that purportedly showed U.S. helicopters airdropping arms and supplies to the militant group. These videos have been widely spread amongst ordinary Iraqis, as are the stories which claim witnesses of similar instances.

“I think ISIS is something that the United States made up,” Aia al-Marsoumy, a 25-year-old dentist in Baghdad, told the WorldPost. “They want their army to be in Iraq. They want Iraq to be helpless without the support of the United States.”

A large number of American military advisers are training security forces in Iraq to battle the ISIS after the country fell apart following an assault by the militant group on Mosul, in northern Iraq, in June. The U.S. is also leading an International coalition of airstrikes against the ISIS establishments.

Mustafa Saadi, who is a commander in a Shiite militias that played a constructive role in driving the militants out of an oil refinery in northern Iraq last month, said that the ISIS are finished if not for the Americans.

But to U.S. military officials, the accusations are too far-fetched. "It's beyond ridiculous," the Washington Post quoted Colonel Steve Warren, the military's Baghdad-based spokesman, as saying. "There's clearly no one in the West who buys it, but unfortunately, this is something that a segment of the Iraqi population believes."

The deep-rooted and widespread mistrust on the United States amongst the Iraqis goes beyond the black patch that remained in the relationship between the two nations since the former invaded the latter in 2003 and its withdrawal of troops eight years later.

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