Suspicions Run Deep in Iraq That CIA and the Islamic State Are United
David D. Kirkpatrick ■ The United States has conducted an escalating campaign of deadly airstrikes against the extremists of the Islamic State for more than a month. But that appears to have done little to tamp down the conspiracy theories still circulating from the streets of Baghdad to the highest levels of Iraqi government that the CIA is secretly behind the same extremists that it is now attacking. "We know about who made Daesh," said Bahaa al-Araji, a deputy prime minister, using an Arabic shorthand for the Islamic State, on Saturday at a demonstration called by the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to warn against the possible deployment of U.S. ground troops. Sadr publicly blamed the CIA for creating the Islamic State in a speech last week, and interviews suggested that most of the few thousand people at the demonstration, including dozens of members of parliament, subscribed to the same theory.