As the terrorist group known as the Islamic State began its march through Iraq, the government tried to answer both on the ground and online, blocking large social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

But now, Iraq seems to be taking advantage of the turmoil to censor websites critical of the central government. Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya have been blocked for weeks, and the government is also blocking smaller sites as well. In the meantime, sites affiliated with the Islamic State, also referred to as IS, or ISIL, remain largely accessible, according to a new report by researchers who have been monitoring Internet censorship in Iraq since the crisis began.

Adam Senft and Jakub Dalek, two researches at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, found out that six new websites have been filtered on three large Iraqi ISPs since June 20, when they released their first report on Iraq's Internet censorship. Apart from Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, these are the newly blocked websites:

herakiq.com: a "political" site that "reports on what it calls the Iraqi Shiite government oppression of Sunni citizens and the counter-Shiite mobilization," according to the researchers.

muslm.org: "an Arabic Islam-oriented news and views portal with no obvious militant content."

hanein.info: "a discussion forum with mostly militant topics that are critical of the central government in Iraq."

iraqislami.own0.com: a discussion forum that the researchers say was "apparently run by [IS]" before it was shutdown by its hosting company.

A screenshot of the page displayed by Iraqi ISP ScopeSky when a user tries to access a blocked website. Image: Citizenlab

While some of these four sites might be reasonably labelled as having ties with IS, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya definitely don't fit that bill. To add to the confusion, "websites affiliated with or supportive of [IS] and other militant groups" have been left untouched, the researchers found.

In early July, Ministry of Communications spokesman Samir Al-Bayati justified the Internet blockade.

"The war with [IS] is now the media war and the government wants to control those sites to prevent rumours being broadcasted," Al-Bayati said.

At this point it's unclear what the Iraqi government's strategy in its online filtering efforts actually is, but it's not making anyone happy.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki "wants to punish Al Arabiya as he did when he closed a large number of newspapers and television stations during the past few years only because those media outlets criticized his policies," Al Arabiya’s General Manager Abdulrahman al-Rashed said.

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