TEHRAN (Dispatches) -- Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday deemed Iran's presence in Iraq to be "helpful" to attempts to beat back the threat of Daesh, given their common enemy.
The measured praise for a country with which the U.S. has a fraught relationship came at the Aspen Ideas Festival, where the secretary of state was asked to assess whether Iran was "more helpful or more harmful" there.
"Look, we have challenges with Iran as everybody knows and we are working on those challenges," Kerry said. "But I can tell you that Iran in Iraq has been in certain ways helpful, and they clearly are focused on ISIL-Daesh, and so we have a common interest, actually."
The top U.S. diplomat explained that he and his Iranian counterparts could now more easily solve global crises and directly communicate.
Brent McGurk, the U.S. special envoy tasked with defeating Daesh, said earlier Tuesday that Iran-backed Shia militias are mostly helpful in Iraq.
"We think most of these popular mobilization forces do operate under the control of the Iraqi state," McGurk said.
Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a high-ranking commander of the Popular Mobilization Units,  told Press TV in an exclusive interview in June that Iranian military advisors were helping Iraqi army soldiers and allied forces following an "an official request” from Baghdad.
"The presence of experts and advisers from Iran gave us a major boost. They provided us with (military) guidelines, and even prevented the fall of the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, Erbil," he said.
Earlier this month, Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said Baghdad needed help from its friends, including Iran, to be able to take out the terrorists wreaking havoc in the Muslim country.
"There is coordination between Russia, Syria, Iran and Iraq. Iraq needs the experience and information provided by these countries," Jaafari told Lebanon's Al-Mayadeen television in an interview.
Daesh terrorists, who were among militants initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, now control parts of Iraq and Syria, where they are engaged in crimes against humanity.
In recent months, the militants have been losing ground in both Syria and Iraq.