Word: itely
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...enemy on the run. In 2008 it may face an even more entrenched foe. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the primary target of the American troop surge and counter-insurgency strategy, appears to be on its last legs after a year of being attacked from all sides. But Shi'ite militias, which have deep roots in Iraq's Shi'a communities and the Shi'ite-dominated government, may now pose a more serious long-term threat...
...some ways AQI was a victim of its own success. It is practically the only organization in Iraq that all the other players in the country saw as an unacceptable threat. Both the U.S. military and the Shi'ite-dominated government had fought the Sunni jihadist group for years. By the beginning of 2007, Sunni tribal leaders and nationalist insurgents had also begun battling with their former allies in AQI in order to retake control of Sunni communities...
Meanwhile, the Mahdi Army, Iraq's largest and deadliest Shi'ite militia, made it through 2007 by refusing to trade body blows with the American military. Petraeus, echoing other American officials, told reporters that "the potential long-term challenge to Iraq is the militia-extremist challenge." To keep the political peace in Iraq, Petraeus and the U.S. military have been careful not to attach the names of the Mahdi Army and its leader Moqtada al Sadr to the threat, hence the use of terms like "the militia-extremist challenge." Sadr controls a sizable political organization as well as his militia...
...these groups called itself Sipah-e-Sahaba and used religious justifications for jihad from an austere sect of Islam called Deobandi, similar to the ideology of the Taliban. Sipah-e-Sahaba and similar groups believe that one obligation of "true Muslims" is to kill so-called apostates like Shi'ites. In the early 1990s, these veterans from the Afghan wars, with no more war to fight, launched a bloody sectarian campaign against Pakistani Shi'ites. In 1996, amid these attacks, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi was formed by a disgruntled member of Sipah-e-Sahaba who named his group after the martyred...
...military, the vast majority of CLCs - about 50,000 out of more than 70,000 - have no interest in joining Iraq's police force of army. They joined the program for the prospect of a steady paycheck in Iraq's moribund economy, and remain mistrustful of the Shi'ite-dominated government and its security forces...