Marisa Cochrane is a policy analyst who contributed reporting on Iraq to The Weekly Standard in 2008. She wrote installments in the magazine's ongoing Iraq Report series, tracking developments in the conflict. She was affiliated with the Institute for the Study of War, where she focused on Iraq security issues.
The greatest threat to stability in Iraq is violence by Iranian-backed militias, known as Special Groups. As Coalition and Iraqi Forces refocused their efforts on combating such groups, they launched a number of offensives in the spring of 2008 that left these Iranian-backed networks fractured and…
Over the last year, operations by Coalition and Iraqi forces have made signifi cant gains against al-Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni insurgents. As the threat from these groups has decreased, Coalition Forces and the Iraqi government have focused their attention on the problem of Shi'a militias in…