Apparently Obama thinks these guys are better than ISIS because he has the U.S. military providing air support for them in Tikrit.
Via BuzzFeed:
The imam stepped through the broken village holding an assault rifle and wearing combat fatigues. All that stood out from the militiamen around him was the black turban that marked him as a holy man of Shiite Islam. He was at ease with the fighters as they stood amid the wreckage of a battle that drove ISIS from this patch of territory on the edge of Anbar in western Iraq. “This is my duty,” he said.
Murad al-Sharifi had completed years of religious study with plans to become a community imam when Iraq’s top Shiite cleric issued a call to arms in June. The fatwa from 84-year-old Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani helped to raise a volunteer force some 100,000 strong — and these militia have played a critical role in the fight against ISIS, which pushes an extremist version of Sunni Islam. But the growing strength of the militia has also brought fears that they will respond to ISIS’s atrocities with abuses of their own as Iraq enters a new stage in its history of sectarian strife.
At the center of the struggle are imams like Sharifi that many of the militia groups have dispatched to the front. They say their role is to stoke the religious passions that inspired the volunteers to join the fight — while also working to keep them in line. Sharifi said that in addition to fighting, leading prayers and counseling soldiers, he tries to keep their fervor from boiling over into sectarian attacks. He promotes the message that the minority Sunni Arab population — in a country increasingly dominated by its Shiite majority — are victims of ISIS too. Yet his very presence on the front was a testament to the war’s religious charge.
ISIS targets the imams with snipers, Sharifi said, and he knew of several who had died. But he was undeterred by dangers that were a far cry from the mosque-bound job he once had in mind. “As an imam,” he said, “you have to be in front.”
The militia officially work under the umbrella of the Iraqi government — and they have become its main fighting force, vastly outnumbering the military’s soldiers in key offensives across the country. In the largest battle against ISIS to date, in the city of Tikrit, the militia accounted for more than three-quarters of the troops, according to the U.S. military’s top general. They are backed by Iranian weapons, training and military advisors. “All we have to count on is God and Iran,” one fighter joked.
The outsized role of the militia — and the presence of the Iranians — initially led the U.S. to sit out the Tikrit offensive. But the U.S. military commenced airstrikes there last week, and the Iraqi government declared victory in the city on Tuesday.