Many questions have been raised in Iraq about the fate of the Shiite militants fighting in Syria alongside the regime of President Bashar al-Assad once the Syrian crisis ends.

While most attention has been given to Sunni terrorist groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which is battling Iraqi government forces in Anbar province, there are also worries about those Iraqi Shiite fighters who have joined the fight on behalf of Assad.

US Secretary of State William Burns testified to the US Senate Foreign Relations on March 6, "Assad has recruited thousands of foreign fighters, mostly Shia, to defend the regime, with active Iranian support and facilitation. The hard reality is that the grinding Syrian civil war is now an incubator of extremism — on both sides of the sectarian divide."

These concerns are legitimate, especially since the number of fighters from these militias — which as Al-Monitor previously reported are substantial — consist of 14 factions. These probing questions are all the more meaningful in light of the exacerbating security crises in Iraq, without any solution in sight on the part of the Iraqi government.