If successful, the appointment of army officers to lead the militias could be the first tangible step toward government control of the brigades.
Until his reported defection, Mr. Indahaadde led the militia of a faction of a key Islamic insurgent group, the Islamic Party.
Belhaj – who was released from prison along with Saadi in 2010 – led the militia that drove Gaddafi's forces out of Tripoli last year, and is now settled in the city with Bouchar.
"The problems started in April when the Kosovo Liberation Army kidnapped three young men from the town," said Vojislav Doncic, 38, a local police officer who leads the militia, and whose extended clan has many members here.
Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, appointed Mohammad Reza Naqdi to lead the Basij militia force.
At the U.N. building in Bogotá, Lozada told me that the FARC secretariat had appointed him to lead the former militia's new "productive sector".
Ryan Bundy, a protester who helped lead the Oregon militia standoff, attempted to escape jail with a rope made of bedsheets, federal prosecutors alleged in court on Monday.
An early Fascist, he led the Blackshirt militia in the March on Rome (October 1922).
It also claimed he was an ally of Jabulani Sibanda, who leads the youth militia alleged to be behind much of recent violence.
In the mid-nineteen-nineties, Jibril Rajoub, Marwan Barghouti, who led the Fatah militia, and Muhammad Dahlan, the head of security for the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip, were considered potential successors to "the Old Man" — Arafat.
