In 2015, Michael Weiss and Michael Pregent accused the Popular Mobilization Units, an organization of 40 mainly-Shi'ite militias backed by Iran, of committing extensive atrocities against Sunni civilians in the course of their war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, including "burning people alive in their houses, playing soccer with severed human heads, and ethnically cleansing and razing whole villages to the ground." Weiss and Pregent even suggested that "Iran's Shi'ite militias aren't a whole lot better than the Islamic State."