This solution echoes the compromise the Americans made during the siege of Falluja last month, when they turned over control of the city to a militia partly composed of the very Sunni Arab insurgents they were fighting.

"If this were Paris and you had dozens of bodies turning up on the street with well-financed militias composed of French nationals and French Arabs, you would call it a civil war."

Puerto Rican Volunteers Corps - a militia composed of private citizens, principally instituted for the defense of Puerto Rico's periphery from pirate incursions and foreign invasion.

Colonial officials created militias composed of freeborn and recently-manumitted blacks.

Alaska also has a naval militia composed of reserve US Marine Corps and Navy personnel, who serve as needed, but not in conflict with their federal military reserve duties.

During Reconstruction after the Civil War, Republican state governments had militias composed almost entirely of freed slaves and populist whites.

Muslim and Croatian militias composed of young men who often had been in the same class at school rained fire on one another, at first across the river, then street by street and finally house by house.

The governors of Paraguay had no royal troops at their disposal and were instead dependent on a militia composed of colonists.

Dale, the teen-age proprietor of the town's general store, raises a small independent militia composed of various refugees.

But its harboring of leaders in the Free Syrian Army, a militia composed of defectors from the Syrian armed forces, may be its most striking challenge so far to Damascus.