Original sentence: Michael Weiss at NOW Lebanon has described them as "a professionalized reinvention of the pro-regime Popular Committees"
Edited sentence: Michael Weiss at NOW Lebanon has described them as a "newly-minted guerrilla army" which has become "a professionalized reinvention of the pro-regime Popular Committees, which were, prior to 2013, locally armed Alawite militias that coordinated closely with the Syrian security services, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah.Now the Committees are being trained up, along with Jaysh al-Sha'bi, the Syrian "Basiji," as the primary purveyors of state violence"