a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in May 2008 that "the recent short-term gains" had "come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq." After Iraqi security forces took the lead in security operations on 30 June 2009, Iraq experienced a "dramatic reduction in war-related violence of all types ..., with civilian and military deaths down by 80 to 90 percent compared with the same period in 2008." 2008–2011 insurgency In 2010, the low point for the al-Qaeda effort in Iraq, car bombings declined to an average of ten a month and multiple-location attacks occurred only two or three times a year. Aftermath Post-U.S. withdrawal insurgency The Iraqi attacks since U.S. withdrawal relates to the last stage of violent terror activities engaged by Iraqi, primarily radical Sunni and Shia insurgent groups against the central government and the sectarian warfare between various factions within Iraq in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal. The events of post-U.S. withdrawal violence succeeded the previous insurgency in Iraq (prior to 18 December 2011), but have showed increasingly violent patterns, raising concerns that the surging violence might slide into another civil war. Conflict parties The Iraqi insurgency is composed of at least a dozen major organizations and perhaps as many as 40 distinct groups. These groups are subdivided into countless smaller cells. The Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimates that less than 10% of insurgents are non-Iraqi foreign fighters. According to the Chief of the British General Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, speaking in September 2007, Because of its clandestine nature, the exact composition of the Iraqi insurgency is difficult to determine, but the main groupings are: Ba'athists, the supporters of Saddam Hussein's former administration including army or intelligence officers, whose ideology is a variant of Pan-Arabism. Iraqi nationalists, Iraqis who believe in a strong version of Iraqi self-determination. These policies may not necessarily espouse a Pan-Arab ideology, but rather advocate the country's territorial integrity including Kuwait and Khuzestan. Historical figures of this movement include the pre-Ba'athist leader of Iraq Abd al-Karim Qasim and his government. Iraqi Salafi Islamists, the indigenous armed followers of the Salafi movement, as well as any remnants of the Kurdish Ansar al-Islam: individuals with a Salafi-only policy opposed to non-Salafis though not aligned to one specific ethnic group. Though opposed to the U.S.-led invasion, these groups