I'm John Batchel with my colleagues, Bill Rajo, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy,

and Asana Kane, former ambassador from Pakistan to the United States, now at the Hudson Institute

as a senior fellow. And we are at this point measuring the chaos and no easy way to summarize

it. So we're not going to try. We're going to go to Syria.

I choose that because for more than a decade, a decade and a half now, it has been darkness

visible in the Middle East. Iran is the driver and Israel is the target, but Syria is the

unsolved wasteland, the darkness visible between the power of Turkey,

the power of Israel, the power of the transnational organizations that are seeking a resolution for Lebanon.

Iran is also part of this mix.

So, Bill, your thoughts about the strike on ISIS, ISIS said to be in the

Damascus neighborhood strike by the U.S. This is totally confusing to me, Bill, because our allies are the

Kurds in the northeast, and yet we're attacking in central Syria. What are your thoughts?

Yes, John. Well, also, our ally, because the Trump administration wants them to be, is the Syrian

regime, which is led by the man who officially used to be al-Qaeda's leader in Syria.

He still may be to this day. He never denounced his oath of allegiance to al-Qaeda's officially used to be al-Qaeda's leader in Syria. Still maybe to this day, he never announced his oath of allegiance to al-Qaeda as

a mere.

The problem with this strike, and CENTCOM has been maintaining this fiction that the Islamic

state carried out this attack last in December 13th, they killed two American soldiers

and a contractor, except it wasn't. It was a member of the

Syrian security forces. And he was under investigation for jihadist ties, yet he was put in

proximity by the Syrian security forces to American troops. And the reality is that Syrian security

forces are made up of thousands, if not tens of thousands of members

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