I'm John Bachelor with Bill Rajah, my colleague and co-host.

Syria, darkness visible for these many years.

Ahmed Shurari of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy watches Syria for us very carefully.

Over these last hours, a report from the U.S. of another airstrike against what are said to be

ISIS targets in Syria.

You will recall in the middle of December there was a strike by the U.S. against so-called

ISIS targets.

That was identified as in response to the murder of two National Guardsmen, I believe, from Iowa,

by a shooter who was said to be ISIS recruited.

Bill Rajo is here to help us clarify the incident in December and see if it's linked in any fashion to the incident that just happened.

Bill, a very good evening to you. Before we go to Ahmed on Syria,

you have very carefully an analysis of the shooter in the guardsman episode of early December.

Who is he? Who was he? And what significance?

Hello, John. Yeah. So the shooter was a member of the Syrian security forces.

He was part of a team that was meeting with American personnel. He supposedly was under investigation for jihadist ties, which is really ironic, John, given that the entire Syrian security forces

establishment is primarily made up of jihadists, some linked to al-Qaeda directly, some that were

members of al-Qaeda, so-called former branch in Syria. But the interesting thing here, so the U.S.

military and the U.S. government is claiming he was ISIS.

The Syrian government, of course, is going to claim he's ISIS because they don't want it to be one of their own.

The only one that's not claiming he was ISIS is the Islamic State itself.

And let's face it, if the Islamic State gave an American soldier a hangnail, it would be all over, Al-Naba, its propaganda arm.

They would be screaming this from the mountaintops, and yet they've been silent about this.

...