I'm John Batchel with my colleague Bill Rajio, senior fellow for the Foundation for Defense of Democracy.

We're speaking about the Iran War, but Iran has surrogates that are war fighters.

So a quick tour, Bill, Khatib Hezbollah, generally understood to be a militia answering to Iran that is based entirely in Iraq.

Does it look to be teetering on the edge of surrender or does it look strong to you?

Now, none of the Iranian-backed militias in that are inside of Iraq are on their back foot.

Sure, the U.S. and Israel have launched on attacks against these groups, but Khadab Hezbo, or Hezboer brigades are groups like Asim al-Hawks, which is known the League of the Righteous.

And there's others, Sayyed al-Shahada.

These groups are all active.

And not only that, but they've been reported, not reported, it's known that they've sent forces inside of Iran to help assist providing security

in key areas inside of Iran. So if they have the capacity to send thousands of fighters inside of

Iran, then these groups are not weakened. They're not looking at maintaining their internal.

And the Houthis, do they look to be on there, as you say, back foot or is that an unknown?

It's an unknown. The Houthis are the real enigma in this. They certainly had the ability,

and I still believe they have the ability to threaten shipping through the Babel Mandeb

straight. They haven't. It's unclear if that's because they don't have the capacity. I find that

difficult to believe. Or if the Iranians have held them back, and this is an escalation card,

because just think of what happened to the world markets if both the Babel Mandeb were about 10%

of the world's oil flows through

into the red sea and the and the strait of Hormuzer shut down at the same time. I believe it

that they're being held back, they're being held in reserve, but time will tell. Yes, closing the

Red Sea is the next threat. All right. We go now to the big surrogate, Hezbollah, which is under attack right now by Israel,

bombing into Beirut, using a lot of offensive intelligence gathering to destroy again,

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