Russia’s army is bleeding men so fast in Ukraine that the Kremlin is now sweeping the globe for replacements. Ukrainian troops just told me they’ve identified fighters from more than 100 countries on Russia’s side, many of them coerced, trafficked, or duped with phony contracts. These aren’t isolated incidents. This is Russia’s new manpower strategy: replace dead Russians with desperate foreigners.

And now South Africa has delivered hard proof that Moscow is actively recruiting on the continent to feed its war machine.

The world keeps talking about this standoff between Washington and Caracas as if it were just another round of political posturing. On paper it sounds like noise, the usual chest-thumping and podium theatrics. But if you watch the details instead of the headlines, you can feel something heavier settling over the region. Airspace over Venezuela has effectively closed. Drug boats that used to race through the Caribbean now vanish in balls of fire. Donald Trump is on the phone with Nicolás Maduro—words nobody expected to say out loud a few months ago.

At the same time, Venezuela’s currency continues to unravel, the economy staggers forward on remittances and side hustles, and everyday people try to hold families together inside a system that is clearly failing. That combination—external pressure and internal collapse—turns a fragile state into a pressure cooker. And history says pressure cookers eventually blow.

The politicians will survive whatever happens. They always do. It’s the ordinary Venezuelans, the ones trying to feed their kids and keep the lights on, who are staring down the very real possibility of a conflict they never asked for.

A Sky That’s Quiet for the Wrong Reasons

When Trump announced that Venezuelan airspace was “closed,” it sounded like a dramatic new move. In reality, the skies had already gone quiet. For more than a week, commercial flights in and out of the country had been canceled. Airlines that normally connect Panama and Caracas simply stopped flying those routes, not wanting to risk getting caught in the middle of a shooting war.

The Venezuelan regime responded the way fragile regimes often do: by lashing out at the wrong targets. They threatened to revoke airline licenses permanently—essentially telling companies, “If you don’t fly into our potential war zone now, you can never come back.” That’s the geopolitical equivalent of stabbing yourself in the face to prove you’re not afraid of knives.

Meanwhile, on the ground, Venezuelan forces have been staging air-defense drills. Some of the footage is almost darkly comic: missile crews practicing launches over downtown Caracas with rockets that look suspiciously like backyard fireworks. It’s hard to tell where the training ends and the propaganda begins, but the message is clear enough. The regime is nervous.

The Migrant Stream That Turned Around

For years, the story of Venezuela has been written in footprints heading north. Under the Biden administration, more than a million people crossed the Darién Gap in 2024 alone—a 40- to 50-mile stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama that used to be considered nearly impassable. Venezuelans made up a huge share of that flow, driven by hyperinflation, food shortages, and a government that had long since stopped pretending to serve its citizens.

That changed almost overnight when Trump took office again. Marines went to the border. Policy flipped. Suddenly, people who had sold everything, walked across continents, and made it as far as Mexico found themselves staring at a closed door.

Now we’re seeing something we haven’t really watched in real time before: the migrant pipeline reversing. Venezuelans who reached the U.S. border and got stuck are drifting back south, trying to scrape together enough money to return to Chile, Colombia, or even to Venezuela itself. Those who had built new lives in Chile are hearing that a Trump-like candidate, favored to win the next election there, is talking openly about clearing out illegal migrants. Peru has already declared a state of emergency at its border because so many Venezuelans are trying to cross.

You have an entire people caught between a country they fled and a world that doesn’t quite know what to do with them. That kind of displacement doesn’t stay politically invisible forever.

Before we get to Syria and Israel’s latest raid, I need to start with something closer to home.

You’ve probably seen the headlines by now: two members of the West Virginia National Guard were shot in Washington, D.C. One of them—Specialist Sarah Beckom—has now died from her wounds. She was shot in the head. The other Guardsman was hit several times and is still fighting for his life.

The attacker is a 29-year-old Afghan man who had worked with U.S. forces for more than a decade before being brought to America after the collapse of our mission in Afghanistan in 2021.

When the Biden administration started airlifting tens of thousands of Afghans out, I said over and over again:
We are not vetting these people properly.
We are importing risk on purpose.
Helping someone in their own country does not automatically give them a right to live in ours.

For that, I was called heartless and xenophobic. I was told, “These people helped us.” No – we helped them. It was theircountry. We were trying to make it a place worth living in so they wouldn’t feel the need to move halfway around the world.

Now a young American woman from West Virginia is dead, another Guardsman is in critical condition, and the attacker—who allegedly fired on our soldiers—is expected to survive.

You’re going to hear a lot of people say this is an isolated incident. Maybe legally it is. Morally, it’s part of a pattern: Western leaders making decisions that prioritize ideology and optics over the safety of their own people. Open borders. Broken vetting. And then stunned disbelief when predictable consequences arrive with blood on the ground.

All right—let’s get to the main story.

Early this morning, Israeli forces carried out a raid deep inside western Syria, in a town called Beit Jinn. If you pull it up on a map, you’ll see it’s not just hugging the border. It’s well inside Syrian territory, in rugged hill country closer to Damascus than to the Israeli frontier.

According to the IDF, the target was a cell belonging to al-Jamaa al-Islamiyya—also known as the “Islamic Group of Lebanon and Syria.” It’s a Sunni extremist group ideologically aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Their fighters operate out of Lebanon but have been steadily embedding themselves inside Syria.

Israeli intelligence says this cell was in the advanced stages of planning attacks into Israel from Syrian soil.

The raid itself looked, on paper, like a classic hit-and-run: go in at night, grab the people you came for, get back across the line before the enemy can mass a response.

Reality rarely follows the script.

Israeli troops succeeded in capturing two members of the terror group and reportedly killed at least two others. But as the force exfiltrated, local fighters opened up on them. What was supposed to be a clean snatch-and-go turned into a running firefight in the dark.

One Israeli vehicle was hit and burned. Seven IDF soldiers were wounded—several of them seriously. As they broke contact and withdrew, Israel brought in air support and hit hostile positions around the town with precision strikes.

From Jerusalem’s point of view, the mission was a success: high-value targets in custody, others eliminated, and a network disrupted before it could fully mature. But “success” in that part of the world almost always comes with a bill attached—often paid in blood.

The Women Behind the War

There’s a fascinating layer to this story that most outlets barely mention.

A lot of the intelligence driving Israel’s operations in Syria is coming from an all-female intel unit. These women operate small drones low and slow over Syrian villages—close enough to capture faces, license plates, and patterns of life.

They cross into Syrian airspace, slip those drones between power lines and minarets, and then pour over the footage frame by frame. Using facial recognition and other tools, they match names, locations, and habits. Then they help build target sets and kill boxes: places where known terrorists gather away from civilians, so the IDF can strike them with minimal collateral damage.

That unit has helped identify IRGC officers, Hezbollah commanders, and now members of al-Jamaa al-Islamiyya. Their work is a big part of why Israel is confident enough to risk cross-border raids like the one in Beit Jinn.

The point isn’t just to hit a few militants. It’s to send a message:

If you build a terror network aimed at Israel—whether in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, or beyond—we will find you, and we will not respect your artificial borders more than you respect ours.