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.
