Syria Itself News Today

Up on the battlefield because of this. in turkey, at the pentagon, on capitol hill, and i want to start with keir simmons on the ground in southern turkey near the border with turkey. keir, i understand that a little bit earlier this morning you were close to some of where this assault whas happening. what are you hearing and seeing? >> thats right. this is a conflict that has kind of escalated through the day and actually we just heard a martor from the syrian side land in that direction. we he...

Kinds of problems as early. i think he wanted to focus on job creation. but hes got a great national security team. i thought secretary tillerson was perfect when he said look, either the russians collaborate and knew this was happening whether russians were duped and theyre just incompetent. but they have to choose one or the other, and i think that second tillerson is going to be very firm tomorrow and say to the russians there is a path forward where we look work together but that path cannot...

All of these years of negligent is close to having nuclear weapons within intercontinental capability to reach the u.s., i think hes also made the decision that after a year of being lied to where both president obama and secretary of state kerry claim things that were just plain false that assad really is totally unacceptable. its very telling by the way, martha, in the entire world, the only countries that publicly objected to the president hitting syria were syria itself, iran, north korea an...

Kinds of problems as early. i think he wanted to focus on job creation. but hes got a great national security team. i thought secretary tillerson was perfect when he said look, either the russians collaborate and knew this was happening whether russians were duped and theyre just incompetent. but they have to choose one or the other, and i think that second tillerson is going to be very firm tomorrow and say to the russians there is a path forward where we look work together but that path cannot...

Brookings institution center for middle east policy. his new book "unthinkable iran: the bomb and american strategy" com comes out on tuesday. ken, ayman was talking about the impact of a strike on syria on iran. you write extensively about the country and to what ayman was saying in his report. >> well, i think that obviously -- look, weve got to recognize there is the potential for some form of retaliation. by the same token, when you look at the main actors who would want to retaliate, iran, ...

Sources? intelligence on the ground? >> again, the syrian chemical weapon issue is, is like the situation inside syria itself, is very fluid, very flammable and highly complex. and getting kpleer pictures is indeed very difficult. we are just saying and reiterating, in the strongest possible words, were not making any policy recommendations to the united states. were not urging, were just going to keep on being great allies and sharing the best intelligence that we have with our allies. so that ...

Potentially and hamas as well. syria and iran for decades now have had a working relationship, which is unusual for an arab country to be working so closely with iran, persian nation, and in this case, the iranians see syria as a crucial way for them to have an influence, not only in syria itself, but in lebanon and throughout the middle east and have access to border country with israel where they want to cause problems. >> how do we explain that we readily went into libya, where the atrocities...

Youre on expert in this area. isis suspected targets or whether elsewhere in syria, this is the first time the u.s. has launched air strikes against the syria targets, is that right? >> yes. >> tell us why. >> usually you have to have the u.n. security council give you the authorization. or we would have to be invited in by syria itself, which wasnt going to happen. then there was the concern about getting ourselves into some kind of escalation that would lead us to basically have ownership of