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friends. it is wednesday, december 27th, i'm willie geist. joe and mika have the morning off. a lot to get to including israeli forces shifting military efforts to southern and central gaza with officials warning the war could take many more months. and hours from now, antony blinken and alejandro mayor kas are set to meet with mexican president obrador. plus donald trump continues to claim he should be immune from any prosecution surrounding his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. we'll have the latest there. also ahead, bus drivers across the country increasingly under attack ...

u.s. troops have come under attack 78 times by iranian backed groups. good morning. >> alexandria: good morning, according to defense department u.s. contractor was killed after a group crashed unmanned ariel vehicle into a building in northeast syria 1:30 local time. once determined it was iranian origin, the war posing group says eight iranian fighters were killed in that action. lloyd austin said the airstrikes were conducted in response to attacks by the group irgc. we will defend our people. no group will strike our troops with impunity. republican congressman matt gates offered...

To try to get out of this? i mean, you said that they probably know the cause of these explosions. i would say assume it's ieds set by these groups. so what are they actually trying to find? the identities of these attackers? first of all, you want to find out if it is an ied set by the group or if they used some kind of rpg to try to get the terrorists out. so, yeah, you're going to try to find that. you're trying to find out who the victims are and who the attackers are. the way you do that very simply is you find all the missing people reports, you match the bodies with the dna taken off of...

Me, they'll solve it themselves. but, anderson, just this year, just this year, 36 million taxpayer dollars have already been sent to these clinics that are now suspended. so we're talking about a lot of wasted money here. >> it was so frustrating when we had the guy on from the program who said, well, he had no idea who, previous to him getting to his position, was responsible for oversight and who dropped the ball and he's not able to name any names. really frustrating stuff. drew, we will continue to report. and great reporting. thanks, drew. >> if you've got a tip, go to cnn.com/investigat...

Weren't were a lot of suicide attacks there as well? >> it has been among operatives. i haven't seen it with al shabaab. i haven't really seen it with groups that are affiliated with al qaeda. they are happy to send women as suicide bombers but it's very unusual for them to play an operational role. that doesn't mean they can't be involved in financing the group or supporting it in some other way, but it would be very unusual. >> steve, you supervised the last investigation to the u.s. em bassey attack in nairobi. what does this entail? and is eight agents enough? >> agent -- eight agents is n...