Middle East

Between Hamas’s butchery, Israel’s grinding war, and a fog of propaganda that makes truth provisional, Gaza is where civilians are crushed while Washington looks away.

Hamas isn’t fighting for freedom—they’re a death cult that turns ceasefires into reload breaks and children into human shields.

We were fighting a war without a front line, where cruelty was as much a weapon as any rifle, and the enemy’s strength lay in finding the weakest point to strike.

U.S. and coalition forces have withdrawn from three forward operating bases in northeastern Syria—Mission Support Site Green Village, Mission Support Site Euphrates (often called the Conoco gas-field base), and a third smaller facility—sometime in May 2025, according to the latest Department of Defense Inspector General quarterly report. These closures represent a mass exodus from the […]

David Bellavia didn’t come back from Fallujah with swagger or speeches—he came back with ghosts, blood on his boots, and a vow that he’d never freeze again when the devil kicked in the door.

Israel’s failure to recognize the full extent of Hamas’ capabilities and intentions leading up to October 7th, 2023, shows that even the most advanced intelligence agencies can overlook critical threats when they make dangerous assumptions about their adversaries.

Refreshed by a fleeting journey of the soul across time and space, I found strength in the shared silence between stars, and returned to the desert ready to march again.

Having walked the dusty camps of Gaza and the corridors of Israeli power alike, one can conclude that this conflict isn’t about religion—it’s about land, politics, and the human cost of indifference.

In a dusty courtyard outside Taji, surrounded by curious children and cautious sheiks, we built fragile bridges with bottled water, schoolbooks, and the stubborn hope that kindness could hold back the war.

On July 18, the world saw Israel and Syria shake hands after a week of bloodletting, the EU slam Russia with its harshest sanctions yet, and Trump’s DOJ crack open the Epstein vault—three headlines that read like a geopolitical fever dream, but here we are on Saturday morning, July 19, 2025. This is your SOFREP morning brief.

You can’t claim to offer humanitarian relief when the entrance to safety is guarded like a fortress—unless, of course, your idea of peace is a gated community built on someone else’s ruin.

Some heroes wear medals—Alwyn Cashe wore fire, pain, and the lives of his men on his back, and still kept going defining the “never quit” ethos.