Pray for a greater awareness of the atrocities taking place in Syria and for a quick resolve of these problems. Our military needs our prayers! Pray for those on the frontlines, download Praying for the Military and Military Families.

“A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” (Matt 2:18)

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In Western eyes, Syria is a faraway land about which we know little. But we do know this: Over the past seven years, more than half a million people have been slaughtered there, with an estimated 150 murdered by chemical weapons just last weekend in a town outside Damascus.

We also know who’s committing these crimes: dictator Bashar Assad and those who have propped him up for their own purposes, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s neo-czar, and Ali Khamenei, supreme leader for life of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

When Assad used the nerve agent sarin to kill no fewer than 1,400 of his subjects in 2013, then-U.S. President Barack Obama drew a red line – and then abruptly erased it, apparently in deference to the Iranian theocrats with whom he was negotiating a deal that he intended to be his major foreign policy legacy.

Led by Russia, Obama soon negotiated an agreement under which Syria was to surrender all its stockpiles of chemical weapons and dismantle its capabilities to make new ones. Secretary of State John Kerry proudly announced: “We got 100% of the chemical weapons out.” He was badly misinformed….

No decisions have yet been made and, I’d wager, the president is now deep in discussions with John Bolton, his new national security adviser, Mike Pompeo, his incoming secretary of state, and James Mattis, his defense secretary, on what to do about the gaping wound that Syria has become.

The point I believe they will emphasize: Syria is one piece, albeit an important one, in a strategic puzzle. The question I hope Trump will ask is not “What’s the exit strategy?” but “What’s the theory of victory? What should Americans want to achieve and what will be required to achieve it?”

I suspect they will advise that a small contingent of U.S. forces needs to remain in eastern Syria. One mission: prevent the resurrection of the Islamic State group that, thanks largely to Trump, has been deprived of the territories it had conquered. A second mission: frustrate the hegemonic ambitions of what my colleague, Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Thomas Joscelyn, calls “the Assad-Putin-Khamenei axis.”…

The cost of remaining in the Middle East will be high – but not as high as it would be should we leave and later realize we need to return. Whether Trump’s national security cabinet can persuasively make this case, I can’t say. About this, however, I am confident: The president’s top advisers understand that Shiite jihadism is no less a threat to the United States and its allies than Sunni jihadism.

Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations will need to meaningfully contribute to a continuing American-led mission in Syria. So, too, must NATO members. This is their fight, too. If they don’t get that, it should be explained to them….

Syria may be “a faraway land about which we know little.” But more than Syria is at stake – just as more than Czechoslovakia was at stake when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain used that phrase in 1938 to describe the small nation he intended to sacrifice to Hitler…. (Excerpts from Clifford D. May article in Israel Hayom – Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a columnist for The ‎Washington Times.‎)