For several years, Western analysts have warned that the Islamic Republic plans to use its intervention in the Syrian civil war, together with its fight against Islamic State (IS) in Iraq, to establish an overland route connecting its own territory to Lebanon and the Golan. If the plan succeeds, Tehran would have the unrestricted ability to send troops and materiel to Israel’s borders, magnifying the threat currently posed by Hizballah. Alexandra Gutowski fears that a current American campaign against an IS stronghold in eastern Syria might be abetting this strategy:

[The U.S.-led coalition’s] airstrikes indicate that Islamic State maintains a robust presence in Abu Kamal, a critical position along the Syria-Iraq border that Iran seeks to control. . . . Curiously, despite these concentrated strikes, U.S.-backed forces will not be conducting a follow-on ground offensive there. The coalition has limited its ground offensives to areas north of the Euphrates River, in order to preserve the deconfliction [agreement] between the coalition and the [pro-Assad] axis: the Syrian government, Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and Shiite militias. Thus, the coalition is . . . effectively ceding Abu Kamal to Iran.

Iran is eager to capture Abu Kamal to secure a land route over Iraq and Syria toward Lebanon. Although Iran has a robust air bridge to supply its foreign wars, an overland route is more reliable and less expensive. Iran has worse odds at the other two crossings: Tanf, where the United States has positioned its special forces, and a northern crossing under Kurdish control.

Whereas those two crossings would be difficult to conquer, the only thing standing between Iran and a secure overland route at Abu Kamal is Islamic State. . . . Iranian forces are already present in Abu Kamal and are using it to facilitate weapons flows. On June 17, an Israeli airstrike killed members of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who were training militias on how to transfer weapons in the area. Additional Iranian forces—those leaving Syria’s southwest—could also be redeployed there.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.