talk about awkward. where was hr? on boss's day, heather says she and her co-workers played pranks on their boss. kay's worst work bonding was a team-building exercise called who moved my cheese. now she hates cheese. thanks for writing. i'm gretchen. >> gretchen, thanks. last night on my orders, america's armed forces began strikes against isil forces in syria. >> and as it turns out, this they told us was only the beginning. the tomahawk missile that say rained death from the air, the warplanes that dropped bombs, the pentagon now indicating that those attacks were the start of a campaign that could last years. >> you are seeing the beginnings of a sustained campaign. strikes like this in the future can be expected. >> today we learned the islamic state was not the only target. ahead this hour what we know about the strikes and the contributions of our arab members of the coalition. plus i'll speak with the pentagon spokesman, rear admiral

kirby about, what to expect next. so let's get to it. first from the fox news deck this afternoon, america's new war against the islamic state militants included surprise attacks on another enemy. one that officials would say was planning an imminent attack or attacks on western targets. that's part of the mission we did not know about when this was all going to go down last night. unlike the coalition of arab nations that helped blow up the islamic state targets, the second objective, this one that had an imminent attack planned, according to the pentagon, belonged to the united states alone. according to the pentagon, the united states hammered a little known al qaeda cell called the khorason group, the khorason group. lots more to come on that. u.s. officials say it could be even more dangerous than the islamic state also known as isis. we reported yesterday about the khorason group and its reported

leader, who officials say was close to osama bin laden. we're told the group was developing cutting edge weapons of terror, including nonmetallic explosives that they would then pack into toothpaste tubes so they could get through airport security. the president mentioned nothing about this group when making his case for strikes against syria. instead the white house said it would build an international coalition to take on the islamic state. and it apparently did exactly that. according to u.s. officials, saudi arabia, jordan, bahrain, the united arab emirates, all dropped bombs on syria overnight. qatar helped with support flights but did not launch weapons. we have a base there, airplanes took off from there. it was key. notice that no nato nations took part. we're a member of nato. no nato nations, though. president obama today said the coalition proves that isis is a grave threat around the globe. >> america is proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with these nations on behalf of our common

security. the strength of this coalition makes it clear to the world that this is not america's fight alone. above all the people and governments in the middle east are rejecting isil and standing up for the peace and security that the people of the region and the world deserve. >> according to the pentagon, the united states and its partners announced strikes in raqqa. those are their flames bursitin there. the islamic state calls its capital. it went there in march of last year, took overall the buildings there and turned the government buildings into its own buildings and started running this islamic state from there. so that was the first target. we're told the u.s. was alone conducting those strikes near aleppo. this is aleppo over on the border. there's a reason we were alone. those were the khorason terror group. the strikes in eastern syria

targeted areas around syria's oil fields that are under isis control. so this was about striking the money. get the oil fields, you strike at their money source. this one over here was about striking command and control, right? if that's where they're headquartered, that's what you take out. it's a hard target, it's easy to find. this one over here is what they're calling this imminent threat. they are lacking specificity and we have lots of questions. officials say sales of that oil over here in the east made the islamic state the richest terror group ever recorded on this planet. we have video of some of those bombings. military officials say this is an isis storage facility. a u.s. bomb shreds the building in a cloud of smoke. this particular strike made history as the first time that the military used a stealth f-22 raptor. that's the pentagon's most advanced fighter jet. it had never been used in combat and now it has. it can swoop in without showing up on radar and can surgically strike targets from some 15 miles away.

much further than in the past. the pentagon also put out before and after pictures of some of the strikes. the reason they did that was to show the precision with which they were attacking. trying to say we'll be able to handle this civilian casualties problem. this is the before picture seeing no damage and this is the after picture. there's a hole in the part of this building and this part of the build is gone as well, so surgical strikes. again, this is a department of defense photo we can't verify. but when we play the video of the strike, you'll be able to see the bombs punch those two rolls right through the roof, blowing out windows, obliterating anything and, well, anybody that might have been inside. check out this amateur video from the ground. fox news can't confirm the source, but we can say where it was shot. it reportedly shows the aftermath of the bombing locations across syria. according to a senior u.s. source to fox news, the bombing zked in damaging the islamic state's infrastructure but the terrorists can still take over new buildings.

that source says it is too soon to know exactly who the strikes may have killed and that wiping out isis leaders will be an enormous challenge as many head into hiding. today the president of the united states warned that america's new war against isis will be a long one and there will be challenges ahead. he said the united states will do whatever is necessary to wipe out that terror group, but that apparently will not include under any circumstances no matter what the use of ground troops from the united states in this conflict. president obama has promised over and over that he will not put american troops in combat, that there will not be any mission creep. we have a lot of things to talk about. we're going to talk about this new group, the khorason group, in a little bit. ed henry is here on the deck to tell us what the president is sitting down to the coalition leaders now. i guess they're going hash this out? >> that's right, he's here in new york, giving a speech on climate change. now is having a meeting next hour with some of the coalition partners you mentioned from these arab nations. but look, he has a lot of work to do while here in new york. you mentioned the nato ally

folks like the united kingdom, france, that are not on board right now. the united kingdom already had one aid worker beheaded in addition to the two american journalists that were beheaded. you now have another british hostage being held, at least one more by isis, so there's pressure on president obama this week to get morale is on board. look, he certainly gets credit for getting those five arab nations to participate in those air strikes over syria, but the question is going to be whether he gets morale is on board and why are some of these others, like egypt, not joining in. their new president told "the wall street journal" the president gets credit for expanding this war from iraq into syria to try to take out these extremists, but the president of egypt said it's not enough to just go after isis. there's a lot of militants throughout the mideast and he's concerned the president might not be in the fight for the long haul, suggesting he didn't focus enough on the mideast early in

his presidency, is he going to focus in now. >> the president's big speech is at the united nations tomorrow but there's another that relates to u.s. security. >> a big meeting. a rare occasion where an american appellate president isa u.n. meeting of the security council. the foix is on foreign fighters. it matters to our viewers because you've got some fear inside the united states government right now that there are folks who were trained by isis, potentially khorason as well, who are potentially in western europe and the united states trying to launch terror attacks. so this affects everyone's security. interesting, the president is now using the threat from isis, the threat from this other terror group, khorason, to justify this military action when, shep, you and i both know going back to january what the president was saying about these al qaeda offshoots. they're just the jv squad. just because you put on a lakers uniform, you're not kobe bryant. now he's saying these kinds of guys have the varsity. so much so we've got to expand

from iraq into syria. >> they have had a very hard time with the narrative. >> no doubt about it. let's bring in ambassador nicholas burnes now, a professor of practice of diplomacy and international politics at harvard. mr. ambassador, good to see you as always. where are we now, as i always ask you? >> well, i think this is a new phase of the war and it was necessary. you can't defeat isis if you don't strike isis at its base of support when it originated and that's in raqqa in syria. there's a combined iraq/syria battle space, if you will, so it was imperative that the united states conducted these air strikes. i think what's different about it, obviously, is that you had bahrain and you had jordan and saudi arabia and the united arab emirates flying with us and conducting air strikes with us. very important, because this is a battle, if you will, for the hearts and minds and future of the sunni arab world. isis is a sunni terrorist group.

it is a much different evil, brutal vision of a future than some of those arab countries do and so important to get their buy-in. >> if we do really, really well with our air strikes, really well, isis won't be able to move around anymore and isis won't be able to control the territory it now controls. the problem is, we can't go in there and control it either because we don't have boots on the ground. does iran want to come control that? does hezbollah want to control that? how do we stop that? >> well, certainly not -- we would never favor obviously iran and hezbollah extending their authority over other parts of syria or even northern iraq. i think you're exactly right. air strikes have been successful in the last month in containing isis, preventing its armored columns from moving, but they can't defeat isis, it's too well funded, too well organized. it has its own mission and it has thousands of people who will fight for it. so you need ground forces. the administration is left with

the kurdish peshmerga forces. they need to help reconstitute a failed iraqi army. and you'll see the administration trying to arm moderate syrian rebel groups to take on isis and some of these other terrorist groups, radical groups inside syria itself. that's a very tall order and will take a long time. it does mean, shep, that we're looking at a multi-year conflict here. >> nicholas burns, it's great to see you. thank you. >> thank you. >> don't you love specificity? when they show us the maps and say here's what we targeted, here's what we hit, here's why we did it and they lay all of that out for you. and then on another matter they are less specific and sometimes you go, hmm. i mentioned today the pentagon revealed it was going after another terrorist group last night, a shadowy organization that the arab nations didn't hit, just us. it's said to be made of al qaeda veterans known as the khorason group. the military has indicated to us there was an imminent threat. to who exactly?

not specific. doing what? something on airplanes with bombs you can't detect. what does imminent mean? who is this bunch? and didn't they need an imminent threat to be able to go ahead with this outside the bush doctrine? they did. is this real? if so, how real? is the threat diminished now? the khorason group, get to know it.

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here in america to attack overseas without provocation, you need an imminent threat. in other words, if you want to go over there and shoot them, whoever they are, you need an imminent threat that they are going to come over here and shoot you or some of yours. we did not have that in this group, isis. didn't have it. but now we have it and we just found out about it. well, except for those of us who follow intelligence, most of us never heard of them, they're the khorason group. the pentagon describes it as a group of seasoned al qaeda veterans who traveled from among oar places afghanistan, pakistan and elsewhere. what they do is try to intercept westerners to try to use them. let's say somebody is coming from france to the united states and they want to go over and fight in the wars in syria. they'll intercept them. before that passport is stamped syria, they'll bring them over to the side and use them later. not to fight in syria but to carry out attacks on the west.

france, britain, united states, whatever. they have been operating in syria for more than a year now but their main mission is to target american and other western countries. they do not care about this assad business. they don't care about the war in syria. they don't really care about taking over lands the way isis does. what they want to do is attack the united states. the pentagon now reports that the group was plotting what they call, quote, imminent attack on american and western interests, unquote. details beyond that are sketchy. when details beyond that are sketchy, i usually have questions for katherine who pops up in the monitor there out of washington. it seems awfully convenient that all of a sudden when you need an imminent threat to carry out the attacks that we need to carry out, suddenly there's an imminent threat in the khorason group. >> what i learned today through my reporting, shep, is probably the one element that made it possible to go forward with these strikes on the khorason group, which is that there was updated location information

which made it possible to target the senior leadership of this group, and these are long-time al qaeda operatives, many of whom trained in afghanistan with osama bin laden in the '90s. number two, if i was going to put my lawyer hat on, they're going to make the argument that it was imminent in the sense that they had moved out of the research phase into an operational phase, which is code for identifying people like you have just discussed and then typically researching flights either into europe or the united states. and if you looked at the strict definition under the authorization to use military force, it says people who are linked to those who are responsible for 9/11, and you can certainly make the case with the membership of the khorason group that they do have long-standing, traditional ties to bin laden himself. >> in fact their leader, we believe, sat next to osama bin laden on 9/12, the day after the

attacks, and marvelled at the 3,000 dead people and their chief bomb maker is close to al qaeda. now, we know they hit three spots. we just had a map up there. you asked if that was yes and i said yes. all right. this is the map. this is the area up here around al alep aleppo. when the united states did those strikes by themselves, that was about khorason. i still wonder about details. where were they going to strike? they say the strike was imminent. they must know operational details or something, right? >> well, they know operational details, but what we have been able to confirm is that there was new location information that allowed us to go after the leadership. see, you're tracking these people. we know at least through my reporting that we were able to identify the members of the khorason group well over a year ago. one of the central leaders of the group, the person with

long-standing ties to bin laden who led al qaeda's network in iran after 9/11, he was there under house arrest, this is one of the senior leaders who, according to reports, may have been hit in this strike. so you can see that the ability to hit was possible now in a way that it may not have been possible a couple of weeks ago. i don't want to give people bad information. we don't know exactly what the target looked like, but we know that they were after airliners into europe and into the united states with these nonmetallic explosives, and security was raised in july because of information about the khorason group and efforts to use cell phones or laptops as some kind of method of detonation for these devices. remember, the detonator is key in these devices and fortunately for us has failed in the past, with the underwear bomb, which he was frankly wearing too long and degraded the explosives and the cargo printer bombs were set

with timers. that was their method of detonation. >> all right, catherine. didn't good to see you, thank you. >> sure. remember, it's not a done deal. there was an authorization put in place under president bush that said you can go after these people, those people directly related to this. not some future cause but these particular people. well, if this guy was sitting next to osama bin laden on the day after 9/11, news from the future, that writing applies because of these people who were trying to get us imminently. will we get details on that? maybe. syria's president bashar al assad spoke out today after the air strikes by the united states and his allies and analysts say he sounds like he's siding with the u.s. today. wow. why would bashar al assad side with the united states on this matter? really hard to figure that one out, isn't it? because this helps him. not that that's our goal but it is an unintended consequence and

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24 minutes past the hour. bashar al assad, the man who orchestrated the slaughtering of his own people for many years is apparently all about the united states-led air strikes. remember for weeks the assad regime had insisted that the united states or any nation that wanted to do anything must work with syria and get permission from syria before launching any strikes inside syria. otherwise the syrian government would consider it an act of aggression. but syrian state television reports in just the past hour that assad has now given his support for any, quote,

international effort against terrorism, unquote. he supposedly said according to his own state-run television, during a meeting with iraq's national security adviser he said that. but assad did not specifically mention the united states strikes. he reportedly also said in order to defeat the militants, there needs to be a range of international resolutions involving other countries, not just military action. matthew van dyke is with us on set, a documentary filmmaker who spent time with the free syrian army and knows syria very well. he was also a close friend of the executed captive journalist james foley and steven sotloff. matthew himself spent time as a prisoner of war in libya when he fought in that civil war back in the day, correct? >> yes. >> and now you advise and are a filmmaker inside syria and watched it all go down. >> yes. >> free syrian army, can they do anything or have they been beaten up to the point where it's not really feasible? >> it's going to be very difficult. there isn't too much of the free

syrian army left. a lot are run by islamic groups. there's needs to be a much larger effort than the administration's proposed of 5,000 troops. >> i'm going to ask you as i did nicholas burns. if our air strikes work really well, command and control, disintegrate, just as it did in the early days of the gulf war, if that works really well, then what? that's been my concern from the beginning. then what? what happens now? does assad come in and take over or does hezbollah come over and iran? i don't know. >> well, that's really the biggest concern. once the isis regime is debill tatd, a vacuum will be created where the assad regime can reclaim that territory. at this point there's not enough free syrian army or islamist groups to hold that territory against assad, particularly when the assad regime continues to do

air strikes. we're asking people to support isis while at the same time they're having bombs dropped on their head by the regime. >> we novak ums are the problem. look what happened in syria: that's exactly the same thing that happened there. vacuums are bad. so is our strategy about to create a vacuum? >> the present strategy is. >> so we're going to have to have a next strategy. >> when the administration announces that they intend to train 5,000 soldiers in jordan of the free syrian army to go an claim these territories, that figure does not make any sense. >> 200,000 were in existence in iraq. >> right. >> and more than 100,000 were in existence in syria. and they melted like butter. and we're expecting to train 5,000 in saudi arabia for one year. so a year from now they will be able to stand up to whatever isis is then. it sounds, to quote a president, something sort of fantastic. >> that's exactly what it is.

it's actually quite ridiculous. i'm not sure how the administration even expects people to believe it. syrians on the ground are surely laughing at it. my contacts in syria don't take this seriously. they're very concerned. they don't want to be fighting the assad regime's battles for them by only going after isis, at the same time their true enemy and the cause of this entire problem happens to be the vacuum created by the assad regime disintegrating and at the same time targeting civilian populations. foreign fighters come to join isis to fight against the assad regime. >> how do we not create a vacuum? >> we need to have a ground force of the free syrian army to go in and take control of these territories. >> where do we get those? >> we're going to have to massively recruit, arm them, convince ones that have joined other factions to join the free syrian army. they can be properly paid, properly trained, properly

eequipped. a lot of rebels have joined islamist groups because islamist groups are actually successful, have weapons and appemmunition are fighters. >> our most recent endeavor into standing up armies had to do with training the iraqi army. we spend hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of american lives and we stood them up so we could stabbed down. when we stood down, they melted again like butter. so we are now expecting -- why would that be any different from this? >> well, the difference between iraq and syria is that in iraq it was largely sunni soldiers who were asked to serve maliki shia. there was a lot of sectarian division and they weren't going to fight for iraq, they weren't going to fight for maliki, they were fighting for their own sect. a lot of it was maliki's own fault in the divisions he created between sunni and shia. in syria, it's largely sunni and so the idea that they will just melt away isn't exactly the same

situation as what occurred in iraq. >> it's nice to see you. appreciate your insight. i'm going to put all thispe. pentagon officials say the pace of future air strikes against the islamist state will depend on the militants' movements on the ground. but a top general says the military has already achieved one goal of the operation. ahead i'll speak live with the pentagon press secretary, rear admiral john kirby, for the latest on the u.s.-led effort to destroy the terrorist army. will we need another strategy in a few, you choose the word, days, weeks, months, will no boots on the ground be a nonstarter? that's coming right up. what if a photo were more than a memory? what if it were more than something to share? what if a photo could build that shelf you've always wanted? or fix a leaky faucet? or even give you your saturday back? the new snapfix app revolutionizes local service.

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police say the gunman wore that uniform in the attack and they're still investigating what happened. firefighters say up to 35-mile-an-hour wind gusts could undo some progress they made battling a fire near lake tahoe. they warn that flames still threaten nearly 12,000 homes and builds and say almost 3,000 people have had to evacuate. and the international space station got its first 3-d printer. part of a shipment from spacex capsule that arrived today. nasa reports the 3-d printer could help the crew make replacement parts. one american astronaut is on board the international space station along with a german and a russian cosmonaut. so how did last night, the opening salvo in the war against the islamic state in syria go? i'll ask the man at the pentagon live, next.

25 minutes before the hour. last night the strikes began inside syria by the u.s. and coalition forces with an effort to degrade and eventually destroy isis, the islamic state

of iraq and syria. so how did it go? rear admiral john kirby is the pentagon press secretary and joins us live from the pentagon this afternoon. sir, it's nice to see you, good afternoon. were we able to begin the process of degrading last night? >> well, we've already actually started, shep, in terms of degrading isil's capability in the region through the activities that we've been coordinating and supporting inside iraq. but last night we started taking away some of their capabilities inside sear yachlt it's all part of a larger effort to degrade and destroy them eventually. you look at some of the targets we hit. they were targets that they used to command, control, lead and sustain their ability to conduct operations. we're still assessing the results of the strikes, but every indication we have so far is that we were very successful. >> that's great to hear. if things went very well and eventually we're able to degrade their capacity to the extent they're not able to spread terror and rain terror on that region, then we have, unless

there's something about this plan i don't know, a vacuum there. if this works, who takes over? >> well, our goal, and you saw that we got congressional authorization last week, is to train and equip the moderate opposition from a military perspective to continue to take the fight against isil inside sear yachlt we're also going to train and equip them to defend their fellow citizens and communities and also go after the assad regime. that's going to take some time. it's not going to be done overnight. it's going to require a lot of effort over a good period of time. it doesn't mean that the moderate opposition doesn't exist now. they do, and they are taking the fight to isil the best they can. what we're going to do is support them from the air in a fashion similar to the way we're supporting iraqi security forces inside iraq. >> understood. when we left iraq, the hope was that the iraqis would stand up when we stood down and that they would take over. that was our plan from the very beginning. so our plan here is that we will have these moderate syrian rebels take over.

but hezbollah wants in on this action, you know iran wants in on this action. there are dozens if not more than 100 of groups on the ground who would like control there. how do we stop all of those groups from filling the void that is left if we're successful in degrading and destroying isis? >> nobody is more clear-eyed about the challenges inside syria than secretary hagel and the defense department. again, we understand this is complicated and we know it will take some time and it's not an easy problem to fix. but you've got to start somewhere. one of the places that we know we can start, what we're distinguish at is training and developing military capabilities for ourselves and for partner that say we work with. this is a good place to start. >> i'm with you completely, but there's still the unanswered question. we're very good at training, i know that, i've seen it. i have family members in the military, i know this. but we trained for a long time and spent a lot of money and lost a lot of lives training in iraq and it did not work

gloriously. why would we think training 5,000 people over the period of a year in saudi arabia to fill a vacuum where there are already a lot of people who would like to fill it, why do we think that will work? we're just getting started. would you forgive the person who's not sure that the plan is one that works long term without our people on that ground doing their thing? >> i can understand the concern over this. nobody said 5,000 trained over a year is going to be the panacea. we've been very honest about that. we see this as a multi-year effort. once you get a program up and going, it becomes a little more efficient over time. nobody is underestimating the challenge here. when we left iraq in 2011, we left an iraqi security force that was competent and capable to the threat that they faced at the time. but when we left in 2011, we made it very clear in a document we sent to congress that we said that it's only going to stay competent and capable to the threat if they are trained and resourced and supported by the central government in baghdad at an appropriate level and they

weren't. prime minister maliki squandered the opportunity that he had been given in 2011 when we left, and we left with that iraqi security force in the condition that they were. another thing that changed over time, shep, was the threat. we trained them to be capable to the threat al qaeda posed in iraq in 2011. nobody anticipated the growth of isil back then to the degree that we face today. the other thing i would say is, yes, four or five iraqi divisions melted away in the north, no question about that, because they didn't have good leadership. but forces in the south have held their ground in and around baghdad and are starting to retake territory, with our help from the air obviously, as well as kurdish forces up north. so the situation in iraq is much more mixed now than it was just a couple of months ago. isil is very much feeling the pressure. now they're starting to feel that pressure in syria. we believe that by training and equipping a moderate opposition can certainly help take away decision space and maneuver space for them inside syria over time. >> regarding the khorason group,

the imminent threat, you're not the politics guy, you're the military guy but i want to lay out the politics of this. there was testimony on capitol hill that isis is not an imminent threat to the homeland. that was the testimony. to carry this out, you needed an imminent threat. all of a sudden here's the khorason group. the reading of the imminent threat from the politicians that they were plotting and planning an attack on targets either in europe or the u.s. homeland. we had enough information to go ahead and go after them and so we did. how did we do against them and what were they planning to do exactly? >> well, i won't get into intelligence matters on tv. i think you can understand that. but we do know and we had good, solid information that they were in the end game of planning and plotting an attack against western targets, as you said rightly in europe or the u.s. homeland. so we know that they were up to something and it was very, very close. to your other question about how we did, we're still assessing the results of those strikes as well, just like we are against

those targets, those isil targets. initial indications are that we were equally effective against the khorason group in syria. we do believe we hit what we were aiming at. we do believe we have disrupted their capabilities. we'll keep assessing and analyzing to make sure we have completely thwarted this potential attack. >> the quote i read, by the way, is from you. you said they were targeting either the europe or the united states homeland. >> right. >> i understand that you don't want me to know which it is, but do you all know? do you guys know what they were planning to attack? because the word "imminent" is important. that word "imminent" means you can do this. without imminent you do not do this. this is the linchpin. i'm just curious, what does imminent mean and do you know whether it was europe or the united states? >> the intelligence is an imperfect thing and it's layered. so i'd be loathe to say that we had every level of detail down. what we did know was an attack was coming soon, that they were in the end game -- >> days, weeks, months, years?

>> i would just say very, very soon. >> in the grand scheme of things that might be three or four years. >> i'm not talking about years, shep. >> months or weeks? >> we know it was coming very, very soon. soon enough that we needed to act. >> soon enough that you needed to act. has what you did stopped that imminent attack? >> we're still assessing the results of the strike, shep. we do know we disrupted their capabilities and hurt them through the strikes that we took last night but we're still assessing the results. i think i need to leave it there. >> let me try this. an attack was imminent, therefore you carried out a mission. was it your belief when you carried out that mission that the results of last night's mission if successful would stop the attack? >> yes. >> so whatever you did last night, if it was successful, the attack which you said was imminent will no longer happen? >> we believe that we will have been able to disrupt the imminent nature of this threat, of this attack, if we're fully successful, but we're still asession the results.

>> gotcha. beyond the attack that was said to be imminent, do we have other concerns about this group which were not addressed in last night's activities? >> we have watched this group for a long time, shep. this isn't -- while it may be a new group to some americans, i can tell you that we've been watching them and the intelligence community has been watching them for a while. they're dangerous, after offshoot of al qaeda. these are bad guys and they continue to be bad guys. it's not like we're going to take our foot off the pedal here. it's not like we're not going to pay attention to them anymore because of one night of air strikes. we're going to assess how we did. if we need to keep hitting them, i can assure you we'll keep hitting them. >> so does that mean the people who were doing the attacking were hit last night or the people putting together the things to do the attack were hit last night? >> what i will tell you is we were trying to hit them in ways to disrupt this particular attack, but also disrupt and degrade their capabilities as a cohesive group. both are true. >> rear admiral john kirby, i certainly hope it happened.

thank you, and it's nice to speak with you. >> you too, shep, thanks. >> a little bit of news there. it was very soon, weeks, and whatever they planned last night if successful it will stop that imminent attack on either europe or the united states. we needed imminent. we'll be back.

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who matters most to you says the most about you. at massmutual we're owned by our policyowners, and they matter most to us. ready to plan for your future? we'll help you get there. continuin air strikes on islamic state militants in syria. that was video from the uss philippine sea, a guided missile cruiser provided to us by the military. fox news getting a closer look at the kinds of weapons that u.s. military and its allies used. our correspondent, leah gabe yel, is a former fighter pilot herself who flew in missions over afghanistan. >> last night's strikes show how our country can hit extremely precise targets and the navy demonstrated they can do it from very far away. two navy ships launched more than 40 tomahawk land attack missiles like the one you see here. this can travel 1500 miles.

they have onboard gps systems and can compare an image of what they're flying over to a programmed image of what it should look like for accuracy. these are some before and after pictures from last night. take a look at the one on the left. here the pentagon says the target was the communications array on top of this finance center and not the building itself. in the after shot you see on the right, you can see that that is exactly what they took out. now, about half an hour later, the f-22 stealth fighter made its first combat mission in the second wave of flights. they also dropped precision-guided bombs. f-18s like the one i flew launched from the uss george bush. now, this video shows them attacking an islamic state residence that was used for training and logistics. the pentagon says they used gps-guided missiles and pointed out that every hit was within the confines of the compound. now, from my experience i know that the gps weapon of choice for the f-18s in this type of mission is the joint direct

attack munition. it allows us to come in very high and fast in any weather, drop it and leave without even having to overfly the target. it basically uses the speed we put on it and the altitude and its on-board gps guides it to the target. the pentagon says that more than 90% of bombs used last night were precision munitions. shep, this is what we call a surgical strike and you can see from the pictures and video why we call it that. >> you certainly can. next a look back at three years of violence inside syria, from the arab spring to reports of chemical gas attacks. that's our daily slide show and it's coming right up. ♪ [announcer]when we make beyond natural dry dog and cat foods. we start with real meat as the first ingredient.

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as americans war against islamists entered a new front in syria, here is a reminder of how things escalated in the last few years. i have things on the slide show. it was march 2011, oh, a great time. nationwide protests against the government of al-assad began with the so-called arab spring and quickly turned violent. the violence between the regime and syrian rebels reduced cities like aleppo to rubble. assad's fighters even launched chemical attacks against incentivize syrians. investigators say more tan a thousand men, women and children died in syrian chemical attacks there last summer. and analysts say several militant groups including the islamist state have taken advantage to take over huge parts of syria. this is along the syria/turkey border. now an enormous refugee crisis. more than 190,000 people died in the first three years of fighting there.

and millions of syrians have left their homes. in fact, listen to this. turkish officials say more than 150,000 syrian refugees have come to turkey in how long? the past four days. some breaking news out of the vatican on a completely different subject. vatican's former ambassador to the dominican republic is now under house arrest at the vatican. and could face criminal charges after accusations he sexually abused young boys in that caribbean nation. this is reportedly the most senior vatican official investigated for sex abuse. the vatican's cannon law court which is separate from the criminal court found the former ambassador guilty of the same charges in june. it sentenced him with its harshest penalty removing him from the priesthood. out in criminal court open hearding into the case. the former ambassador could face jail time if the court finds him

guilty. and why would he not, if he abused little children. and we'll be right back. this i.

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there is breaking news on fox news channel. our sister network sky news for the united kingdom and beyond is reporting at this moment that british isis hostage, alan hennings, his wife has just gotten an audio file of her husband pleading for his life. sky news report confirmed with with the british foreign office. we have not until this moment named this british hostage because they asked us not to use his name. they just dropped that request. now we will tell you his name is alan henning. he is held hostage by isis and his wife just received an audio file of him begging for his life. more details on this as they come in throughout the afternoon. in addition late today, cdc issuing a warning that 1.4 million people in north africa may contract ebola by the end of

this year. and finally, before we get away, final look at the dow on this day. and the dow is down about 111 points. best in business coming up. i'm shepard smith in new york. good afternoon. >>. all right, thank you. so focused on the fire storm over there as of late, are we missing the real threat lurking right here right now? welcome, everybody. u.s.-led air strikes taking out isis targets in syria but what about the hundreds of americans who went to fight with isis reports that at least 40 of them are now back in this country planning god knows what. former new york city mayor rudy giuliani says this threat is very real and far more pressing and immediate because of right now right here. he is my special guest on fox business tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern. republican senator marco rubio now on whether we are doing enough to stop a possible attack here. senator,