After first denying that an American raiding party had crossed into Syria, the U.S. command now admits that it sent U.S. Special Forces in hot pursuit of armed Islamist militants who have been using Syria as a sanctuary.

Indeed, it's now claiming  that one of those captured in the raid was was Abu Ghadiya,  "the senior leader of al Qaeda's extensive network that funnels foreign fighters, weapons, and cash from Syria into Iraq," according to an unidentified senior intelligence official.

According to the Long War Journal's Bill Roggio: 

The raid to capture Ghadiya occurred in the town of Sukkariya near Abu Kamal in eastern Syria, just five miles from the Iraqi border. Four US helicopters crossed the border and two of the helicopters landed to drop off special operations forces, who then proceeded to clear structures.

[Update: A CIA team led the raid, McClatchy reported.]

Last week U.S. Maj. Gen. John Kelly, who is responsible for Anbar province, which extends from Baghdad to the Syrian border, turned up the volume on a longstanding complaint that Syria had become "a sanctuary" for Al Qaeda in Iraq.

"Has the Syrian border stopped you from going after insurgents?" Kelly was asked in an interview  which didn't appear -- a bit awkwardly -- until Monday, in US News & World Report.

"We don't go across the border," Kelly said, "for sure."

Right. Let's call that inoperative.

David Ignatius has the gem down low in today's Washington Post column, which describes a half-hearted, even feckless U.S. covert action program to send operatives from Iraq into Iran.

He said the Iranians had recently captured several dissident Iranian operatives who had been recruited by U.S. military officers inside Iraq and then sent into Iran. The Iranians, whose intelligence network inside Iraq is pervasive, surveilled the meeting, then followed the agents across the border and seized them.

Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups.

Even the most successful bombing raid would leave Iran with some nuclear capability. At best, proponents of this option admit, bombing would set back the [nuclear] program five years. During that time the [White House] expectation is that the Iranian people miraculously would unseat the country's ruling clergy and dismantle the nuclear program permanently.