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Today's briefing:
Two gunmen attacked a San Diego mosque. An armed guard stopped them.
A London rapper posted a video calling for Iranian exiles to be shot.
A man legally barred from the White House returned and opened fire.
Welcome to your weekly briefing.
Security systems handle the probable. They are built around the known shape of a threat: who might come, from what direction, with what intent. The Islamic Center of San Diego had an armed guard on May 18 because the environment for Muslim communities had made that a reasonable precaution. What no protocol could specify was that the right response to two men walking past his position would be to turn around, draw his weapon, and go after them. The specific shape of a threat is always someone's problem to solve in the moment. This week, it was Amin Abdullah's.
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TOP STORY
The San Diego Guard Who Stopped Two Gunmen and Saved 140 Children
On May 18, two gunmen walked onto the grounds of the Islamic Center of San Diego during morning prayers. Cain Lee Clark, 17, and Caleb Liam Vazquez, 18, moved through the grounds and initially passed Amin Abdullah's guard position without registering his presence. According to San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl, that changed when Abdullah saw them.
Abdullah, 51, drew his weapon and moved toward the attackers from behind — into the gun battle, not away from it. During the exchange of fire, he used his radio to broadcast a lockdown code across the facility. He was fatally wounded. Two other men also died: Mansour Kaziha, 78, a founding member of the center, and Nadir Awad, 57, a congregant.
Clark and Vazquez fled in a BMW and were found dead approximately 0.3 miles from the scene, with apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Searches of their residences recovered 30 firearms and a crossbow. They had published a racist manifesto online before the attack and livestreamed it.
At the moment Abdullah engaged the shooters, 140 children were attending classes in rooms 15 feet from the point of contact.
Our Take
for law enforcement. Abdullah did the opposite: he pursued two armed men from behind, into an active firefight, in the direction of 140 children 15 feet away. He transmitted the lockdown call while doing it. He died doing it.
Whether the pursuit constitutes correct protocol in that scenario is genuinely unresolved. What is settled: the 140 children behind that door had no idea what was happening until the lockdown call came through. They were still there when police arrived.
The armed/unarmed debate at houses of worship has run for years, with both sides selecting their evidence. This incident provides a data point that is harder to work around. A guard recognized a threat that had already passed him, made a decision, and absorbed the seconds that decision cost. The counterfactual — what happens in those 15 feet without someone who has already drawn — is the argument.
READER POLL
Should armed security at houses of worship be a legal requirement?
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MEANWHILE
London's Iranian Factional War Under Police Review
Last month, a 28-year-old north London drill rapper known as "021kid" (Tony Mohraz) posted a video at a protest memorial wall in Golders Green. In it, Mohraz mimicked firing a weapon while reciting lyrics calling for MEK members and leftists to be shot. The Metropolitan Police are assessing the footage following complaints from the Association of Anglo-Iranian Women, who described it as direct incitement to murder.
The video is the most visible point in a pattern building across London's Iranian exile community for months. In March, pro-Pahlavi individuals forced their way into a Persian New Year reception at Westminster Hall and were physically ejected. Confrontations have occurred outside the Iran Freedom Congress. Businesses on Finchley Road have been pressured to display pre-revolutionary flags. Chatham House analysts link the escalation to perceived vulnerabilities inside the Tehran regime following recent US and Israeli military actions, prompting exile factions to compete more aggressively for international positioning.
Nasire Best Had an Active Stay-Away Order. He Came Back to the White House Anyway.
Shortly after 6:00 PM on May 23, Nasire Best, 21, of Maryland, approached a Secret Service checkpoint at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW and opened fire with a revolver. Between 15 and 30 shots were exchanged. Best was critically wounded and died at hospital. A civilian bystander was struck. No Secret Service personnel were injured. President Trump was inside the White House; the brief North Lawn lockdown was lifted before 7:00 PM.
Best was not unknown. In July 2025, he had attempted unauthorized entry at a different White House checkpoint, leading to his arrest, a stay-away order, and a psychiatric evaluation. The order was active on May 23.
This is the second armed engagement at or near executive branch facilities within 30 days, following the April 25 WHCD shooting. Best was on file as a known threat. He came back anyway.
Sound even smarter:
The Department of Homeland Security's Nonprofit Security Grant Program allocated $305 million in FY2023 for physical security upgrades at high-risk nonprofits, with houses of worship among the primary recipient categories. The program was established in 2005 following a series of attacks on faith-based facilities.
Texas HB 1177, enacted in 2019 following the shooting at West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement — where two congregants died before an armed volunteer ended the attack in under six seconds — removed the state prohibition on licensed carriers in houses of worship unless specifically excluded by the organization. Similar legislation has since passed in Ohio, South Carolina, and several other states.
SNAPSHOTS
🇧🇴 BOLIVIA — President Rodrigo Paz Pereira expelled Colombia's ambassador on May 20 following weeks of nationwide unrest. More than 3,500 individual roadblocks have been established across 67 highways by transport unions, miners, and Indigenous groups protesting fuel shortages and austerity measures. At least four people have died, including individuals unable to reach medical care. Daily economic losses are estimated at $50 million.
🇳🇬 NIGERIA — Armed groups hit three schools simultaneously in Borno state between May 13 and 14, abducting approximately 50 children, most aged two to five. On May 16, raids on two secondary schools in Oyo state resulted in 40 to 45 students and staff taken hostage. A teacher, Michael Oyedokun, was beheaded on video. A military unit dispatched to intercept the kidnappers was killed by explosive devices planted on the egress routes.
🇿🇦 SOUTH AFRICA — Joseph "Big Joe" Nyalungu, 62, an alleged kingpin in South Africa's illicit wildlife trade and a former police officer, was shot dead at his business premises in Mkhuhlu, Mpumalanga, on May 16. Two suspects in a white pickup truck pursued him as he fled. He had survived a separate attempt at the same location eight days earlier and was out on bail for weapons charges at the time of his death.
🇮🇱 WEST BANK — The UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, the Netherlands, and the European Union issued a joint statement on May 22 declaring that settler violence has reached "unprecedented levels." The coalition condemned Israeli government policies facilitating administrative annexation and warned that businesses participating in settlement construction face significant legal and reputational exposure.
EXTRA INSIGHT
GOVERNMENT INFRASTRUCTURE — A Nightwing contractor published plaintext credentials, AWS GovCloud keys, and internal CISA system architectures to a public GitHub profile in November 2025. The most damaging exposure came in late April 2026, when an active RSA private key granted theoretical access to a CISA enterprise GitHub account. A bipartisan congressional inquiry has been launched; early reports incorrectly attributed the leak to a CISA administrator rather than the Nightwing contractor.
HOME SECURITY — A proposed class action, James v. ADT Inc., filed May 12, alleges a cyberattack compromised 5.5 million customer records, ADT's own confirmed figure, including home addresses and subscription details. ADT has stated that security system configurations were not affected. A confirmed home address paired with a monitored security subscription is targeting intelligence regardless of whether system access was obtained.
RECOMMENDED READING
Inside the Wire
The most consequential security incidents of the past year didn't come from outside. IBM's breach cost research puts the average malicious insider incident at $4.99 million and 287 days to contain. Ponemon Institute data found that organizations averaged 13.8 negligent insider incidents in 2025. Those are cyber numbers. The physical security risk they represent is harder to quantify, and almost never appears in the same report.
The gap most insider threat programs haven't closed is the public surface — the forums, social platforms, and dark web activity where people with access to your principals and facilities are considerably less guarded than they would be inside a corporate communication channel. OSINT monitoring is the detection layer that surfaces those signals before they reach the physical environment.
The full article breaks down what a mature insider threat program actually looks like, where most corporate programs are still falling short, and what the organizations getting ahead of it are doing differently.
Amin Abdullah turned around. Nasire Best had been arrested, evaluated, and legally barred from returning — and came back armed anyway. In London, a video calling for MEK members to be shot has been sitting in police assessment for weeks. Each situation carried more documented information about the threat than most operations encounter in a year. None of it made the outcome automatic.
See you next week.
– On The Circuit
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PREVIOUS POLL - RESULTS
Q: Is Iran's strategy of striking commercial infrastructure working?
Is Iran's criminal proxy model now harder for Western counterterrorism to stop?
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 A. Yes — building in deniability was the entire design (62%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ B. No — this network got caught; the model is flawed (18%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ C. Watch which state tries this next (12%)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ D. Something else. Let us know → (8%)
Your Comments:
RF: “Prison gangs in America have been developing similar techniques for almost a decade.”
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