The road to Al Quds apparently runs through Kyiv, with the Iranian regime’s Lebanese ‘resistance’ affiliate Hezbollah dispatching fighters to the city and elsewhere in Ukraine to fight for Russia in a deal with the infamous Russian Wagner Group.

According to a report published by Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, the Russian mercenary group run by ‘Putin’s chef’ Yevgeny Prigozhin, has persuaded the Iranian regime’s Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, to participate in the Russian war against Ukraine.

The town of Qara in the Qalamoun region, in Damascus Countryside Governorate, is reportedly witnessing rising tensions between Assad’s forces and Hezbollah.

According to local activists, the latest hostilities began when Hezbollah fighters stormed the regime-run private Qara Hospital and expelled Assad’s forces from it last week.

Fighting reportedly broke out on Sunday (February 14) between members of the Lebanese Hezbollah militia and personnel from the Assad regime’s infamous Air Force Intelligence Directorate (AFID) in rural Damascus province.

According to news site SY24’s correspondent in the area, “The town of Al-Ghasoula, near Damascus International Airport in the countryside of Damascus, saw clashes using automatic weapons between groups of Hezbollah militia and the Air Force Intelligence branch."

Political sources in Beirut said the assassination of Lebanese Shia political activist and prominent Hezbollah critic Lokman Slim in southern Lebanon on Thursday (February 4), in an area under direct Hezbollah control, was intended to intimidate the Lebanese people, especially the Shia community, and send a message from Iran’s regime to the new US administration.

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah has claimed that Qassem Soleimani, the late head of Iran’s Quds Force, was responsible for convincing Russia to intervene militarily in Syria.

Media in Deir Ezzor province have reported that Iran’s so-called ‘Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) has been disposing of unidentified bodies in unmarked graves near the village of Al-Suwayyah, with the report stating that numerous bodies have been secretly buried in this way in the desert areas in the province.

Iraqi security forces raided a headquarters belonging to an Iran-backed militia south of Baghdad late on Thursday, seized rockets and detained three leaders of the group at the site, two Iraqi government officials said.

The officials said the militia group targeted was Kataib Hezbollah, an Iran-backed group that U.S. officials have accused of firing rockets at bases hosting U.S. troops and other facilities in Iraq. Kataib Hezbollah is also among the Iranian-backed militias backing Assad in Syria.

The top U.S. military commander overseeing the Middle East said Tuesday that despite the nuclear deal, Iran shows no signs of altering its destabilizing behavior.

"There are a number of things that lead me to personally believe that, you know, their behavior is not — they haven't changed any course yet," said Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, commander of U.S. Central Command, at a Senate hearing.

Following Monday's incident on Israel’s northern border, Russia has instructed Hezbollah to calm down. According to Al-Arabia reports, Moscow, which assists Tehran's Lebanese proxy militia in Syria, has made a direct request to desist from further “igniting the wick of confrontation” between the terror organization and Israel.

Forty thousand people living in the Syrian town of Madaya in Damascus province are reportedly dying from starvation as the world watches in complicit silence, say activists.

The small town, located in the Qalamoun mountain range 40km south of Damascus in an area adjacent to the Lebanese border, has been besieged since July 2015 by Assad's forces, backed by mercenaries from the Tehran-backed Hezbollah militia, who continue to prevent any food or humanitarian aid from reaching residents. .