The preparations and build-up to the coming wars continue as the epicenter will remain the hotspot of the world as we approach Isaiah 17, Ezekiel 38-39 and of course, the Tribulation wars:
Shelling of the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk is continuing practically non-stop with shells landing in civilian areas after mediators’ talks failed Saturday. Militia and Kiev forces are fighting for the strategically key area of Debaltsevo.
Officials of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) said at least three civilians have been killed by Ukrainian artillery fire targeting residential areas overnight.
“Overnight, the Ukrainian troops fired about 30 barrages at DPR cities. The night shelling injured 14 civilians” in two of the city’s neighborhoods, reported Eduard Basurin, deputy defense minister in the DPR.
Four more people have been killed on Sunday, the militia said, while the total number of injured over the past 24 hours is being counted at over 20. They blamed Ukrainian units holding two villages northwest of the city and several infiltration groups for the violence.
“They drive the streets in common freight mini-vans or garbage trucks and fire mortars they have inside at civilian and military targets, mostly to spread panic,” a militia official told RIA Novosti.
Ukrainian shells landed on two residential buildings, near a school, at the roof of a morgue near one of the city’s hospital and at garages, reports said.
The continued violence prompted local authorities to keep all schools closed until Wednesday.
Meanwhile clashes between Kiev loyalists and militia forces continued along the front line. Kiev reported losing 13 soldiers dead in the past 24 hours of hostilities. A further 20 soldiers were injured in the clashes, a military spokesman said. Their opponents offered no update on their casualties.
The Azov volunteer battalion reported a failed attempt to storm the city of Uglegorsk, a site of fierce fighting over the past few days. The militia forces claimed capturing it on Friday, but the Ukrainian military denied surrendering the strategically important location.
“The units of the Ukrainian Army and National Guard have fallen back from Uglegorsk. The city is de facto under enemy control,” the battalion said on its web page.
In his first televised speech since a deadly attack inside the Israeli border Wednesday killed two IDF soldiers, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah warned that his terror group “cannot be deterred” and that any Israeli action against it would not be unpunished.
“We don’t fear war [against Israel] and we don’t hesitate in facing it if it is imposed on us and we will be victorious, God willing,” he said.
“Everyone was saying that Hezbollah would not respond because of the Iranian [nuclear] talks, or [the war in] Syria. Now they know the truth,” Nasrallah told thousands of supporters in south Beirut Friday, addressing the public rally through a video link from a secret location.
“From now on, if any member of Hezbollah is assassinated, then we will blame it on Israel and reserve the right to respond to it whenever and however we choose,” he threatened Friday. “The resistance no longer cares about rules of engagement and we do not recognize them in confronting the enemy.”
Acknowledging that an Israeli retaliation to Wednesday’s attack could have been devastating, Nasrallah said the terror group took that consideration into account, and mocked Israel for failing to prevent the attack despite its high level of alert.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday held Iran ultimately responsible for Wednesday’s attack, and said Tehran was seeking to open multiple fronts in its “sustained” war against Israel. He slammed the international community for preparing a potential deal with Iran that would leave it with the capacity to build nuclear weapons.
Hours after Hezbollah terror chief Hassan Nasrallah warned that his terror group would not be “deterred” and that any Israeli action against it would not go unpunished, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps said Israel “learned a lesson” from Wednesday’s attack in which two IDF soldiers were killed.
Speaking in Beirut at a ceremony for the “martyrs of Quneitra” — the 12 Hezbollah and Iranian operatives, including a general, who were killed in an airstrike attributed to Israel on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights on January 18 — General Mohammad Ali Jafari was quoted by the IRNA news agency as saying that Iran’s and Hezbollah’s responses to any future Israeli attack would be “the same.”
Both Iran and its proxy Hezbollah effectively outlined a new policy on Friday, according to a report on Channel 2, in which any Israeli operation in Syria would be met with a powerful response. Both indicated “new rules of engagement” on Friday during respective remarks in Beirut.
According to the Channel 2 report, Iran was seeking to solidify its hold on southern Syria and open a new front using Hezbollah members operating under an Iranian umbrella.
A top Iranian general met with Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah late last month, following an air strike that killed several operatives in Syria according to Lebanese reports.
Qassem Soleimani, a shadowy commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force, also visited the graves of Hezbollah fighters killed in the January 18 airstrike on the Golan Heights widely attributed to Israel.
Soleimani traveled to Lebanon a day after the strike, which killed six Hezbollah men and an IRGC brigadier general, Mohammed Ali Allahdadi, according Lebanese media reports.
Israeli media reported at the weekend that Soleimani appointed two Quds Force members to help orchestrate Hezbollah’s response to the strike, last Wednesday, in which two IDF soldiers were killed and 7 injured in a cross-border missile attack.
The January 18 attack highlighted the increasingly public Iranian involvement in Hezbollah’s activities, both in southern Lebanon and in Syria, where the Lebanese group is fighting in that country’s civil war to support the forces of the Assad regime.
Among the dead in the Golan strike was Jihad Mughniyeh, son of the late Hezbollah military chief Imad Mughniyeh, who was wanted in Europe and the US for terror activities and was assassinated in Syria in February 2008 in an operation believed to have been conducted by Israeli and possibly other Western intelligence agencies.
Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi has been circulated widely as ruler of the Islamic “caliphate” he founded in parts of Syria and Iraq. But behind the scenes, he is assisted by a tight inner group of 12-15 former high officers from the Baath army which served the Saddam Hussein up until the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Members of this group ranged in rank from lieutenant-colonel to general.
Ex-Maj. Gen. Abu Ali al-Anbari, its outstanding figure, acts as Al Baghdadi senior lieutenant.
Ex-Maj. Gen. Abu Ali al-Anbari, its outstanding figure, acts as Al Baghdadi senior lieutenant.
He also appears to be the brain that has charted ISIS’s current military strategy which, our sources learn, focuses on three major thrusts: the activation of sleeper cells in Europe for coordinated terrorist operations: multiple, synchronized attacks in the Middle East along a line running from Tripoli, Libya, through Egyptian Suez Canal cities and encompassing the Sinai Peninsula; and the full-dress Iraqi-Syrian warfront, with the accent currently on the major offensive launched Thursday, March 29, to capture the big Iraq oil town of Kirkuk.
Another former Iraqi army officer was entrusted with coordinating ISIS operations between the East Libyan Islamist contingent and the Sinai movement. Their mission is to topple the rule of President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi.
The imported Iraqi command made its presence felt in Libya Tuesday, Jan. 27 with the seizure of the luxury Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli and execution of the foreigners taken there, including an American and a British man. Two days later, ISIS terrorists fanned out across Sinai for their most devastating attack ever on Egyptian military and security forces. They launched simultaneous attacks in five towns, Rafah on the border of the Gaza Strip, El Arish and Sheikh Suweid in the north and the Suez Canal cities of Port Said and Suez to the west – killing some 50 Egyptian personnel and injuring more than double that figure.
ISIS strategists, not content with these "successes," are still in full thrust and believed to be planning to expand their operations and hit Israel – whether from the south or the north.
Israel will continue to preempt enemy plans against the Jewish state, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Sunday, all but publicly confirming the country’s involvement in an airstrike in Syria last month that left at least seven Hezbollah and Iranian operatives dead.
“We have proven that nobody is immune from our intention to foil attacks against us. Thus we have acted and thus we will continue to act,” he said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem.
The comments constitute the strongest hint yet by a senior Israeli official that Israel had carried out the January 18 strike on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights that killed six Hezbollah fighters and an Iranian brigadier general, Mohammed Ali Allahdadi.
Hezbollah and Iran have spent the weeks since the strike threatening grave consequences for Israel.
On Wednesday a Hezbollah cell fired five anti-tank Kornet rockets at a convoy of IDF infantry commanders driving along the northern border, killing two soldiers and wounding seven.
The exchanges of fire on the northern border last month highlighted Iran’s growing role in the Syria conflict and, through its proxy Hezbollah, on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.
Israel was witnessing “Iran’s attempts to open another front against us on the Golan Heights, in addition to the front it is operating against us in southern Lebanon,” Netanyahu said Sunday.
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