N. A. BERENKOVA Post-graduate student of IMOMI Lobachevsky UNN (Nizhny Novgorod) Keywords: Middle East, Hezbollah, war in Syria, Lebanon, Arab Spring Currently, representatives of many countries are taking part in the fighting in Syria. The region is not new to the presence of organizations and military groups that have declared the entire Middle East or part of it a zone of their operations. However, the events in Libya and Syria indicate a new level of development of this phenomenon. Let's look at the main reasons that prompted the Lebanese Hezbollah to join the conflict on the side of the Syrian government, and the consequences for Lebanon. There are several main approaches to analyzing the activities of the Lebanese Hezbollah. According to one of them, the goals of Hezbollah as a radical organization have not been revised since its foundation in the 1980s, only the ways to achieve them change. The main task of Hezbollah was to liberate the territory of Lebanon*, which was called the " Islamic Resistance in Lebanon "(al-muqawama al-Islamiyya fi Lubnan). The term is often used as the name of Hezbollah's military wing. Other researchers believe that the ideology of Hezbollah has undergone a major change1, as a result of which a political party emerged from the armed group of the civil war**, which accepted the "terms of the game" of Lebanese politics. Revolutionary slogans calling for the abolition of the confessional political system imposed by the colonialists, replacing it with an Islamic state modeled on Iran, were replaced by a pragmatic domestic policy aimed at improving the situation of the Shiite community. Some even predicted a reduction in combat activity after the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.2 Despite the trend towards integration into the Lebanese political system and increasing attention to internal issues, the party has maintained a close ideological and material connection with Iran. Hezbollah's compliance with Iran's direct inst ... Read more