Raad: Resistance Won't Be Dragged into Sunni-Shiite Strife
Head of Hizbullah's Loyalty to Resistance bloc, MP Mohammed Raad, on Saturday accused what he called “the local and regional agents” of “hiding behind the fabricated trend of Takfirism (Islamist extremism) with the aim of provoking the Resistance and dragging it into a confrontation that takes the form of a Sunni-Shiite strife.”
“But they do not want the dignity of the Sunni community or the Shiite community, they rather want to weaken everyone and keep them under their hegemony so that they can continue to have the upper hand in the region,” Raad added.
“We have the responsibility of remaining patient in order to foil the enemy's plot and the scheme they have resorted to, and we don't doubt for a moment that we will achieve our goals and that we will achieve the victory we are preparing for,” the top Hizbullah official added.
He stressed that Hizbullah will not be preoccupied with “the trends that are moving from one street to another and from one region to another in an attempt to incite, provoke and create an uproar.”
“Their only target is the Resistance and they are nothing but tools tasked with creating these atmospheres that scare and mislead the public opinion and push it to despair,” Raad noted.
He declared that “the Resistance has made great progress in confronting the scheme that wants to dominate Lebanon and the region and any retreat is not acceptable at all.”
“The Resistance will maintain its preparedness to achieve its goals and confront its real enemies, and we will not be preoccupied by lackeys and tools and we will confront the perpetrators of the hostile schemes being plotted against our nation,” Raad stressed.
Hizbullah's leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has recently warned that “some parties are pushing Lebanon in a very rapid manner to sectarian strife and working on that night and day.”
He warned that “some statements and remarks by some MPs who belong to the dear Sunni sect are taking a very provocative and seditious course."
"Some parties must shoulder their responsibilities and we are extremely keen on civil peace, but no one should make wrong calculations," Nasrallah has said, in remarks described as an implicit threat by some of Hizbullah's Sunni rivals.
Islamist cleric Sheikh Ahmed al-Asir and his supporters staged four rallies between March 1 and March 5 to protest claims that Hizbullah rented apartments in the vicinity of Asir's mosque in the Sidon suburb of Abra.
Last month, Asir urged officials and authorities to force the evacuation of apartments allegedly inhabited by Hizbullah gunmen near his mosque to avert a possible “strife or any dangerous incident.”
“We will not give up on our right to live in dignity... We will escalate our measures if our demands weren't met,” Asir vowed on Sunday.
“Recently, the mosque's neighbors, and we're among them, noticed some rented apartments that are inhabited by young men who are not residents of the area, and the neighbors thought that they are students,” Asir has said, adding that “a dispute happened recently and heavily armed young men came out of these rented apartments and threatened the neighbors.”
Nasrallah later hinted that the party will not tolerate the evacuation of any of its offices in Sidon and its suburbs.
“We have a lot of allies in Sidon, especially in the Sunni sect. But thousands of Shiites have been residing in Sidon since hundreds of years, do they need a permission now? We were among those who fought to liberate Sidon and the South and we have offices, houses, mosques and complexes in Sidon since 30 years."
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