BEIRUT: Hezbollah will continue to act against schemes aimed at gaining control over Lebanon and the region, MP Mohammad Raad, who heads the Loyalty to Resistance parliamentary bloc, said late Friday.

“The resistance has come a long way in facing the project to dominate Lebanon and the region: going backward is absolutely unacceptable,” Raad said during a Hezbollah ceremony in south Lebanon.

He said the resistance movement was continuously being attacked both from local and regional sides who sought to gain control in Lebanon and the region.

“The resistance in Lebanon stands in the way of opponents [local and regional] who seek to regain control over the country and that is why [the party] is constantly being targeted,” he said.

Raad said the group’s opponents resorted to all sorts of ways to attack the party and weaken it.

“We were attacked directly by Israel in the latest [July-August] War in [2006] where we can say that the resistance succeeded in disrupting the Israeli military and security structure,” he said.

He said some domestic opponents were employing the phenomenon of “Takfir,” whereby one member of the Muslim community accuses another of being an apostate, in order to incite sectarian strife.

“The local and regional agents employ the Takfir phenomenon to provoke the resistance and drag it into a Sunni-Shiite confrontation,” Raad said, in an apparent reference to Sidon-based Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir.

“However, the least these people care about is the dignity of the Sunnis or Shiites. They want to weaken everyone so that they can remain a part of the regional equation.”