Lebanese Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Lebanese Civil War lasted fifteen years, from 1975 to 1990, and killed an estimated 150,000 people. Nearly one million more fled the country entirely. What makes this conflict so difficult to grasp is that it was not a single war. It was many wars layered on top of each other, each with its own logic, its own shifting alliances, and its own cast of armed factions. Christians fought Muslims, then Christians fought Christians. Shia fought Sunni, then Shia fought Shia. Palestinians fought alongside Lebanese leftists, then found themselves besieged by a Syrian-backed coalition. Foreign powers drew their lines across Lebanese soil: Syria, Israel, Iran, the United States, and the Soviet Union all played roles.

  How did a small country on the eastern Mediterranean coast become the arena for so many overlapping conflicts at once? The answer reaches back decades before the first shots were fired in April 1975, to a political system deliberately built on sectarian arithmetic, and to waves of Palestinian refugees who transformed Lebanon's demographic balance. What began as a fishermen's strike in the coastal city of Sidon would escalate into a catastrophe that reshaped the entire Middle East.

• 2. A Republic Built on Sectarian Math

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  Lebanon was declared a republic in 1926, during the French Mandate, and a constitution was adopted that same year. The French had created the state of Greater Lebanon as a safe haven for the Maronite Christian community but drew the borders to include a large Muslim population. Under the system that emerged, the President was to be a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker of Parliament a Shia Muslim. This formula, sometimes called the National Pact, was designed to manage diversity. In practice it locked every Lebanese citizen's political identity to their religious community.

  The link between politics and religion had deep roots. In 1860, a civil war between Druze and Maronites had erupted in the Ottoman Mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon, resulting in the massacre of roughly 10,000 Christians and at least 6,000 Druze. The French reinforced sectarian divisions when they took control of the region after the defeat and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire between 1908 and 1922. Lebanon achieved full independence on the 22nd of November 1943, after which Free French troops who had entered in 1941 withdrew by 1946. The Maronite community assumed dominant control of government and the economy.

  But demography would not stand still. Two waves of Palestinian refugees crossed into Lebanon: the first following the Israeli Declaration of Independence on the 14th of May 1948, and the second after 1967. Lebanon's Muslim population, already a large minority, grew steadily larger. The Christian-dominated government began to face increasing opposition from Muslims, pan-Arabists, and left-wing groups. The Cold War deepened that fault line. Lebanese Christians mostly aligned with the Western world, while Muslims, pan-Arabists, and leftists mostly aligned with Soviet-linked Arab countries, a tension that had already brought Lebanon to the brink of civil war in the 1958 Lebanese crisis.

• 3. The Match at Sidon

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  In February 1975, fishermen at Sidon went on strike. At issue was an attempt by former President Camille Chamoun, who also led the Maronite-oriented National Liberal Party, to monopolize fishing along the coast of Lebanon. The injustice felt by the fishermen drew sympathy from across Lebanese society and sharpened resentment that had been building against the state and its economic arrangements.

  What followed was studied closely by the scholar Farid Khazen, who sourced local histories and eyewitness accounts from Sidon. Khazen's research reveals that the man shot and killed during the protest, identified by many sources as the former Mayor of Sidon, Maarouf Saad, was not in fact the mayor at the time and was not in active dispute with the fishing consortium, which was made up of Yugoslav nationals. The Yugoslav representatives had already negotiated with the fishermen's union to make the fishermen shareholders in the company, offering to modernize their equipment, purchase their catch, and provide the union an annual subsidy. Saad had even been offered a place on the company's board. Khazen's analysis suggests that Saad's effort to narrow the gap between the two sides made him a target for someone who wanted a small protest to become a full conflagration. The sniper struck right at the moment the demonstration was dispersing.

  Within months, those demonstrations had been transformed into political action supported by the left and by the Palestine Liberation Organization. The state tried to suppress the protesters. Control began to slip. By 1975, Lebanon's government was losing its grip on the situation it had helped ignite.

• 4. A Thousand Militias

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  On the morning of the 13th of April 1975, unidentified gunmen in a speeding car fired on a church in the East Beirut suburb of Ain el-Rummaneh, killing four people including two Maronite Phalangists. Hours later, Phalangists led by the Gemayel family killed 30 Palestinians traveling through the same suburb. The event became known as the Bus Massacre, and citywide clashes erupted in response. The Phalange party itself had been founded by Pierre Gemayel in 1936.

  As militias multiplied, the two main poles of the conflict became the Lebanese Front, consisting of nationalist Maronites opposed to Palestinian militancy, and the Lebanese National Movement, a coalition of pro-Palestinian leftists. The NLM was a fragile alliance from the start. It included Lebanese Communist Party members, secular Nasserists, pan-Arabist groups, and Islamist factions that shared no common ideology beyond the short-term goal of overturning the existing political order.

  On the 6th of December 1975, a day remembered as Black Saturday, the killing of four Phalange members prompted Phalange fighters to set up roadblocks across Beirut where identity cards were checked for religious affiliation. Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims passing through were killed on the spot. Retaliation by Muslim and Palestinian militias pushed the total death toll for that day to between 200 and 600 people. The Green Line, dividing Christian East Beirut from Muslim West Beirut, hardened into a permanent feature of the city.

  The war also generated its own economy. Militias taxed the populations under their control at checkpoints, operated smuggling networks through Lebanon's ports, and received outside funds from Syria, Israel, Iran, and various Arab governments. The Bekaa Valley became one of the world's largest hashish-producing regions. As the fighting dragged on, many militia commanders shifted from political goals toward mafia-style criminal enterprises.

• 5. Foreign Hands

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  Syria's entry into Lebanon in 1976 illustrated the war's central paradox: an intervention nominally aimed at restoring peace that in practice served narrow strategic interests. On the 22nd of January 1976, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad brokered a truce, while covertly moving Syrian troops into Lebanon under the cover of the Palestine Liberation Army. On the 1st of June 1976-12,000 regular Syrian troops formally entered Lebanon. Their initial operations were directed against Palestinian and leftist militias, which placed Syria, at least temporarily, on the same side as Israel, which had already begun supplying Maronite forces with arms, tanks, and military advisers in May of that year.

  In October 1976, the Arab League summit in Riyadh gave Syria a mandate to keep 40,000 troops in Lebanon as the Arab Deterrent Force. Other Arab nations participated at first but soon lost interest, leaving Syria in sole control with the ADF as diplomatic cover. The so-called civil war pause that followed was uneasy; PLO combatants drifted back into southern Lebanon under the terms of the Riyadh Accords, and violence in the south continued.

  Israel's involvement deepened after Fatah fighters landed on a beach in northern Israel on the 11th of March 1978 and hijacked two buses on the Haifa-Tel Aviv road, killing 37 and wounding 76 Israelis. Four days later, Israel launched Operation Litani, occupying most of the territory south of the Litani River. The UN Security Council passed Resolution 425 calling for immediate Israeli withdrawal and creating the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. Israel withdrew later that year but retained a 12-mile security zone along the border, managed by the South Lebanon Army under Major Saad Haddad.

  Iran's role crystallized after 1982, when the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps established a base in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley and, in the IRGC's own terms, founded, financed, trained, and equipped Hezbollah to operate as a proxy army. On the 23rd of October 1983, an Iranian-sponsored suicide bombing killed 241 American and 58 French servicemen in their Beirut barracks. The bombing at the U.S. Embassy in West Beirut six months earlier, on the 18th of April 1983, had already killed 63 people.

• 6. Christian Against Christian

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  Among the war's lesser-discussed chapters is the systematic violence within the Maronite community itself. By the mid-1970s the two dominant Maronite militias were the National Liberal Party's Tigers Militia, founded in 1968 and led by Dany Chamoun, and the Kataeb Regulatory Forces, officially formed in 1961 and later led by Bachir Gemayel. Bachir Gemayel spent the years 1977-1980 methodically absorbing or destroying smaller militias to consolidate Maronite military power.

  On the 7th of July 1980, at the coastal town of Safra north of Beirut, Gemayel's Phalangist forces launched a surprise attack on the Tigers Militia in what became known as the Safra massacre, or the Day of the Long Knives. The attack killed up to 83 people, most of them ordinary citizens rather than militia fighters, and effectively ended the Tigers as a fighting force. In September 1979, another episode of intra-Christian fighting had occurred in the Beirut suburbs of Bourj Hamoud and Naaba, when Kataeb forces attacked areas controlled by the Armenian Dashnak party in an effort to consolidate Bashir Gemayel's control over all Christian districts. The Armenian militia defeated the attack, but the fighting left 40 people dead.

  The divisions did not end with Bashir Gemayel's election as president on the 23rd of August 1982, because he was assassinated on the 14th of September by Habib Tanious Shartouni, affiliated with the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, only 22 days after taking office. In January 1986, a further split between Lebanese Forces leaders Samir Geagea and Elie Hobeika over Hobeika's support for a pro-Syrian accord produced an internal civil war that resulted in 800 to 1,000 casualties before Geagea secured control and Hobeika fled to form a Syria-allied splinter faction.

• 7. Toward Taif

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  By the late 1980s, Lebanon had fractured into a patchwork of self-governing cantons. The Phalangist territory was known informally as Marounistan. The Progressive Socialist Party administered the Civil Administration of the Mountain, also called the Jebel-el-Druze. A northern canton centered on Zghorta was dominated by the Franjieh family. A TIME correspondent named Wilton Wynn visited the East Beirut Christian canton in 1976, reporting that compared to villages outside its boundaries, garbage was absent from the streets, gas cost one-fifth of the price charged in West Beirut, and bread prices were held to pre-war levels.

  In March 1989, General Michel Aoun, whom departing President Amin Gemayel had appointed as interim prime minister in September 1988, declared war on the Syrian presence in Lebanon. Seven months of artillery exchanges followed before the Arab League brokered a ceasefire and convened a committee to draft a settlement. The result, concluded in October-November 1989, was the Taif Agreement, which redistributed political power among Lebanon's sects and became the formal framework for ending the war.

  Rene Moawad was elected president under the agreement but was assassinated 17 days later. Elias Hrawi succeeded him. General Aoun refused to recognize the new government and continued fighting until the 13th of October 1990, when he was forced from the presidential palace and went into exile. In March 1991, Parliament passed a general amnesty law pardoning political crimes committed before its enactment. In May 1991, all armed factions were formally dissolved, with one exception: Hezbollah, backed by Iran, was allowed to retain its weapons. By 1988, Hezbollah's militia had reached an estimated 25,000 fighters, and by the 1990s it had become the best organized Shia political party in Lebanon, a status that would define Lebanese politics for decades to come.