
Author: C.R. Pennell, former Al-Tajir Lecturer in the History of Islam and the Middle East, University of Melbourne, Australia
Edited by: Erik Prins
The First Stage of the Lebanese Civil War
In January 1976, Maronite Kataib militias took control of the Muslim Lebanese and Palestinian slum of Karantina and massacred 1,500 people. On 18 January, they went on to besiege Tel al-Zaatar Palestinian refugee camp. On 20 January, Muslim militias and those belonging to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) retaliated by massacring the Christian population of the town of Damour.
The Syrian government of Hafez al-Assad saw these developments as a two-pronged threat to the regime. It feared that the fragmentation of Lebanon might spill over into a wider balkanisation of the Middle East in general and of Syria in particular; and that a radicalized regime in Lebanon might allow Syrian opposition groups allied to the Lebanese National Movement to become stronger and threaten the dominance of the Ba`ath party, the ruling party in Syria at the time.
In mid-February, under Syrian pressure, President Franjieh proposed a new constitutional settlement, although it did not amount to much. It reaffirmed the sectarian distribution of the roles of president, prime minister and speaker of parliament but distributed parliamentary seats on a fifty-fifty basis.
It also proposed making appointments to the civil service and military on merit rather than an ethnic basis. Nobody supported it, as the different stakeholders would lose advantages they wanted to keep. The left-wing National Movement called it “a cynical exercise in cosmetic reform,” and the Druze leader Kemal Jumblatt refused to take part in choosing a cabinet.
The army then mutinied and split. Muslims split off under lieutenant Ahmed Khatib and formed the Lebanese Arab Army. Christians joined Maronite militias, notably the Army of Free Lebanon led by Antoine Barakat and Saad Haddad.
The Syrian regime was appalled. If Lebanon was partitioned it might lead to a small Christian state that would make an alliance with Israel on the one hand and a radical Arab state supported by Iraq on the other. With the tacit consent of both the United States and Israel, the Syrian army invaded Lebanon on 31 May and 1 June 1976, in the face of resistance from Palestinian forces and the Lebanese Left.
One column moved along the Beirut–Damascus Road and stopped outside Beirut, and a second one went into the Chouf Mountains towards Sidon, where PLO forces stopped it. A third entered the Bekaa valley, moving towards Tripoli, where Christian militias forced it to a halt.
Syrian Invasion of Lebanon
The Syrian government, through its proxies in Lebanon, forced Franjieh to resign and on June 1 ensured the election of Elias Sarkis as President. Sarkis was the former governor of the central bank and beaten by Franjieh in the elections six years earlier.
Syrian President Assad was worried the Israelis would intervene. The size of the Syrian army that had invaded Lebanon early June grew from 12,000 troops to 25,000, to prevent the defeat of its Maronite Christian allies.
On 12 August, the militia loyal to former president Chamoun that had been besieging the Palestinian refugee camp at Tel al-Zaatar since January broke in and massacred between 2,000 and 3,000 of its inhabitants.
In October, the Saudi government organized a conference that effectively handed Lebanon over to Syria. The only real symbol of Lebanese independence left now was the banking system. The Lebanese pound remained a strong currency. Apart from that, there was widespread disorder.
Throughout the spring of 1977, there was a wave of kidnappings. Kemal Jumblatt, the Druze leader, was murdered, probably by the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), in collaboration with the Syrian Ba’ath Party. The Syrian hegemony handed overlordship of Mount Lebanon to the Maronites.
The first stage of the civil war had brought the intervention of outside powers in the conflict.
1978: The Israeli Invasion of southern Lebanon
On 11 March 1978, Palestinian guerrillas crossed from southern Lebanon into Israel and hijacked an Israeli bus. In response, on 15 March, Israeli forces mounted a full invasion of southern Lebanon as far as the Litani river. They then created a frontier zone controlled by Major Saad Haddad who was now head of the South Lebanon Army (SLA), a Christian splinter group.
The SLA allied itself with Israel and gained substantial power. In 1979, Haddad proclaimed a “Lebanese Free State” in the south. Effectively, this put both Mount Lebanon and the far south under Maronite control. Attempting to keep the peace in areas between Lebanon and Israel, the UN Security Council set up the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) to patrol the south as well. The UN has renewed UNIFIL’s mandate repeatedly ever since.
In 1979, Israel and Egypt signed a full peace treaty. The Camp David Accords were designed to provide a “Framework for Peace in the Middle East.” A UN resolution (242) provided a supposedly agreed upon basis for a peaceful settlement of the conflict, with the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank and Gaza and a move towards an autonomous self-governing authority in the West Bank and the Gaza strip.
However, the treaty did not mention the Palestinian Right of Return nor the Syrian Golan Heights (occupied by Israel in 1967), both of which affected the situation in Lebanon. In fact, there was no provision for Lebanon at all.
Inside Lebanon, political interests overshadowed religious divisions. While Maronite forces, particularly the Phalange loyal to Bashir Gemayyel, opposed the Palestinians, so did the Shia militia, Amal. Many Shias resented the Palestinian-Sunni alliance that had disrupted the south.
Indeed, at first Major Haddad had significant support among the Shias. Against this background, a new Shia political force began to emerge, linked to the Shi’a centre of Najaf in Iraq and the Iraqi al-Da’wa party.
After the Iranian revolution of 1979, the new leaders of Iran also developed a close relationship with the Shia community in Lebanon. Another international player had emerged to enmesh itself in Lebanese affairs. But the reverse was also true: actors in the Lebanese crisis spread their influence beyond its borders. In March 1975, a radical Saudi prince who had trained with Palestinians in Lebanon, assassinated King Faisal.
1982 – The Second Israeli invasion of Lebanon

In June, after a Palestinian splinter group attempted to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London, the Israeli army invaded Lebanon again. ‘Operation peace for Galilee’ took Israeli troops as far north as Beirut in July. The Israelis wanted to end Palestinian attacks from Lebanon, destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the country, and install a pro-Israel Maronite government.
On 7 July 1982, US President Ronald Reagan agreed to send a small US military force as part of a larger multinational peacekeeping mission to help stabilize Lebanon. It included military units from France, Italy, and Great Britain. Its purpose was to oversee the withdrawal of the PLO from West Beirut and prevent a bloody confrontation between Israeli forces and Palestinian fighters.
Surrounded in West Beirut and subjected to heavy Israeli bombardment, the PLO and their allies negotiated a ceasefire with the aid of United States Special Envoy Philip Habib. The PLO, led by Yasser Arafat, was expelled from Lebanon. The following month, in August 1982, Philip Habib organised a truce and under its terms the PLO moved its command from Beirut to Tunis while the Israelis withdrew from Beirut itself. That withdrawal was completed between 21 August and 1 September.
Meanwhile, on 23 August 1982, the pro-Israeli leader of the Maronite-dominated Phalange party, Bashir Gemayel, was elected president. Less than a month later, on 14 September, he was assassinated. On the following day, the Israeli army swept into West Beirut.
The Sabra and Shatila Massacre
Bashir Gemayel’s brother Amin replaced him as president with the backing of the Israeli army, with a clear determination that he would not risk the Maronite hegemony. Gemayel met opposition from a broad coalition of Sunnis, Palestinians and leftists, represented by the Lebanese National Front.
Between 16 and 18 September, Phalangist units avenged their dead leader by attacking the Palestinian neighbourhood of Sabra and the refugee camp of Shatila and massacred somewhere between 1,500 and 3,500 civilians, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shi’a. The Phalangists acted under the protection of the Israelis, or at least with their tacit consent. The Israeli government quickly set up a commission of inquiry into the massacres headed by the top judge in Israel, Yitzhak Kahan, who was President of the Supreme Court.
When it presented its report on 8 February 1983, the commission said that “direct responsibility” rested with the Phalangist militias and that no Israelis were “directly responsible.” But it also found that the Israeli Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon, had a “personal responsibility “because he had ignored the dangers and had not taken “appropriate measures to prevent bloodshed.”
The commission recommended that he should be dismissed. The Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin refused to comply but protests in Israel eventually forced Sharon to resign. On 29 September 1982, the IDF withdrew from Beirut and ended its operation there.
New political players and tactics in Lebanon

The Israeli invasion in 1982 laid the basis for two important developments in southern Lebanon. The first was the emergence of the Shia Hezbollah movement and the second was the creation of a fiefdom controlled by Haddad’s South Lebanon Army as an Israeli surrogate.
At first, many Shia in southern Lebanon had welcomed the Israeli invasion , because they wanted the PLO to leave. But when the Israelis made it clear that they were staying, some Shia turned militant. The Amal movement, led by Nabih Berri, split into moderate and radical wings, and a prominent figure among the Amal radicals was Sayyid Husayn Musawi.
Musawi accused Berri of collaboration with the enemy and went to the Bekaa Valley to found Islamic Amal in June 1982. It soon united with several smaller Shia movements, to form Hezbollah as an umbrella organisation. Hezbollah then built up links in Beirut with Sheikh Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, the head of the Council of Shia Religious Scholars, who became its spiritual guide, and another influential religious leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
The revolutionary regime in Iran sent help in the form of funding, and a Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guard) unit to the Bekaa in eastern Lebanon. Hezbollah cooperated with Teheran by kidnapping foreign hostages in Beirut, including six Americans. In Washington, elements in the administration attempted to free them through a backdoor deal to provide aid to the Contras, a rebel group in Nicaragua.
Congress had already banned the administration from legislative appropriations to support the Contras. The Iran-Contra deal was essentially a money laundering scheme designed to raise funds for them off the books, with arms shipments to Iran as part of a deal that also would free those American hostages.
Hostage taking became a regular feature of the Lebanese civil war between 1982 and 1992 when over a hundred foreigners were kidnapped, notably three Britons (John McCarthy, Brian Keenan and Terry Waite). They were mainly American and Western European, but overall, they came from 21 countries. Also among the Lebanese themselves there were hostages. Between 1976 and 1992, some 17,000 Lebanese were abducted and disappeared. Hezbollah officially denied any involvement, but it was one of the biggest hostage takers.

Hostage taking was not the only new political tactic that developed during the Lebanese civil war. Suicide bombing was another. On 18 April 1983, a van smashed into the US Embassy, and its driver detonated a ton of explosives. Some 60 diplomats, service members, and visitors were killed. On 23 October, truck bomb attacks on the headquarters of units of the multinational peacekeeping forces killed 241 US and 58 French troops. Hezbollah organised these attacks and many others.
As in Iran, martyr operations led to the creation of the cult of martyrdom, although not all the suicide bombers were Shia. In April 1985, a young Christian woman became the ‘Bride of the South’ by carrying out a suicide operation against the Israeli army in the south. She was a member of the SSNP and the first known female suicide bomber.
US troops withdrew from Lebanon in 1984. Israeli troops had already begun to pull back. On 17 May 1983, an agreement between Israel and Lebanon ended the state of war between the two countries in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal beginning in August. By 3 September, the Israeli army had moved back south of the Awali river in southern Lebanon, leaving a “security zone” in the south.
This southern zone took up roughly ten percent of Lebanon’s total area and it was partly controlled by Israel’s local ally, the South Lebanese Army. To bolster its numbers the SLA offered an attractive wage to any man who agreed to join its ranks. Because South Lebanon was a poor region many local inhabitants did so willingly. The SLA also forced others to work for it. It imposed quotas or “levees” upon villages and threatened collective punishments if these were not met.
Disintegrating Lebanon
In the second half of the 1980s, Lebanon effectively disintegrated. The economy collapsed because the PLO withdrew enormous amounts of money from Lebanese banks, part of a wider capital flight that led to the collapse of the Lebanese pound and rapid inflation.
Different militias divided the territory between them and effectively operated as business enterprises. There was a cantonisation of the economy with the ports ( and airports) controlled by different militias. Widespread abductions continued and an estimated third of the population left the country.
Even so, the traditional structures of the Lebanese state remained in place, if only as a rump.
There was still, in theory, a national army, and in 1984, Michel Aoun became its youngest ever commander, at the age of 49. And there was a president. Amine Gemayel, elected by Parliament in 1982, who had to be replaced in 1988, according to the constitution. But Parliament, which showed no capacity to influence events, failed to elect a successor to Gemayel.
As a result, on 22 September, the soon-to-be-departed President Amine Gemayel appointed Aoun, a Maronite, as interim Prime Minister at the head of Military Government and dismissed the acting prime minister, Selim Hoss. Hoss, as the National Pact had laid down, was a Sunni Muslim, so he refused to accept the new arrangement. There were now two rival governments. Lebanese Christians supported Aoun, based in East Beirut, while Muslims supported Hoss, who was based in West Beirut and had Syrian support.
In February 1989, General Aoun launched what he called a “War of liberation” directed at the Syrian military presence. Even in his own community many Christians disputed the intransigence of his policy towards the Syrian presence.
As a result, he lacked cohesive support when the Syrian air force, with US connivance, attacked the Presidential Palace and forced Aoun to seek refuge in the French embassy in Beirut. He went into exile in Paris on 13 October 1990. This event is often described as the end of the civil war.