Lebanese Civil War

The Lebanese Civil War was a many-sided conflict fought in Lebanon from 1975 to 1990. It began as a struggle between Christian militias and Palestinian armed groups allied with Lebanese Muslim and leftist parties, and grew into a war of shifting alliances in which Syria, Israel and Iran intervened. Estimates of the dead range from about 120,000 to 150,000, and nearly a million people were driven from their homes.

Lebanon became independent in 1943 under a system that shared power among religious communities: the president was to be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim. As the population changed, the arrangement came under growing strain. Palestinian refugees had arrived after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and after the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was expelled from Jordan in 1970 its fighters made Lebanon their main base, controlling much of the south and parts of Beirut. Many Christians saw the armed Palestinian presence as a threat to the state, while many Muslims and leftists sympathised with it and sought a bigger share of power.

Tension boiled over on 13 April 1975, when gunmen fired on a church in the Beirut suburb of Ain el-Rummaneh and Phalangist militiamen then killed some 30 Palestinians on a bus. Fighting spread across the capital. Massacres followed on all sides, including killings at Phalangist roadblocks on "Black Saturday" in December 1975, the killing of hundreds at Karantina by Christian forces and the retaliatory attack on Damour by Palestinian militias in January 1976. As people fled to areas held by their own community, Beirut split into a largely Christian east and a Muslim west. In June 1976 Syrian troops entered Lebanon, at first acting against the Palestinians and their allies, and later stayed on as the core of an Arab peacekeeping force. Some 60,000 people were killed in 1975–1977.

Palestinian attacks on Israel from Lebanese soil led Israel to invade the south in 1978 and to set up a security zone held by an allied militia. On 6 June 1982, after an attempt on the life of its ambassador in London, Israel launched a much larger invasion, besieged West Beirut and forced the PLO leadership and fighters to leave the country under international supervision. The newly elected president, Bachir Gemayel, was assassinated in September. Days later, Phalangist militiamen, operating in an area controlled by the Israeli army, killed hundreds or possibly thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in the Sabra and Shatila camps. An Israeli inquiry found the defence minister, Ariel Sharon, personally responsible, and he resigned that post.

A multinational force including American, French, Italian and British troops arrived in 1982. In 1983 suicide bombings struck the American embassy and then the barracks of the American and French contingents, killing 241 American and 58 French servicemen, and the force withdrew in 1984. In the same years Iran's Revolutionary Guards helped found Hezbollah among the Shia community, inspired by the Iranian Revolution. The later 1980s saw fighting within communities as much as between them, such as the "War of the Camps" between the Shia Amal movement and Palestinian factions.

In October 1989 Lebanese members of parliament meeting in Ta'if, Saudi Arabia, agreed a settlement brokered by the Arab League. It gave Muslims and Christians equal numbers of seats in parliament and gave Syria a major role. General Michel Aoun, head of a rival government in East Beirut, rejected it, and in 1990 his troops fought a destructive battle with the Christian Lebanese Forces militia. On 13 October 1990 Syrian forces and their Lebanese allies overran his positions, and he fled into exile, ending the war.

Most militias were disbanded, but Hezbollah kept its weapons, citing Israel's continued occupation of the south, which ended in 2000. A 1991 amnesty covered most wartime political crimes, and tens of thousands of people remained missing. Syrian troops stayed until 2005.

Our 1960 map shows Lebanon before the war, and our 1985 map shows it in the middle of the conflict, with unchanged international borders.