The Lebanese Civil War (Arabic: الحرب الأهلية اللبنانية, al-ḥarb al-ahliyyah al-libnāniyyah) was a multifaceted armed conflict fought in Lebanon from 1975 to 1990. It resulted in an estimated 120,000 deaths, displaced nearly one million people, and caused widespread destruction across the country.
The war arose from longstanding political and sectarian tensions within Lebanon's confessional system, compounded by demographic change, the presence of Palestinian armed groups following the Arab–Israeli conflict, and the influence of regional rivalries and the Cold War. Fighting initially broke out between Christian militias and Palestinian factions, principally the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), allied with Lebanese Muslim, leftist, and pan-Arab groups. As the conflict escalated, it developed into a complex, multi-sided war involving shifting alliances among Lebanese factions and the military intervention of Syria, Israel, Iran, and other foreign actors.
Throughout the conflict, numerous militias fought for political, sectarian, and territorial objectives, with alliances frequently changing over time. While much of the fighting occurred between opposing sectarian and ideological coalitions, significant violence also took place within individual communities. International peacekeeping forces, including the Multinational Force in Lebanon and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), were deployed during different stages of the war.
The 1989 Taif Agreement laid the foundation for ending the conflict, and most militias were disbanded following the war's conclusion in 1990. In 1991, the Lebanese Parliament enacted a general amnesty for political crimes committed during the conflict. Hezbollah, however, remained armed, citing its role in resisting the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. The war left a lasting impact on Lebanon's political system, economy, and society, and many of its underlying political and sectarian divisions have continued to shape the country in the decades since its end.
Background
Ottoman and European rule
In 1860, a civil war between Druze and Maronites erupted in the Ottoman Mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon. The war resulted in the massacre of about 10,000 Christians and at least 6,000 Druzes.
During World War I, most Arabs fought in the Ottoman army against the British and French invaders.
With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the French took control of the area under the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon. The French created the state of Greater Lebanon as a safe haven for the Maronites, but expanded it beyond the historical Ottoman borders, including a large Muslim population.
In 1926, Lebanon was declared a republic and a constitution was adopted, which France would suspend in 1932 and 1939. Sunni Muslim factions refused to recognize Lebanon's separation from Syria until its claim on Lebanon was abandoned in 1936. In parallel, Maronite Christian leaders sought a more equal partnership with French authorities and a move towards self-governance, although both communities were divided in their interests. In 1936, the Maronite Phalange party was founded by Pierre Gemayel.
Lebanese independence
World War II and the 1940s brought great change to Lebanon and the Middle East. Lebanon was promised independence, which was achieved on 22 November 1943. Free French troops, who had invaded Lebanon in 1941 to rid Beirut of the Vichy French forces, left Lebanon in 1946. The Maronites assumed power over Lebanon and its economy. A parliament was created in which both Muslims and Christians each had a set quota of seats. Accordingly, the President was to be a Maronite, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim and the Speaker of Parliament a Shia Muslim.
In 1947, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine led to civil war in Palestine, the end of Mandatory Palestine, and the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948. The ongoing civil war was transformed into a state conflict between Israel and the Arab states in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. This led to Palestinian refugees crossing the border into Lebanon.
In July 1958, Lebanon was threatened by a civil war between Maronite Christians and Muslims. President Camille Chamoun had attempted to break the stranglehold on Lebanese politics exercised by traditional political families in Lebanon. These families maintained their electoral appeal by cultivating strong client–patron relations with their local communities. Although he succeeded in sponsoring alternative political candidates to enter the elections in 1957, causing the traditional families to lose their positions, these families then embarked upon a war with Chamoun, referred to as the War of the Pashas.
In 1956, tensions with Egypt escalated when the non-aligned President, Camille Chamoun, did not break off diplomatic relations with the Western powers that attacked Egypt during the Suez Crisis, angering Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. This was during the Cold War and Chamoun has often been called pro-Western, though he had signed several trade deals with the Soviet Union (see Gendzier). Nasser had attacked Chamoun because of his suspected support for the U.S. led Baghdad Pact. Nasser felt that the pro-western Baghdad Pact posed a threat to Arab nationalism.
President Chamoun looked to regional pacts to ensure protection from foreign armies: Lebanon historically had a small cosmetic army that was never effective in defending Lebanon's territorial integrity, and this is why in later years the PLO guerrilla factions had found it easy to enter Lebanon and set up bases, as well as take over army barracks on the border with Israel as early as 1968. Early skirmishes saw the army lose control over its barracks to the PLO and lose many soldiers. Even prior to this, president Chamoun was aware of the country's vulnerability to outside forces.
His Lebanese pan-Arabist Sunni Muslim Prime Minister Rashid Karami supported Nasser in 1956 and 1958. Lebanese Muslims pushed the government to join the newly created United Arab Republic, a country formed out of the unification of Syria and Egypt, while the majority of Lebanese and especially the Maronites wanted to keep Lebanon as an independent nation with its own independent parliament. President Camille Chamoun feared the toppling of his government and asked for U.S. intervention. At the time the United States was engaged in the Cold War.
Chamoun asked for assistance proclaiming that Communists were going to overthrow his government. Chamoun was responding not only to the revolt of former political bosses, but also to the fact that both Egypt and Syria had taken the opportunity to deploy proxies into the Lebanese conflict. Thus the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), led by George Habash and later to become the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and a faction of the PLO, were deployed to Lebanon by Nasser.
The ANM were a clandestine militia implicated in attempted coups against both the Jordanian monarchy and the Iraqi president throughout the 1950s at Nasser's bidding. The founding members of Fatah, including Yasser Arafat and Khalil Wazir, also flew to Lebanon to use the insurrection as a means by which a war could be fomented toward Israel. They participated in the fighting by directing armed forces against the government security in the city of Tripoli according to Yezid Sayigh's work.
In 1958, President Chamoun was unable to convince the Maronite army commander, Fuad Chehab, to use the armed forces against Muslim demonstrators, fearing that getting involved in internal politics would split his small and weak multi-confessional force. The Phalange militia came to the president's aid instead to bring a final end to the road blockades which were crippling the major cities. Encouraged by its efforts during this conflict, later that year, principally through violence and the success of general strikes in Beirut, the Phalange achieved what journalists dubbed the "counterrevolution". By their actions the Phalangists brought down the government of Prime Minister Karami and secured for their leader, Pierre Gemayel, a position in the four-man cabinet that was subsequently formed.
Estimates of the Phalange's membership by Yezid Sayigh and other academic sources put them at a few thousand. Non-academic sources tend to inflate the Phalanges membership. What should be kept in mind was that this insurrection was met with widespread disapproval by many Lebanese who wanted no part in the regional politics and many young men aided the Phalange in their suppression of the insurrection, especially as many of the demonstrators were little more than proxy forces hired by groups such as the ANM and Fatah founders as well as being hired by the defeated parliamentary bosses.
Demographic tensions
Palestinian insurgency in Lebanon
In the 1960s Lebanon was relatively calm, but this soon changed. Fatah and other Palestinian Liberation Organization factions had long been active among the 400,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanese camps. Throughout the 1960s, the center for armed Palestinian activities had been in Jordan. They were forced to relocate after being evicted by King Hussein during the 1970 Black September in Jordan. Fatah and other Palestinian groups attempted to mount a coup in Jordan by incentivizing a split in the Jordanian army, something that the ANM had attempted to do a decade earlier by Nasser's bidding. Jordan responded, and expelled the Palestinian forces into Lebanon. When they arrived, they created "a State within the State". This action was not welcomed by the Lebanese government, and this shook Lebanon's fragile sectarian balance.
Solidarity with the Palestinians was expressed by the Lebanese Sunni Muslims, with the aim to change the political system from one of consensus amongst different sects, towards one where their power share would increase. Certain groups in the Lebanese National Movement wished to bring about a more secular and democratic order, but as this group increasingly included Islamist groups, encouraged to join by the PLO, the more progressive demands of the initial agenda was dropped by January 1976. Islamists did not support a secular order in Lebanon and wished to bring about rule by Muslim clerics.
These events, especially the role of Fatah and the Tripoli Islamist movement known as Tawhid, in changing the agenda being pursued by many groups, including Communists. This ragtag coalition has often been referred to as left-wing, but many participants were actually very conservative and had religious elements that did not share any broader ideological agenda. Rather, they were brought together by the short-term goal of overthrowing the established political order, each motivated by their own grievances.
These forces enabled the PLO / Fatah to transform the Western Part of Beirut into its stronghold. Fatah constituted 80% of the membership of the PLO and Fatah guerrillas now controlled most of its institutions. The PLO had taken over the heart of Sidon and Tyre in the early 1970s. It controlled great swathes of south Lebanon, in which the indigenous Shiite population had to suffer the humiliation of passing through PLO checkpoints and now they had worked their way by force into Beirut.
The PLO did this with the assistance of so-called volunteers from Libya and Algeria shipped in through the ports it controlled, as well as a number of Sunni Lebanese groups who had been trained and armed by PLO/ Fatah and encouraged to declare themselves as separate militias. However, as Rex Brynen makes clear in his publication on the PLO, these militias were nothing more than "shop-fronts" or in Arabic "Dakakin" for Fatah, armed gangs with no ideological foundation and no organic reason for their existence, except the fact their individual members were put on the PLO/ Fatah payroll.
In February 1975, the strike by fishermen at Sidon could be considered the first important episode that set off the outbreak of hostilities. That event involved a specific issue: the attempt of former President Camille Chamoun, also the head of the Maronite-oriented National Liberal Party, to monopolize fishing along the coast of Lebanon. The injustices perceived by the fishermen evoked sympathy from many Lebanese, and reinforced the resentment and antipathy that were widely felt against the state and the economic monopolies. The demonstrations against the fishing company were quickly transformed into a political action supported by the political left and their allies in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The state tried to suppress the demonstrators, and a sniper reportedly killed a popular figure in the city, the former Mayor of Sidon, Maarouf Saad.
Many non-academic sources claim a government sniper killed Saad; however, there is no evidence to support such a claim, and it appears that whoever had killed him had intended that what began as a small and quiet demonstration to evolve into something more. The sniper targeted Saad right at the end of the demonstration as it was dissipating.
Farid Khazen, sourcing the local histories of Sidon academics and eyewitnesses, gives a run-down of the puzzling events of the day that based on their research. Khazen reveals, based on the Sidon academic's work, that Saad was not in dispute with the fishing consortium made up of Yugoslav nationals. The Yugoslavian representatives in Lebanon had negotiated with the fisherman's union to make the fishermen shareholders in the company. The company offered to modernize the fishermen's equipment, buy their catch, and give their union an annual subsidy.