The War of Brothers (Arabic: حرب الإخوة, romanized: Ḥarb al-ʾIkhwat) was a period of violent armed clashes between rivals Amal and Hezbollah, Lebanon's main Shiite militia movements, during the final stages of the Lebanese Civil War. The fighting broke out in April 1988 and proceeded intermittently in three phases over the following years until the signing of an agreement brokered by their respective foreign backers, Ba'athist Syria and Iran, in November 1990.
The Amal Movement was formed in 1974 as the armed wing of popular Shiite cleric Musa al-Sadr's Movement of the Dispossessed. Amal supported the intervening Syrian army against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Hezbollah, on the other hand, which began as an umbrella organization consisting of more conservative elements of Lebanon's Shiite community, was born in 1982 in reaction to Israel's invasion and occupation of South Lebanon. As the Amal-initiated "War of the Camps" against the PLO ended, Hezbollah and its rival Amal began clashing in South Lebanon and in Beirut's southern suburbs.
Background
The French mandate in Lebanon was carved out of the region of Syria in 1920, aiming to provide Mount Lebanon's Maronite Christians the basis for an independent state of their own. But due to the Christians' limited geographic distribution, the mandate was including Muslims' lands as well, which only contributed to the complication of the political situation. The situation gradually became better over the years, however, as the Shiites were officially recognized as a sect and granted the right to celebrate Ashura.
As the economic situation began to improve in the 1950s, the Shiites, many of whom had relocated to urban areas, started seeking political representation. Musa al-Sadr, an Iranian-Lebanese cleric who arrived in Lebanon in 1959 to occupy the position of Tyre's leading imam, sought to further his community's interests by promoting and strengthening a certain 'Shiite identity' that is consistent with the broader Lebanese identity. Before Sadr's founding of the Movement of the Dispossessed (Harakat al-Mahrumin) in 1974 and the Supreme Islamic Shiite Council before it, the Shiites, who long felt disenfranchised in the political spectrum, tended to join ranks with a variety of available sociopolitical movements, among which were the Lebanese Communist Party, as well as Nasserist, Ba'athist and even Palestinian movements. The Movement of the Dispossessed became increasingly popular among the middle class Shiites and Lebanese returnees from West Africa, as well as some progressive elements within the influential za'im system. Sadr's promotion of the idea of social solidarity among Shiites which, coupled with the narrative of "resistance" to Israel, were particularly appealing to his community and contributed to the growth of his movement.
Civil War and rise of Hezbollah
Sadr initially advocated for non-violence during the early stages of the Lebanese Civil War, but when an explosion took place at a training camp in the Beqaa Valley, he acknowledged, in July 1975, the existence of "Amal" (Arabic acronym for "Lebanese Resistance Brigades") as the military wing of the Movement of the Dispossessed. Amal grew rapidly in size, though with an increasingly weaker central command. This, in addition to the growing military presence of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Shiite lands in the south and its use of methods like torture, increased tension between the two parties. At first, the Shiites, particularly the ones living in the south, were generally supportive of the PLO, to which Amal was originally allied. But relations between the PLO and Amal were further strained by the latter's decision to support the Syrian intervention of 1976 against the Lebanese National Movement-PLO coalition. Sadr also drew criticism from within the Shiite community when, later in 1976, he struck a deal with Maronite Phalangist forces besieging the al-Nabaa district of Beirut, allowing the relocation of 100,000 Shiites, among whom were Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, from the neighborhood to Jabal Amel and the Beqaa. When Israel launched Operation Litani in 1978 against the PLO in South Lebanon, disproportionate damage was inflicted upon the Shiite community, as it was caught in the crossfire. Sadr himself criticized the PLO for provoking the conflict, and supporters of Amal shifted to blaming the Palestinians for their community's plight. Violent clashes between Amal and the various Palestinian factions operating in the country became more frequent between 1978 and the Israeli invasion of 1982. The IDF operation, which eventually succeeded in routing the PLO out of Lebanon, was welcomed by a portion of the southern Shiite community, given that it aimed to destroy their Palestinian foes.
Musa al-Sadr's unsolved disappearance in 1978 during a trip to Libya, following the Litani operation, led to a struggle for influence among the Shiites, and left Amal's leadership divided along moderate and extremist lines. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 had an equally significant impact on the Shiites of Lebanon, which later managed, through Hezbollah, to indoctrinate the community at the expense of Amal's internal schisms. Hezbollah originated from a Syrian–Iranian deal that allowed Tehran to deploy a 1,500-member Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) delegation in the form of religious scholars and military officials. The Syrian government's concern by the possibility of Israeli influence among the Shiites of the south in the wake of the 1982 IDF invasion motivated its decision to allow the IRGC delegation to operate freely in the country, despite Syrian wariness of the prospect of Iran's clerical entrenchment in Lebanon. Hussein al-Musawi, one of Amal's leading members, split from the movement in June 1982 to form Islamic Amal. Two months later, Iran's revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, met with a number of prominent Lebanese Shiite figures in Tehran, including Fadlallah and Subhi al-Tufayli, who would later become Hezbollah's first secretary-general, among several others. During this conference, Khomeini encouraged his guests to form a resistance movement against Israel in South Lebanon. Meanwhile, the IRGC delegation, stationed in the Beqaa Valley, helped form the nucleus of Hezbollah's leadership after a recruitment campaign that managed to gather several Lebanese clerics in its ranks. At the same time, the military wing of this movement grew rapidly as a result of extensive Iranian funding and training. Among the constituent groups of Hezbollah were the Muslim Student Union and the Lebanese branch of the Islamic Dawa Party of Iraq, both of which Fadlallah helped create, as well as Hussein al-Musawi's Islamic Amal.
Lead-up to war
Hezbollah originally devoted itself to overthrowing the Lebanese government and establishing a Faqihi Islamic Republic in the image of Iran and resisting the presence of Israeli troops and the Multinational Force in Lebanon (MNF) in the country, as illustrated later by the "Open Letter", a constitutional document which it released in February 1985. The organization is widely credited with a series of attacks sponsored by Iran in the early 1980s, not long after which the MNF ceased to exist. Such incidents include the 1983 suicide bombings in Beirut which struck separate buildings housing MNF troops, killing 241 American soldiers and 58 French paratroopers. The movement also engaged in a series of kidnappings of foreigners and assassinations of politicians throughout the civil war. Given the criticism Syria has received for its links to Hezbollah, the latter's tactics were badly received by both the Syrian government and Amal, who had been working toward achieving favorable perception by world media and the United States. Hafez al-Assad, Syria's president, warned that he would expel the IRGC from Lebanon following Hezbollah's kidnapping of David S. Dodge, the acting president of the American University of Beirut. Amal's leader, Nabih Berri, became the target of multiple Iranian-backed assassination attempts perpetrated by Hezbollah and other pro-Khomeini elements in Lebanon. Assad's threat to the IRGC was materialized when he expelled 300 of its recruits from Baalbek following a complaint by Berri to the Syrian government over the attempts on his life. The hijacking of TWA Flight 847 from Athens to Rome in 1985 by Hezbollah, which was forced to land in the Amal-controlled Beirut International Airport, initially embarrassed Berri and Syria, and further added to the tension between the Syrian and Iranian camps. Hezbollah opposed the Syrian-brokered Tripartite Accord later that year, and supported the PLO during the War of the Camps, which was launched by Amal, with Syrian support, in order to curb the resurgence of Yasser Arafat's PLO in Lebanon. Hezbollah considered this sort of inter-Muslim fighting a distraction from the resistance to Israel, and Iran was keen to lift Amal's siege on the Palestinian camps, publicly denouncing its actions as beneficial to the Israelis, against whom it sought to create a Shiite-Palestinian coalition.
On its part, Amal was not only concerned because Palestinian fighters in Lebanon were increasing in number, but also because their camps were geographically located between its strongholds in West Beirut and Hezbollah-controlled Shiite districts in the city, where the latter was gaining influence at Amal's expense. Violent skirmishes between Amal and Hezbollah were rare, but limited clashes did, however, break out twice in 1986 during the War of the Camps. In February, Amal, backed by the Shiite Sixth Brigade of the Lebanese Army, fought Hezbollah in Beirut. They clashed once again in September, and this time the violence reportedly ended with a ceasefire, following an Iranian diplomatic intervention. Another confrontation took place in 1987, when over 2,500 Hezbollah supporters attempted a march on Tyre in the south. They retreated when Amal mobilized its men to block the move. The standoff was accompanied by a large demonstration in the city in which thousands of Shiites rallied in support of Amal. On 22 February 1987, spurred by the kidnapping of Terry Waite, attributed to Hezbollah, and the defeat of the Syrian allied Amal Militia in a week of fighting with the Druze and Communist militias, the Syrian Army deployed 7,000 commandos into West Beirut. On February 24, 1987, an incident occurred at the Fathallah barracks in which 23 Hezbollah militiamen were executed by the Syrians. Hezbollah fighters were placed on high alert following the massacre, while the movement's top leadership condemned it and demanded an apology. Following intense pressure from Iran the Syrians agreed to stop further activity against Hizbollah.
Events
On February 17, 1988, while on his way back from a meeting with a local Amal official, American colonel William R. Higgins, who was heading a United Nations observers' mission, was captured by Hezbollah men on a coastal road in South Lebanon. Earlier this month, they also kidnapped, but eventually released, two UNRWA workers in an area controlled by Amal near Sidon. Nabih Berri considered Hezbollah's actions a territorial breach, and ordered an extensive search and rescue operation in Iqlim al-Tuffah following the Higgins incident. Hezbollah, while backing his captors' demands, denied any responsibility for the kidnapping. When Amal's operation spread to villages in the region which Hezbollah controlled, carrying out a series of arrests and home to home inspections, the latter responded by killing a Lebanese Army officer associated with Amal, and by attacking an Amal checkpoint on the outskirts of the village of Harouf in the Jabal Amel region.
Fighting in Nabatieh and Ghazieh
During the early stages of an Amal offensive on April 5, 1988, Hezbollah managed to occupy Nabatieh and the surrounding villages. It seized Amal positions and offices in the town, as well as in Ghazieh. In a counterattack, however, Amal retook Nabatieh. It proceeded to attack Hezbollah militants in Tyre and its surroundings, and took the conflict further south to Siddikine. The fighting had gone uninterrupted, despite mediation attempts by a local imam in Nabatieh. Amal had retaken positions it had lost earlier in the fighting, in addition to the three villages of Jebchit, Doueir and Zawtar, previously considered Hezbollah strongholds. The armed clashes were accompanied by psychological warfare, through which Amal attempted to pressure its rival, with Berri associating his movement's military successes to broad public support. Amal declared victory over "extremism and political kidnapping" by mid-April, announcing an end to Hezbollah's military presence in the south, and expelled a number of its rival's clerics to the Beqaa.