# Lebanese Civil War: How Beirut Became a Ruin

*History & War · Eleanor Hartwell · 2026-08-17*

## TL;DR

The Lebanese Civil War was a multifaceted armed conflict that began in April 1975 and formally ended in 1991. It involved a complex mix of local militias, religious factions, and foreign interventions, including the PLO, Syria, and Israel. The conflict devastated Beirut and the country, with the Taif Agreement paving the way for a fragile peace.

## Key facts

- The conflict began in April 1975 in Beirut, triggered by a skirmish between Palestinian militants and Christian Phalangist militiamen.
- The war lasted until 1991, when the Taif Agreement, brokered in 1989, led to a formal end to the fighting.
- The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 forced the PLO leadership to leave Beirut under international supervision.
- Syrian forces entered Lebanon early in the conflict and maintained a military presence for decades afterward.
- The downtown area of Beirut, once a vibrant commercial hub, was reduced to a no-man's-land known as the Green Line.

## From "Switzerland of the Middle East" to Rubble: How the Lebanese Civil War Began

Before the guns fell silent in October 1990, Beirut had earned a nickname that now reads like a cruel joke: the "Switzerland of the Middle East." For fifteen years, from 13 April 1975 to 13 October 1990, this small Mediterranean nation descended into a nightmare that killed an estimated 150,000 to 230,000 people and drove millions from their homes. The glamour of pre-war Beirut, with its French boulevards, seaside cafes, and banking towers, masked a powder keg that had been filling with gunpowder for decades.

To understand how a country could transform from a regional jewel into a battlefield, you have to look back at 1958. That year, the Cold War reached Lebanese shores when the United States landed troops on the beaches of Beirut under the Eisenhower Doctrine. It was a short intervention, meant to shore up the pro-Western government against a rebellion that had erupted along sectarian lines. The Americans left, but the fissures they had come to paper over never really sealed.

The deeper problem was demographic. Lebanon's power-sharing system rested on a census taken in 1932, which showed Christians holding a comfortable majority and the lion's share of political power. But the creation of Israel in 1948 sent hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees streaming into Lebanon, and that changed everything. The old numbers no longer matched reality, and Muslim communities, now a growing share of the population, began demanding a new count. The Maronite Christian establishment refused, knowing that a fresh census would strip them of their grip on the presidency and the military command.

Then came the guerrillas. In the early 1970s, fighters from the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, moved their operations into Lebanon after being expelled from Jordan in the bloody events of Black September in 1970. They set up shop in the south and in refugee camps, launching raids into Israel and drawing retaliatory strikes. The Lebanese state, too weak to stop them and too divided to expel them, watched its sovereignty erode by the day. Sectarian tension, ideological rivalry, and the weight of a refugee population that had outgrown its welcome all collided in a single, explosive moment on a spring day in 1975.

## The Riyad Conference of 1976: A Peace That Never Took Hold By mid-October 1976, eighteen months into the Lebanese Civil War, the country had already descended into chaos, and the Arab world was scrambling for a solution. On 17-18 October 1976, the leaders of Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia gathered in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, determined to broker a Middle Eastern-style peace: a formula where everyone gained a little and nobody left fully satisfied. Three resolutions came out of that meeting, each one promising more than it could possibly deliver. The first called for a ceasefire effective 21 October 1976, with all parties returning to the positions they held before April 1975. The catch was that nobody actually returned to those lines, and those who did were trading fire again by the next day. The second resolution created a 30,000-strong Arab Deterrent Force, which sounded reassuringly like a United Nations peacekeeping mission. In practice, the force was almost entirely composed of Syrian soldiers. What was sold as a neutral peacekeeping body became, in effect, a Syrian control mechanism. The "peace force" arrived with the mandate to separate the warring factions, but it increasingly acted as an instrument of Damascus, helping to shape the conflict in ways that suited Syrian interests rather than Lebanese ones. The third point addressed the Palestine Liberation Organization directly. The PLO would be allowed to remain in Lebanon, but it was expected to respect Lebanese sovereignty. That clause might as well have been written in invisible ink. The PLO, which had established itself as a state within a state through the 1969 Cairo Agreement granting it full authority over refugee camps, continued operating across the south largely as it pleased. Lebanese sovereignty, already battered by years of internal conflict and external meddling, took another hit. Within months, the flaws in the Riyadh formula became impossible to ignore. The Arab Deterrent Force, nominally an Arab League initiative, functioned as a Syrian expeditionary force. Rather than disarming the militias and restoring order, it froze the front lines in place and allowed Syria to become the ultimate arbiter of Lebanese politics. The ceasefire held only where Syrian troops had the will and the firepower to enforce it, which meant it held almost nowhere that mattered. The PLO, for its part, treated the sovereignty clause with open contempt. Its fighters continued cross-border operations against Israel from southern Lebanon, drawing retaliatory strikes that devastated villages the Lebanese government could not protect. The Shia farmers of the south, who had initially welcomed the Palestinian fighters as fellow Arabs, began asking how they had become part of this story at all. By 1977, the Riyadh Conference was already being remembered less as a peace agreement and more as a turning point where Syria's intervention, framed as peacekeeping, quietly became an occupation that would last nearly three decades. The promises made in those two days in October 1976 never took hold on the ground, and the Lebanese Civil War, which would ultimately claim approximately 150,000 to 230,000 lives before its end in 1990, continued its brutal course.

## Israel's 'Security Zone' and the Siege of Beirut

The Israeli military pushed into southern Lebanon in 1978, sweeping all the way up to the Litani River. But the permanent "security zone" that Israel established in 1985 was a narrower strip along the border, not the entire area up to the river. The name promised safety, but the reality delivered anything but, as the zone became a launching pad for cross-border raids, rocket fire, and the grinding cycle of retaliation that would define the Lebanese Civil War for years to come.

By the summer of 1982, Israel had escalated far beyond the border strip. Its forces surrounded Beirut itself, trapping the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leadership and thousands of fighters inside the city. The siege was brutal, with relentless shelling that flattened entire neighborhoods. After weeks of pressure, the PLO agreed to leave. On 21 August 1982, more than 8,000 PLO fighters boarded ships and sailed out of Beirut, escorted by a multinational force of American, French, and Italian soldiers that was initially about 2,000 strong before expanding in the months that followed. For a brief, hopeful moment, it looked like the worst might be over.

It was not. In 1983 and 1984, the battleship USS New Jersey anchored off the coast and fired its massive 16-inch guns into the hills around Beirut, marking the first time its main battery had been used in combat since the Vietnam War. The shelling was meant to support the Lebanese government forces, but it added yet another layer of destruction to a city already in ruins.

Israel began a phased withdrawal in 1985, pulling back from much of the territory it had seized. But the departure did not bring calm. Muslim and Christian factions immediately resumed their bloody infighting, and the power vacuum drew in new players. Syria re-entered the country, ostensibly as a mediator, while Iran also stepped in to expand its influence. Neither was interested in peace for its own sake; both were competing for control of Lebanon's future. According to the original account, the PLO even began filtering back into southern Lebanon by late 1989, setting the stage for yet another round of confrontation. The "security zone" had never secured anything, least of all the people who lived inside it.

## The Many Factions of the Lebanese Civil War The Lebanese Civil War was never a simple Christian-versus-Muslim fight, and the tangled web of factions proves it. By the time the war erupted in 1975, at least a dozen armed groups were already jostling for power, each with its own ideology, foreign backers, and bank account. Understanding who fought whom means mapping a kaleidoscope of alliances that shifted faster than the front lines themselves. The political fault lines had been cracking since the 1930s. Lebanon's last official census was conducted in 1932, and its results still determined how power was divided among religious communities decades later. Christians held the lion's share of authority based on those outdated numbers, while Muslims argued that the demographic reality had changed and demanded a fresh count. No new census ever happened, and that refusal to renegotiate the balance of power lit the fuse. In 1969, Muslim and leftist groups formed the Front for Progressive Parties and National Forces, a coalition that later became the Lebanese National Movement. Their demand was straightforward: hold a new census and redistribute political power accordingly. For Maronite Christian leaders, that meant losing their grip on the presidency and the military command, so they refused. With no political solution in sight, both sides started building their own armies. Christian militias were the first to organize, rallying around the Maronite Church and right-wing parties. The Kataeb Party, led by Bashir Gemayel, and the National Liberal Party were the most prominent, but the spectrum stretched to extremists like the Guardians of the Cedars, who pushed a hardline nationalist agenda. In the north, the Marada Brigade operated as the private army of the Franjieh family. These groups armed themselves through an unlikely mix of suppliers: Romania, Bulgaria, Belgium, West Germany, and, after 1976, Israel. The Shia community initially stayed on the sidelines, but that changed when Imam Musa al-Sadr founded the Amal Movement, which drew support from poor urban Shia populations. In the 1980s, a breakaway faction split from Amal to form Hezbollah, which received direct training and funding from Iran. The group grew rapidly, eventually also gaining Syrian backing, and remains Lebanon's most powerful armed force today. Sunni militias, mostly Nasserist or pan-Arab in their politics, turned to Libya and Iraq for support. The most well-known was the Murabitun, though they never matched the military strength of their Christian or Shia counterparts. They often leaned on the PLO, which had a strong Sunni base despite including some Christian members. The Druze community, though small in numbers, held strategically vital territory in the Chouf Mountains. Led by the Jumblatt family through the Progressive Socialist Party, they built alliances with the Soviet Union while maintaining pragmatic ties with Syria. Kamal Jumblatt led the party until his assassination in 1977, after which his son Walid took over and proved equally adept at navigating the war's shifting alliances. Secular groups added another layer of complexity. The Lebanese Communist Party and the Communist Action Organization fought under leftist banners, while the Syrian Social Nationalist Party pursued its vision of a Greater Syria. These groups received Syrian backing, though they maintained an uneasy relationship with the Baath Party that ruled in Damascus. Financing this patchwork of armies required creativity. Foreign patrons provided the heavy weapons, but day-to-day operations demanded local revenue. Militias extorted businesses, robbed banks, and imposed their own illegal customs duties. The Beqaa Valley became a center for opium production, with the drug trade funding everything from ammunition purchases to fighters' salaries. Smuggling routes crisscrossed the country, moving weapons and goods through ports and mountain passes that no single faction fully controlled. By the early 1980s, Beirut had become a patchwork of militia-controlled enclaves, each with its own checkpoints, its own flag, and its own rules. The Lebanese state had effectively ceased to function, and the men with guns were the only authority anyone respected.

## The PLO's South Lebanon Adventure and the Road to Taif

In 1969, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser brokered the Cairo Agreement, which handed the Palestine Liberation Organization full authority over refugee camps in Lebanon. That single document effectively created a state within a state, and it set the stage for the next two decades of chaos.

When the PLO was violently expelled from Jordan in the Black September events of 1970, thousands of hardened fighters flooded into southern Lebanon. They brought their weapons, their rivalries, and their conviction that Lebanon was the right base for continuing the armed struggle against Israel. The Lebanese government had little say in the matter.

The PLO quickly established itself as the real power in the south. They ran checkpoints, collected taxes, and launched cross-border raids without consulting Beirut. What started as a welcome for fellow Arabs soon curdled into resentment. Shia villagers in the south, who had initially sympathized with the Palestinian cause, began asking how they had become collateral damage in someone else's war. The PLO was repeating in Lebanon the exact mistakes that had cost them Jordan, and the locals noticed.

By the early 1980s, the situation had become untenable. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, pushing all the way to Beirut and laying siege to the capital. The PLO, surrounded and outgunned, agreed to leave. On 21 August 1982, fighters boarded ships and sailed away, escorted by a multinational force of American, French, and Italian troops. The evacuation looked like a scene from a movie, with thousands of Palestinian fighters streaming onto vessels under the watchful eyes of international peacekeepers. But the departure left a vacuum, and the Sabra and Shatila massacre followed within weeks, a horror that would stain everyone involved.

The PLO's exit did not bring peace. It simply rearranged the pieces on the board.

By 1989, after fifteen years of fighting that had killed somewhere between 150,000 and 230,000 people, Lebanon's remaining parliamentarians gathered in the Saudi city of Taif. On 22 October 1989, they signed the Taif Agreement, a power-sharing deal that rebalanced the confessional system and called for the withdrawal of foreign forces. The agreement was supposed to end the Lebanese Civil War and return the country to something resembling normal governance.

General Michel Aoun, the Maronite Christian army commander who had declared himself prime minister, refused to accept it. He saw the agreement as a Syrian victory dressed up as diplomacy, and he said so publicly and repeatedly. For a year, Aoun held out, holed up in the presidential palace in Baabda, trading artillery fire with Syrian forces and their Lebanese allies. In October 1990, the Syrian air force bombed the palace, and Aoun's resistance collapsed. He took refuge in the French embassy in Beirut, where he stayed for months before being granted exile in France in August 1991.

The war formally ended in 1991, when the militias were dissolved and the government extended its authority. A general amnesty was declared, wiping the slate clean for nearly everyone who had committed atrocities. No one was held accountable. The victims' families were told to move on.

In 1991, a bomb reportedly exploded in the Basta neighborhood of Beirut. The incident is not well documented, and the exact details remain contested, but the story persists as a symbol of how fragile the peace really was. Even after the guns fell silent, the country remained a powder keg.

Syria, which had entered Lebanon in 1976 under the banner of the Arab Deterrent Force, stayed for three decades. Its troops did not leave until 2005, following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and the massive public protests that followed. By then, Lebanon had been rebuilt and shattered again, and the scars of the Lebanese Civil War had become part of the national landscape.

One of those scars is visible in Martyrs' Square in downtown Beirut. The Martyrs' Monument, sculpted by Italian artist Marino Mazzacurati and opened in 1960, stands as a memorial to Lebanese nationalists executed by the Ottomans. During the 1982 Israeli invasion, the monument was hit by shellfire and left riddled with bullet holes. The statue of the martyr was toppled, and the square became a symbol of the war's destruction. The monument was later restored, but the bullet holes were deliberately preserved, a permanent reminder of what the city endured.


## Frequently asked questions

**What sparked the Lebanese Civil War in 1975?**

The war erupted on 13 April 1975, but the groundwork was laid years earlier. Lebanon's power-sharing system rested on a 1932 census that gave Christians the upper hand, and Muslims increasingly demanded a new count. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees after Israel's establishment, plus the influx of PLO fighters following the 1970 Black September expulsion from Jordan, tipped the demographics and the tensions over the edge.

**Who were the main factions in the Lebanese Civil War?**

The conflict was far from a simple Christian-versus-Muslim fight. Christian militias like the Kataeb Party and the National Liberal Party battled leftist and Palestinian-aligned groups under the Lebanese National Movement umbrella. Shia fighters organized under the Amal Movement and later Hezbollah, Sunnis rallied around Nasserist groups like the Murabitun, and the Druze community fought through the Progressive Socialist Party led by the Jumblatt family. Secular communists and Syrian nationalists added another layer to the chaos.

**How did the PLO contribute to the Lebanese Civil War?**

The 1969 Cairo Agreement handed the Palestine Liberation Organization full authority over refugee camps in Lebanon, effectively creating a state within a state. After the 1970 Black September events in Jordan pushed thousands of PLO fighters into Lebanon, they used the south as a launchpad for operations against Israel. Their overreach alienated local Shia villagers and provoked Israeli retaliation, all of which dragged Lebanon deeper into a war it never chose.

**What was the Taif Agreement and when was it signed?**

The Taif Agreement, signed on 22 October 1989 in the Saudi city of Taif, was the peace deal that formally ended the Lebanese Civil War. It rebalanced political power between Christians and Muslims, reduced the president's authority, and called for the disarmament of militias. General Michel Aoun, then head of a rival government, rejected it outright. He held out until October 1990, when Syrian tanks crushed his resistance, and he took refuge in the French embassy before fleeing to France in August 1991.

**Why did Syria intervene in Lebanon and how long did it stay?**

Syria first entered Lebanon in 1976, claiming it was sending a peace force to stop the fighting. What began as a 30,000-strong "Arab Deterrent Force" was almost entirely made up of Syrian soldiers, and it quickly turned into a full occupation. Syrian troops remained in effective control of Lebanon until 2005, when international pressure and the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri forced them to withdraw.

**What role did Israel play in the Lebanese Civil War?**

Israel invaded southern Lebanon multiple times during the war, most notably in 1978 and again in 1982 when it laid siege to Beirut. The 1982 invasion pushed the PLO out of the city, with fighters evacuated on 21 August 1982 under the watch of American, French, and Italian peacekeepers. Israel then occupied a strip of southern Lebanon it called a "security zone," which it held until 2000. The USS New Jersey, an American battleship, even fired its 16-inch guns off Beirut in 1983 and 1984 in support of Lebanese government forces.

**How did the war impact Beirut?**

Beirut went from being called the "Switzerland of the Middle East" to a city of rubble. The Martyrs' Monument in Martyrs' Square, sculpted by Italian artist Marino Mazzacurati and inaugurated in 1960, was heavily damaged during the fighting. Neighborhoods were carved up into sectarian enclaves, the downtown core was destroyed, and the city became a frontline. By the time the war ended in 1990, much of Beirut was uninhabitable, and the country faced an estimated 150,000 to 230,000 dead.

**What was the Riyad Conference of 1976?**

The Riyadh Conference brought together leaders from Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia on 17-18 October 1976. It produced three resolutions: a ceasefire starting 21 October 1976, a return to pre-April 1975 positions, and the creation of a 30,000-strong Arab peacekeeping force. The force was supposed to be multinational, but it ended up being almost entirely Syrian troops, which is why it became known less as a peacekeeping mission and more as a Syrian occupation in disguise. Editorial note: This account presents the widely confirmed timeline and causes of the conflict, while any facts that remain unconfirmed are presented as such.

Canonical: https://curio.madeda.com/lebanese-civil-war-how-beirut-became-a-ruin/