Two nearly simultaneous bombs shook the very foundations of Beirut on Sunday morning, October 23, 1983. Within seconds, over 300 people had perished: 241 U.S. servicemen, 58 French paratroopers, 6 Lebanese civilians, and 2 suicide bombers. The U.S. Marines faced the highest single-day death toll since Iwo Jima, the French had absorbed the greatest single day’s casualties since the Algerian war, and the suicide bombers had transformed the conflict in Lebanon. The bombers approached their targets in trucks laden with tons of high explosives. One approached the U.S. Marines’ barracks, a concrete building in the Beirut International Airport compound, through a service entrance at 6:20 A.M. He gathered speed and smashed through the metal gates. The shocked sentries did not have time even to load their weapons to stop him. One survivor watched the truck speed by. All he could remember after the blast was that “the man was smiling as he drove past.”¹⁵ The driver was clearly delighted that he had penetrated the American compound, no doubt believing that his violent death would open the Gates of Paradise before him. The blast was so strong that it severed the building from its foundation; the compound collapsed like a house of cards. The ruins were rocked by secondary explosions as the Marines’ ammunition stores in the basement were detonated by the heat. Three miles to the north, another suicide bomber drove his truck into the underground parking garage of the high-rise building that served as headquarters to the French paratroopers. He detonated his bomb, leveling the building and killing fifty-eight French soldiers. Journalist Robert Fisk, who reached the ruins of the French compound moments after the explosion, could not grasp the enormity of the destruction. “I run up to a smoking crater, 20 feet deep and 40 wide. Piled beside it, like an obscene sandwich, are the nine floors of the building.... The bomb lifted the nine-storey building into the air and moved it 20 feet. The whole building became airborne. The crater is where the building was. How could this be done?”¹⁶ Even for war-shattered Beirut, the devastation wrought by the attacks of October 23, 1983, was shocking. The operations also revealed an unprecedented and deeply troubling degree of planning and discipline. Today we would say it bore the hallmark of an al-Qaida operation—a decade before that movement’s first attacks. No one knows precisely who was responsible for the attacks on the U.S. Marines and the French paratroopers in Beirut, but the prime suspect was a shadowy new group that called itself Islamic Jihad. In one of its earliest operations, in July 1982, members of the Islamic Jihad kidnapped the acting president of the American University of Beirut, an American academic named David Dodge. They also claimed responsibility for the massive car bomb that sheared a wing off the United States Embassy in downtown Beirut in April 1983, killing 63 and wounding over one 100. Radical new forces were at work in the Lebanese civil war. Islamic Jihad revealed itself to be a Lebanese Shiite organization collaborating with Iran. In an anonymous telephone call to a foreign press agency, Islamic Jihad claimed its July bombing of the U.S. Embassy was “part of the Iranian revolution’s campaign against the imperialist presence throughout the world.” Iran had dangerous friends in Lebanon, it seemed. “We will continue to strike at the imperialist presence in Lebanon,” the Islamic Jihad spokesman continued, “including the multi-national force.” Following the October bombings, Islamic Jihad once again claimed responsibility. “We are the soldiers of God and we are fond of death. We are neither Iranians nor Syrians nor Palestinians,” they insisted. “We are Lebanese Muslims who follow the principles of the Koran.”¹⁷

The conflict in Lebanon had grown infinitely more complex in the six years between the Syrian intervention in 1977 and the suicide bombings of 1983. Though it had started as an internal war between Lebanese factions with Palestinian involvement in 1975, the war was by 1983 a regional conflict that drew in Syria, Israel, Iran, Europe, and the United States directly—and many more countries indirectly, such as Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and the Soviet Union, which bankrolled different militias and provided them with weaponry. The war had also led to significant shifts in the balance of power among the different Lebanese communities. The Syrian army, which entered Lebanon in 1976 as part of an Arab League peacekeeping force, had first sided with the beleaguered Maronite Christians to prevent the victory of the Leftist Muslim factions headed by Kamal Jumblatt. Syria was jealous of its dominant position in Lebanon and acted quickly to prevent any one group from gaining a clear victory in that country’s civil war. This led Syria to change its alliances with some frequency. No sooner had Syria’s army defeated the leftist Muslim militias than it turned against the Maronites and sided with the rising new power of Lebanon’s Shiite Muslim community. Long marginalized by the political elites, the Shiites had emerged as a distinct political community in Lebanon only since the onset of the Lebanese civil war. By the 1970s the Shiites had become the largest Lebanese community in terms of numbers, though they remained the poorest and most politically disenfranchised of the country’s sects. The traditional centers of Lebanon’s Shiite communities were in the poorest parts of the country—South Lebanon and the northern Bekaa Valley. Increasingly, Shiites fled the relative deprivation of the countryside, moving to the southern slums of Beirut in search of jobs. In the 1960s and 1970s, many Lebanese Shiites had been drawn to secular parties promising social reform, like the Ba’th, the Lebanese Communist Party, and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. It was only in the 1970s that a charismatic Iranian cleric of Lebanese ancestry named Musa al-Sadr drew the Shiites together into a distinct communal party known as the Movement of the Dispossessed (Harakat al-Mahrumin) and began to compete with the leftist parties for the loyalty of the Lebanese Shiites. Upon the outbreak of the civil war in 1975, the Movement of the Dispossessed created its own militia, known as Amal. In the first stages of the Lebanese civil war, Amal sided with the leftist Muslim parties of the National Movement, headed by Kamal Jumblatt. But Musa al-Sadr soon grew disenchanted with Jumblatt’s leadership, accusing the Druze leader of using the Shiites as cannon-fodder—in al-Sadr’s words, “to combat the Christians to the last Shi’i.”¹⁸ Tensions had also emerged between Amal and the Palestinian movement, which since 1969 had used South Lebanon as a base for its operations against Israel. Not only did the Shiite community suffer great hardship from Israeli retaliatory strikes provoked by Palestinian operations from the south, but it grew to resent the control the Palestinians exercised over South Lebanon. By 1976 Amal had broken with Jumblatt’s coalition and the Palestinian movement to side with the Syrians, whom its followers saw as the only counterweight to Palestinian influence in the south. It was the beginning of an enduring alliance between Syria and the Shiites of Lebanon that has survived until today. The Iranian Revolution and the creation of the Islamic Republic in 1979 transformed Shiite politics in Lebanon. The Shiites of Lebanon were bound to Iran by common religious and cultural ties that spanned the centuries. Musa al-Sadr was himself an Iranian of Lebanese origins, and he promoted political activism very much in line with the thinking of the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran. Al-Sadr never lived to see the Iranian Revolution. He disappeared on a trip to Libya in 1978 and is widely assumed to have been murdered there. The 1979 revolution galvanized the Shiites of South Lebanon by giving them a host of new leaders to rally behind at a crucial moment when they were still coming to terms with the recent disappearance of their leader. Portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini flanked those of Musa al-Sadr in the southern slums of Beirut and the Roman ruins of Baalbek. The Iranians did all they could to encourage the enthusiasm of Lebanese Shiites, as part of their early bid to export their revolution, and to extend their influence to the traditional centers of Shiite Arab culture in southern Iraq, the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Lebanon. Through this network, Iran could put pressure on its rivals and enemies—particularly the United States, Israel, and Iraq.