Lebanese Civil War

The Beirut Barracks Bombing occurred during the Lebanese Civil War, when two truck bombs struck separate buildings housing United States and French... military forces—members of the Multinational Force in Lebanon—killing 299 American and French servicemen. The organization Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the bombing. Suicide bombers detonated each of the truck bombs. In the attack on the American Marines barracks, the death toll was 241 American servicemen: 220 Marines, 18 Navy personnel and three Army soldiers, along with sixty Americans injured, representing the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima of World War II, the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States military since the first day of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War, and the deadliest single attack on Americans overseas since World War II. In addition, the elderly Lebanese custodian of the Marines' building was killed in the first blast. The explosives used were equivalent to 5,400 kg of TNT.
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The 1983 U.S. embassy bombing was a suicide bombing against the United States embassy in Beirut, Lebanon on April 18, 1983 that killed over 60... people, mostly embassy staff members and United States Marines and sailors. It was the deadliest attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission up to that time, and is seen by some as marking the beginning of anti-U.S. attacks by Islamist groups. The attack came in the wake of the intervention of a Multinational Force, made up of Western countries, including the US, in the Lebanese Civil War, to try to restore order and central government authority. It also followed the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Christian militiamen. The car bomb was detonated by a suicide bomber driving a delivery van packed with about 2,000 pounds of explosives at approximately 1:00 pm April 18, 1983. The van, originally sold in Texas, bought used and shipped to the Gulf, gained access to the embassy compound and parked under the portico at the very front of the building, where it exploded. Former CIA operative Robert Baer's account says that the van broke through an outbuilding, crashed through the lobby door and exploded there.
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Black Saturday was a series of massacres and armed clashes in Beirut, that occurred in the first stages of the Lebanese Civil War. On Saturday... December 6, 1975, the bodies of four members of the rightist Kataeb Party , an organization grouping primarily Maronite Christians, were found in an abandoned car outside the state-owned power plant in Christian-dominated East Beirut. The Phalange's militiamen in the city went into a frenzied rage, blaming the killings on the Lebanese National Movement , dominated by leftist Muslims and Palestinians. Phalange forces attacked Muslims throughout Christian-dominated East Beirut, indiscriminately firing into crowds. Tens or hundreds of Muslim hostages were snatched off city streets and either killed or later released for ransom. Fighters, allegedly led by Joseph Saadeh, whose son was one of the four murdered, began putting up checkpoints on major roads. At these, passing cars and pedestrians were intercepted and ordered to show identification cards. Any Palestinians or Muslims were killed on the spot.
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The Damour massacre took place on January 20, 1976, during the 1975–1990 Lebanese Civil War. Damour, a Christian town on the main highway south... of Beirut, was attacked by the Palestine Liberation Organisation units. Part of its population died in battle or in the massacre that followed, and the remainder were forced to flee. The Phalangist militia based in Damour and Dayr al Nama had been blocking the coastal road. The Damour massacre was a response to the Karantina massacre of January 18, 1976, in which Phalangists killed from 300 up to 1,500 people. It occurred as part of a series of events during the Lebanese Civil War, in which Palestinians joined the Muslim forces, in the context of the Christian-Muslim divide, and soon Beirut was divided along the Green Line, with Christian enclaves to the east and Muslims to the west. The attackers systematically destroyed the buildings in the seaside village and then took revenge on the remaining Christian inhabitants. The Christian cemetery was destroyed, coffins dug up, the dead robbed, vaults opened, and bodies and skeletons thrown across the graveyard.
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