This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Lebanon's National Pact of 1943 divided political power among the country's recognized religious communities, reserving the presidency for a Maronite Christian, the premiership for a Sunni Muslim and the speakership of parliament for a Shia Muslim, a formula meant to hold a religiously mixed state together. By the 1970s the formula was straining against a changed reality: Muslim communities had grown well past the demographic weight the 1932 census the power-sharing ratios still rested on assumed, economic opportunity remained concentrated in Christian and elite hands, and the Palestine Liberation Organization's armed presence, relocated to Lebanon after 1970, turned the south into a staging ground for cross-border conflict with Israel.
Fighting broke out in April 1975 after Phalangist gunmen killed Palestinian bus passengers in the Beirut suburb of Ain al-Rummaneh, and the country split into shifting, heavily armed camps, a Maronite-led Lebanese Front against a Muslim and leftist Lebanese National Movement allied with the Palestine Liberation Organization, with Syria intervening militarily from 1976 and Israel invading in 1978 and again in 1982, reaching Beirut. New factions rose as the war ground on, including the Shia movements Amal and, from the 1980s, Hezbollah.
The Taif Agreement, negotiated in Saudi Arabia in 1989, rebalanced the National Pact's confessional formula and set terms for a ceasefire. Fighting nonetheless continued into 1990, when Syrian forces finally suppressed the last holdout general, Michel Aoun. Lebanon emerged under a period of Syrian military tutelage that did not fully end until 2005.