Lebanese Civil War

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.

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 fifteen-year war has no official casualty count, and the figures still cited today diverge by a wide margin. Reporters covering the war's final phase in 1990 settled on a round figure near 150,000 dead, repeated ever since in encyclopedia entries and news retrospectives. The Lebanese demographers Boutros Labaki and Khalil Abou Rjeily set out in the early 1990s to test that figure against parish, hospital and municipal records rather than repeat it, and arrived at a considerably lower total near 90,000. Later reviewers of the historiography have judged the Labaki and Abou Rjeily study the most methodologically rigorous count available, and treated the widely repeated higher figure as an artifact of wartime press reporting that was never subjected to the same scrutiny.

Whether the war itself should be called a religious war is a separate and contested question. Lebanon's fighting lined up combatants largely along confessional community, and popular memory of the war often reduces it to Christian against Muslim. The historian Fawwaz Traboulsi's account argues this framing mistakes the war's visible fault lines for its causes: the confessional power-sharing system itself, entrenched economic inequality between and within communities, and the destabilizing armed Palestinian presence drove the fighting, with religious community serving as the identity militias recruited along rather than as the war's actual grievance.

On this reading Lebanon fought a sectarian war, in which religious affiliation sorted the combatants, rather than a religious one, in which religious doctrine supplied the cause. Both readings agree on where the killing happened and roughly how much of it there was; they differ on what, underneath the confessional labels, actually drove it.