The Israeli invasion in 1982 laid the basis for two important developments in southern Lebanon. The first was the emergence of the Shia Hezbollah movement and the second was the creation of a fiefdom controlled by Haddad’s South Lebanon Army as an Israeli surrogate.
At first, many Shia in southern Lebanon had welcomed the Israeli invasion , because they wanted the PLO to leave. But when the Israelis made it clear that they were staying, some Shia turned militant. The Amal movement, led by Nabih Berri, split into moderate and radical wings, and a prominent figure among the Amal radicals was Sayyid Husayn Musawi.
Musawi accused Berri of collaboration with the enemy and went to the Bekaa Valley to found Islamic Amal in June 1982. It soon united with several smaller Shia movements, to form Hezbollah as an umbrella organisation. Hezbollah then built up links in Beirut with Sheikh Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, the head of the Council of Shia Religious Scholars, who became its spiritual guide, and another influential religious leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
The revolutionary regime in Iran sent help in the form of funding, and a Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guard) unit to the Bekaa in eastern Lebanon. Hezbollah cooperated with Teheran by kidnapping foreign hostages in Beirut, including six Americans. In Washington, elements in the administration attempted to free them through a backdoor deal to provide aid to the Contras, a rebel group in Nicaragua.
Congress had already banned the administration from legislative appropriations to support the Contras. The Iran-Contra deal was essentially a money laundering scheme designed to raise funds for them off the books, with arms shipments to Iran as part of a deal that also would free those American hostages.
Hostage taking became a regular feature of the Lebanese civil war between 1982 and 1992 when over a hundred foreigners were kidnapped, notably three Britons (John McCarthy, Brian Keenan and Terry Waite). They were mainly American and Western European, but overall, they came from 21 countries. Also among the Lebanese themselves there were hostages. Between 1976 and 1992, some 17,000 Lebanese were abducted and disappeared. Hezbollah officially denied any involvement, but it was one of the biggest hostage takers.
Hostage taking was not the only new political tactic that developed during the Lebanese civil war. Suicide bombing was another. On 18 April 1983, a van smashed into the US Embassy, and its driver detonated a ton of explosives. Some 60 diplomats, service members, and visitors were killed. On 23 October, truck bomb attacks on the headquarters of units of the multinational peacekeeping forces killed 241 US and 58 French troops. Hezbollah organised these attacks and many others.
As in Iran, martyr operations led to the creation of the cult of martyrdom, although not all the suicide bombers were Shia. In April 1985, a young Christian woman became the ‘Bride of the South’ by carrying out a suicide operation against the Israeli army in the south. She was a member of the SSNP and the first known female suicide bomber.
US troops withdrew from Lebanon in 1984. Israeli troops had already begun to pull back. On 17 May 1983, an agreement between Israel and Lebanon ended the state of war between the two countries in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal beginning in August. By 3 September, the Israeli army had moved back south of the Awali river in southern Lebanon, leaving a “security zone” in the south.
This southern zone took up roughly ten percent of Lebanon’s total area and it was partly controlled by Israel’s local ally, the South Lebanese Army. To bolster its numbers the SLA offered an attractive wage to any man who agreed to join its ranks. Because South Lebanon was a poor region many local inhabitants did so willingly. The SLA also forced others to work for it. It imposed quotas or “levees” upon villages and threatened collective punishments if these were not met.