War of the Camps

In the wake of the creation of the state of Israel and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees fled to Southern Lebanon. A few Palestinians with skills and capital were allowed to reside in cities and live dignified lives; the majority, however were destitute peasants who could only offer their unskilled work to the Lebanese economy, and were kept in squalid refugee camps near the main cities.

Even before the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964, exiled Palestinian intellectuals residing in Lebanon and other Arab countries began to form clandestine paramilitary groups in the late 1950s, which later evolved into the main PLO guerrilla factions. In Lebanon, some of these groups would later raise roadblocks where Lebanese people were forced to pay "tolls" to support the Palestinian cause. This alienated important sectors of the native population, in particular the Christian Maronite and Shia communities. Beginning in the late 1960s, Palestinian factions also gradually turned the Jabal Amel region of Southern Lebanon into a de facto state of their own, using it as a base for launching guerrilla attacks on Israel. Although in time the Shia community would support the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel, the PLO's and the more radical Rejectionist Front groups' behavior in Southern Lebanon made many Lebanese Shias resent the Palestinian presence. The Palestinians put the Shias of the Jabal Amel at risk by attacking the Israelis from Lebanon, which in turn invited harsh retribution from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). In 1978, the IDF invaded Southern Lebanon (Operation Litani) in response to the guerrilla attacks made by the PLO from South Lebanon.

Israel's second invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 succeeded in driving thousands of Palestinian fighters under the command of PLO Chairman Yassir Arafat out of Southern Lebanon and West Beirut. Under international auspices, PLO forces were evacuated to northern Lebanon and re-settled in the port city of Tripoli. By this time, however, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad proceeded to expel Arafat and the Palestinian factions allied to him from Lebanon. Israel's 1982 invasion led to its beginning a 20-year-long occupation of a shallow fringe of southern Lebanon (10 to 15 kilometers) as a security zone for its border, allied with a local force - the South Lebanese Army, which was originally purely Christian but gradually added local Shiites and Druze to its ranks. Meanwhile, with permission from Syria, Iran sent a contingent of Revolutionary Guards to Lebanon, tasked with amalgamating, reorganizing and building up the small Shiite religious factions into a new organization - Hezbollah.

Assad sought to control both the PLO and Lebanon. He worried that Palestinian guerrilla activities would invite another Israeli invasion and that his minority Alawite regime in Sunni-majority Syria would be endangered by the advancement of the (mostly Sunni) Palestinians. Initially, the Syrian government encouraged its favoured Palestinian groups to compete for influence, facilitating the entrance of as-Sa'iqa, PFLP-GC, and the pro-Syrian dissident Fatah faction under Colonel Said al-Muragha (Abu Musa). However, Syria's allies were strong only in the areas controlled by the Syrian Army, such as the Beqaa valley. In the areas beyond Syria's control, however, it soon became apparent that Palestinian organizations such as Fatah, PFLP and DFLP had far stronger support.

Assad recruited Said al-Muragha to drive Arafat and his loyalist fighters out of Lebanon. Musa, himself a former member of Fatah, used Arafat's public willingness to negotiate with Israel as a pretext for war. In November 1983, Musa's Fatah al-Intifada (Fatah-Uprising) faction fought the Arafatist Fatah for a month at Tripoli, until Arafat once again was on his way to Tunisia by December. Unfortunately for Assad, Arafat's Fatah forces quietly returned to Lebanon over the next two years, ensconcing themselves in the many refugee camps in Beirut and the South.

As more Palestinians regrouped in the South, Assad's anxiety grew, as he didn't want to give Israel a pretext for another invasion. This time, Assad recruited the more powerful Shia Amal Movement militia headed by Nabih Berri to dislodge Arafat's loyalists. Assad benefited from this alliance, which enabled him to exert a greater degree of control over Lebanese affairs through his local Lebanese allies. The benefit for Amal was revenge for decades of Palestinian arrogance and the opportunity of gaining further control over Shia-populated areas of Lebanon.

By mid-1985 Amal was also in conflict with the Druze Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) and its militia, the People's Liberation Army (PLA), led by Walid Jumblatt in the mountainous Chouf region. As Amal-PSP relations severely deteriorated, the Palestinian alliance with the Druze PSP was re-established. Unlike the majority of other Lebanese leftist militias, the Communist Action Organization in Lebanon (OCAL), led by Muhsin Ibrahim, refused to cooperate with Syria in its attempts to vanquish Arafat. This refusal brought the wrath of the Syrians on the OCAL, forcing them to operate underground from 1987 onwards.

Internal fighting had happened before in the Muslim/leftist camp (the former Lebanese National Movement or LNM) but never on such massive scale. This inflicted a severe blow in terms of public image for many Muslim militias and destroyed the perception of unity. The main Lebanese Sunni militia, the Al-Mourabitoun, was crushed and their leader Ibrahim Kulaylat sent into exile. The results were mitigated since the PLO retained control of some of the camps.

At the end of the war, an official Lebanese government report stated that the total number of casualties for these battles was put at 3,781 dead and 6,787 injured in the fighting between Amal and the Palestinians. Furthermore, the number of Palestinians killed in inter-factional clashes between pro-Syrian and pro-Arafat organizations was around 2,000. The real number is probably higher because thousands of Palestinians were not registered in Lebanon and the blockade meant that no officials could access the camps, so that all the casualties could not be counted. As the Amal-initiated "War of the Camps" against the PLO ended, the religiously oriented Hezbollah and its rival the essentially secular Amal began clashing in South Lebanon and in Beirut's southern suburbs over control of the Shiite population of Lebanon.

• Amal Movement
• Internal Security Forces
• Lebanese Army
• Lebanese Civil War
• Sabra and Shatila massacre
• Mountain War (Lebanon)
• People's Liberation Army (Lebanon)
• Weapons of the Lebanese Civil War
• 6th Infantry Brigade (Lebanon)
• 8th Infantry Brigade (Lebanon)

• Edgar O'Ballance, Civil War in Lebanon, 1975-92, Palgrave Macmillan, London 1998. ISBN 0-333-72975-7
• Éric Micheletti and Yves Debay, Liban – dix jours aux cœur des combats, RAIDS magazine n.º41, October 1989 issue. ISSN 0769-4814 (in French)
• Samer Kassis, 30 Years of Military Vehicles in Lebanon, Beirut: Elite Group, 2003. ISBN 9953-0-0705-5
• Moustafa El-Assad, Civil Wars Volume 1: The Gun Trucks, Blue Steel books, Sidon 2008. ISBN 9953-0-1256-8
• Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: the PLO in Lebanon, Boulder: Westview Press, Oxford 1990. ISBN 0 86187 123 5 –
• Joe Stork, The War of the Camps, The War of the Hostages, MERIP Reports, No. 133 (June 1985), pp. 3–7 and 22.
• Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, London: Oxford University Press, (3rd ed. 2001). ISBN 0-19-280130-9
• The War of the Camps, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 191–194.

• Histoire militaire de l'armée libanaise de 1975 à 1990 (in French)
• Lebanese Civil War The combat returned to Beirut in 1987, with Palestinians, leftists, and Druze fighters allied against Amal, eventually drawing further Syrian intervention.