What Happened During the 1983 Bombings in Beirut?

In the annals of Middle East violence, it can be hard to pick moments that stand out, but 1983 was a watershed year because of suicide bombings in Beirut that left at least 360 people dead, the majority of them U.S.Marines.On Friday, the Lebanese group Hezbollah announced that Ibrahim Aqeel — one of its top military commanders and a man the United States accused of helping to plan the 1983 bombings — had been killed in an Israeli airstrike on a building in the southern Beirut neighborhoods that are a Hezbollah stronghold.Not far from where he died, just on the other side of Beirut’s international airport, on Oct.

23, 1983, a suicide bomber drove a Mercedes truck packed with a massive amount of explosives into a barracks housing sleeping peacekeepers from the U.S.Marine Corps.

The stupendous explosion felt across the capital killed 241 American service members and injured more than 100 others.The toll in the Marine Corps, with 220 dead, was its worse single-day loss since the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.A second suicide bomber who drove into a building housing French peacekeeping forces killed an additional 60 soldiers.Six months earlier, a similar attack that pancaked the U.S.

Embassy in Beirut had killed 17 Americans, including the core of the C.I.A.station in the Middle East, as well as 32 Lebanese and 14 others.The murderous attacks were claimed by the Islamic Jihad Organization, considered a precursor to Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese militia and political organization built and backed by Iran to advance its interests in the region.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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