1983 Beirut Barracks Bombing

1983 Beirut Barracks Bombing

First Phase

• Bus massacre
• Hotels
• Black Saturday
• Karantina
• Damour
• Tel al-Zaatar
  

Second Phase

• Hundred Days' War
• 1978 South Lebanon conflict
• Ehden
• Safra
• Zahleh campaign
  

Third Phase

• 1982 Lebanon War
• Sabra and Shatila
• US Embassy
• Barracks bombing
• Mountain War
  

Fourth Phase

• War of the Camps
• 1985 Beirut car bombing
• Geagea-Hobeika Conflict
• October 13 massacre

The Beirut Barracks Bombing (October 23, 1983 in Beirut, Lebanon) occurred during the Lebanese Civil War, when two truck bombs struck separate buildings housing United States and French military forces—members of the Multinational Force in Lebanon—killing 299 American and French servicemen. "Believing Resistance" later known as Hezbollah, claimed responsibility for the bombing.

Suicide bombers detonated each of the truck bombs. In the attack on the American Marines barracks, the death toll was 241 American servicemen: 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers, along with sixty Americans injured, representing the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima of World War II, the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States military since the first day of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War, and the deadliest single attack on Americans overseas since World War II. In addition, the elderly Lebanese custodian of the building was killed in the first blast. The explosives used were equivalent to 5,400 kg (12,000 pounds) of TNT.

In the attack on the French barracks, the eight-story 'Drakkar' building, two minutes after the attack, 58 paratroopers from the 1st Parachute Chasseur Regiment were killed and 15 injured, in the single worst military loss for France since the end of the Algerian War. The wife and four children of a Lebanese janitor at the French building were also killed.

The blasts led to the withdrawal of the international peacekeeping force from Lebanon, where they had been stationed since the withdrawal of the Palestine Liberation Organization following the Israeli 1982 invasion of Lebanon.