What Happened During the 1983 Bombings in Beirut?

One of Hezbollah’s top military commanders, who was accused of helping plan the blasts four decades ago, was killed on Friday in an Israeli airstrike.

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.

In the years since, the United States government singled out Mr. Aqeel, believed to be in his mid-60s, as a “specially designated global terrorist” with a $7 million bounty on his head. He was also believed to have been involved in some of the kidnappings of Western hostages in Beirut in the 1980s as well as attacks in France. Several other senior figures considered to be involved have also been killed in the current conflict.

Imad Mughniyeh, believed to be behind both the suicide bombings and numerous kidnappings, died in a car bombing in Damascus, Syria, in 2008.

The United States and several European nations had deployed a peacekeeping force in Beirut in 1982, meant to assure stability in the capital as the armed fighters of the Palestine Liberation Organization withdrew from the city as part of the deal to end an Israeli invasion.

As time passed, however, the foreign forces were increasingly drawn into the fray. The effort to push the United States to withdraw its troops culminated in the two suicide bombings. Although not unprecedented at that time, no such bombings had been done on that scale before, and it ushered in a new era of similar attacks.

In addition, although President Ronald Reagan vowed that the American peacekeeping force would stay, as did other European governments, they were withdrawn within months. The bombings had achieved their aim.

It was the worst but hardly the only attack against American diplomats in the city, and it prompted a strengthening of security measures for U.S. diplomatic missions and military installations around the world. The U.S. Embassy in Beirut, for example, is now an armed fortress on a hill north of Beirut, and the U.S. ambassador moves around in a long motorcade of armored S.U.V.s.

The attacks came not long after the 1979 revolution in Iran that gave birth to the Islamic Republic, and they also ushered in that country’s violent efforts to assert itself in the region through proxy forces.

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.