Beirut Marine Bombing

On October 23, 1983, 241 US service personnel -- including 220 Marines and 21 other service personnel were killed in a suicide attack by a truck bomb at a Marine compound in Beirut, Lebanon. Hezbollah, funded by the Islamic Republic regime of Iran, is long understood to have been responsible and emerged during the chaos of Lebanon’s civil war as an effective proxy of the Islamic Republic to exert it’s power amongst the varying factions, vying for power in Lebanon. The ground was fertile for Iran’s post-1979 revolutionary leaders to demonstrate that their example could be replicated in the Arab world, by exploiting long-standing grievances of Lebanon’s Shiite Muslim underclass.