Greater Lebanon: History of Terrorism

03/08/2026

By Hicham Bou Nassif | Weinberg Associate Professor of International Relations and the Middle East and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College-California

The news passed largely unnoticed amid the rush of developments in Lebanon: Abdul Ballout, the perpetrator of the recent terrorist attack in Berlin, is of Lebanese origin.

Details about him remain unclear. Reports circulating in the media suggest his family is Shia, while Ballout himself is believed to have embraced the ideology of the Islamic State (ISIS). It remains uncertain how he moved from his Shia background to Sunni extremism. What is clear, however, is that international media identified him as being of Lebanese origin, once again linking Lebanon’s name and reputation to terrorism.

Ballout immediately brings to mind another terrorist of Lebanese descent: Hadi Matar.

News of Matar also received little attention, despite deserving closer scrutiny. Born in the United States to a Lebanese Shia family, Matar was 24 years old when he attempted to assassinate renowned author Salman Rushdie in 2022, acting on Ayatollah Khomeini’s decades-old fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death. Rushdie survived the attack but lost an eye.

Particularly noteworthy were comments made by Matar’s mother to the US media. She said her son had lived a normal life until he spent a month in his father’s hometown of Yaroun in southern Lebanon, a stronghold of Hezbollah. According to her, he returned from the visit a profoundly changed person — far more religious, preoccupied with Islam and political causes, supportive of Iran, and admiring of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Only a few years separated Matar’s visit to Yaroun from his attack on Rushdie, during which he maintained the ideology he had absorbed there. Reports also said he adopted the name “Hassan Mughniyeh” on his driver’s license, in admiration of Hassan Nasrallah and Imad Mughniyeh.

The fact is that the groups incorporated into Greater Lebanon have, by any measure, a long history of involvement in terrorism.

It is well known that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka made extensive use of suicide attacks during their conflict with the Sri Lankan government. Less widely known, however, is that the Tamil Tigers were influenced by Hezbollah’s use of suicide bombings in the early 1980s. There have also been unconfirmed reports that Hezbollah provided assistance to the LTTE.

More broadly, Muslim West Beirut served during the 1980s as a hub of international terrorism, where members of the Japanese Red Army (JRA), Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Group, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), and various Iran-backed Shia organizations received training.

Some militants later retired in Lebanon, among them Kozo Okamoto, the perpetrator of the notorious Lod Airport attack. Along with two other members of the JRA, Okamoto killed 26 people — most of them civilians — including 17 Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico who were visiting the Holy Land. By tragic coincidence, they found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time when Palestinian militants carried out the assault on Lod Airport.

There is no room here to recount every terrorist attack that linked Lebanon’s name to international terrorism — or all those responsible for them, who, notably, all came from outside the former Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate.

In Australia alone, for example, dozens of Lebanese Muslims left the country to join ISIS. Several years ago, then Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said Australia had made a mistake by opening its doors to Lebanese immigrants in the 1970s.

All of the above represents only a fraction of Greater Lebanon’s history of terrorism. Lebanon’s image abroad has become closely associated with terrorist killers, in addition, of course, to its civil wars and seemingly endless crises.

It was not always this way. European travelers who visited Mount Lebanon in the nineteenth century wrote extensively in praise of it, among them Gérard de Nerval, Alphonse de Lamartine, François-René de Chateaubriand, and Constantin-François de Volney, to name but a few.

That was, of course, before Patriarch Elias Howayek — now beatified — chose to lead Mount Lebanon out of its Maronite isolation and into the broader framework of Greater Lebanon.

From that point on, instead of opening our doors to figures such as Lamartine and Chateaubriand, we opened them to Kozo Okamoto, Mostafa Chamran, and Yasser Arafat.

As for Lebanon’s reputation in the world, shaped by guests such as these, it does not misrepresent the country. A project of this kind fully deserves a reputation of this kind.

This article was originally published in Arabic by Nida al-Watan on 3 August 2026. The original can be found here.

The views expressed in this op-ed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of SyriacPress.