title: Jaundice

text: Prehepatic jaundice is most commonly caused by a pathological increased rate of red blood cell (erythrocyte) hemolysis. The increased breakdown of erythrocytes → increased unconjugated serum bilirubin → increased deposition of unconjugated bilirubin into mucosal tissue. These diseases may cause jaundice due to increased erythrocyte hemolysis:


title: Jaundice

text: Hepatic jaundice is caused by abnormal liver metabolism of bilirubin. The major causes of hepatic jaundice are significant damage to hepatocytes due to infectious, drug/medication-induced, autoimmune etiology, or less commonly, due to inheritable genetic diseases. The following is a partial list of hepatic causes to jaundice:


title: Jaundice

text: Posthepatic jaundice (obstructive jaundice), is caused by a blockage of bile ducts that transport bile containing conjugated bilirubin out of the liver for excretion. This is a list of conditions that can cause posthepatic jaundice:


title: Jaundice

text: Jaundice is typically caused by an underlying pathological process that occurs at some point along the normal physiological pathway of heme metabolism. A deeper understanding of the anatomical flow of normal heme metabolism is essential to appreciate the importance of prehepatic, hepatic, and posthepatic categories. Thus, an anatomical approach to heme metabolism precedes a discussion of the pathophysiology of jaundice.


title: Jaundice

text: When red blood cells complete their lifespan of about 120 days, or if they are damaged, they rupture as they pass through the reticuloendothelial system, and cell contents including hemoglobin are released into circulation. Macrophages phagocytose free hemoglobin and split it into heme and globin. Two reactions then take place with the heme molecule. The first oxidation reaction is catalyzed by the microsomal enzyme heme oxygenase and results in biliverdin (green color pigment), iron, and carbon monoxide. The next step is the reduction of biliverdin to a yellow color tetrapyrrole pigment called bilirubin by cytosolic enzyme biliverdin reductase. This bilirubin is "unconjugated", "free", or "indirect" bilirubin. Around 4 mg of bilirubin per kg of blood are produced each day. The majority of this bilirubin comes from the breakdown of heme from expired red blood cells in the process just described. Roughly 20% comes from other heme sources, however, including ineffective erythropoiesis, and the breakdown of other heme-containing proteins, such as muscle myoglobin and cytochromes. The unconjugated bilirubin then travels to the liver through the bloodstream. Because this bilirubin is not soluble, it is transported through the blood bound to serum albumin.


title: Jaundice

text: Once unconjugated bilirubin arrives in the liver, liver enzyme UDP-glucuronyl transferase conjugates bilirubin + glucuronic acid → bilirubin diglucuronide (conjugated bilirubin). Bilirubin that has been conjugated by the liver is water-soluble and excreted into the gallbladder.


title: Jaundice

text: Bilirubin enters the intestinal tract via bile. In the intestinal tract, bilirubin is converted into urobilinogen by symbiotic intestinal bacteria. Most urobilinogen is converted into stercobilinogen and further oxidized into stercobilin. Stercobilin is excreted via feces, giving stool its characteristic brown coloration. A small portion of urobilinogen is reabsorbed back into the gastrointestinal cells. Most reabsorbed urobilinogen undergoes hepatobiliary recirculation. A smaller portion of reabsorbed urobilinogen is filtered into the kidneys. In the urine, urobilinogen is converted to urobilin, which gives urine its characteristic yellow color.


title: Jaundice

text: One way to understand jaundice pathophysiology is to organize it into disorders that cause increased bilirubin production (abnormal heme metabolism) or decreased bilirubin excretion (abnormal heme excretion).


title: Jaundice

text: Prehepatic jaundice results from a pathological increase in bilirubin production: an increased rate of erythrocyte hemolysis causes increased bilirubin production, leading to increased deposition of bilirubin in mucosal tissues and the appearance of a yellow hue.


title: Jaundice

text: Hepatic jaundice (hepatocellular jaundice) is due to significant disruption of liver function, leading to hepatic cell death and necrosis and impaired bilirubin transport across hepatocytes. Bilirubin transport across hepatocytes may be impaired at any point between hepatocellular uptake of unconjugated bilirubin and hepatocellular transport of conjugated bilirubin into the gallbladder. In addition, subsequent cellular edema due to inflammation causes mechanical obstruction of the intrahepatic biliary tract. Most commonly, interferences in all three major steps of bilirubin metabolism — uptake, conjugation, and excretion — usually occur in hepatocellular jaundice. Thus, an abnormal rise in both unconjugated and conjugated bilirubin will be present. Because excretion (the rate-limiting step) is usually impaired to the greatest extent, conjugated hyperbilirubinemia predominates.


title: Jaundice

text: The unconjugated bilirubin still enters the liver cells and becomes conjugated in the usual way. This conjugated bilirubin is then returned to the blood, probably by rupture of the congested bile canaliculi and direct emptying of the bile into the lymph exiting the liver. Thus, most of the bilirubin in the plasma becomes the conjugated type rather than the unconjugated type, and this conjugated bilirubin, which did not go to the intestine to become urobilinogen, gives the urine a dark color.


title: Jaundice

text: Posthepatic jaundice, also called obstructive jaundice, is due to the blockage of bile excretion from the biliary tract, which leads to increased conjugated bilirubin and bile salts there. In complete obstruction of the bile duct, conjugated bilirubin cannot access the intestinal tract, disrupting further bilirubin conversion to urobilinogen and, therefore, no stercobilin or urobilin is produced. In obstructive jaundice, excess conjugated bilirubin is filtered into the urine without urobilinogen. Conjugated bilirubin in urine (bilirubinuria) gives urine an abnormally dark brown color. Thus, the presence of pale stool (stercobilin absent from feces) and dark urine (conjugated bilirubin present in urine) suggests an obstructive cause of jaundice. Because these associated signs are also positive in many hepatic jaundice conditions, they cannot be a reliable clinical feature to distinguish obstructive versus hepatocellular jaundice causes.


title: Jaundice

text: Most people presenting with jaundice have various predictable patterns of liver panel abnormalities, though significant variation does exist. The typical liver panel includes blood levels of enzymes found primarily from the liver, such as the aminotransferases (ALT, AST), and alkaline phosphatase (ALP); bilirubin (which causes the jaundice); and protein levels, specifically, total protein and albumin. Other primary lab tests for liver function include gamma glutamyl transpeptidase (GGT) and prothrombin time (PT). No single test can differentiate between various classifications of jaundice. A combination of liver function tests and other physical examination findings is essential to arrive at a diagnosis.


title: Jaundice

text: Some bone and heart disorders can lead to an increase in ALP and the aminotransferases, so the first step in differentiating these from liver problems is to compare the levels of GGT, which are only elevated in liver-specific conditions. The second step is distinguishing from biliary (cholestatic) or liver causes of jaundice and altered laboratory results. ALP and GGT levels typically rise with one pattern while aspartate aminotransferase (AST) and alanine aminotransferase (ALT) rise in a separate pattern. If the ALP (10–45 IU/L) and GGT (18–85 IU/L) levels rise proportionately as high as the AST (12–38 IU/L) and ALT (10–45 IU/L) levels, this indicates a cholestatic problem. If the AST and ALT rise is significantly higher than the ALP and GGT rise, though, this indicates a liver problem. Finally, distinguishing between liver causes of jaundice, comparing levels of AST and ALT can prove useful. AST levels typically are higher than ALT. This remains the case in most liver disorders except for hepatitis (viral or hepatotoxic). Alcoholic liver damage may have fairly normal ALT levels, with AST 10 times higher than ALT. If ALT is higher than AST, however, this is indicative of hepatitis. Levels of ALT and AST are not well correlated to the extent of liver damage, although rapid drops in these levels from very high levels can indicate severe necrosis. Low levels of albumin tend to indicate a chronic condition, while the level is normal in hepatitis and cholestasis.


title: Jaundice

text: Laboratory results for liver panels are frequently compared by the magnitude of their differences, not the pure number, as well as by their ratios. The AST:ALT ratio can be a good indicator of whether the disorder is alcoholic liver damage (above 10), some other form of liver damage (above 1), or hepatitis (less than 1). Bilirubin levels greater than 10 times normal could indicate neoplastic or intrahepatic cholestasis. Levels lower than this tend to indicate hepatocellular causes. AST levels greater than 15 times normal tend to indicate acute hepatocellular damage. Less than this tend to indicate obstructive causes. ALP levels greater than 5 times normal tend to indicate obstruction, while levels greater than 10 times normal can indicate drug (toxin) induced cholestatic hepatitis or cytomegalovirus infection. Both of these conditions can also have ALT and AST greater than 20 times normal. GGT levels greater than 10 times normal typically indicate cholestasis. Levels 5–10 times tend to indicate viral hepatitis. Levels less than 5 times normal tend to indicate drug toxicity. Acute hepatitis typically has ALT and AST levels rising 20–30 times normal (above 1000) and may remain significantly elevated for several weeks. Acetaminophen toxicity can result in ALT and AST levels greater than 50 times than normal.


title: Jaundice

text: Unconjugated bilirubin is hydrophobic, so cannot be excreted in urine. Thus, the finding of increased urobilinogen in the urine without the presence of bilirubin in the urine (due to its unconjugated state) suggests hemolytic jaundice as the underlying disease process. Urobilinogen will be greater than 2 units, as hemolytic anemia causes increased heme metabolism; one exception being the case of infants, where the gut flora has not developed). Conversely, conjugated bilirubin is hydrophilic and thus can be detected as present in the urine — bilirubinuria — in contrast to unconjugated bilirubin, which is absent in the urine.


title: Jaundice

text: Medical imaging such as ultrasound, CT scan, and HIDA scan are useful for detecting bile-duct blockage.


title: Jaundice

text: Yellow discoloration of the skin, especially on the palms and the soles, but not of the sclera or inside the mouth, is often due to carotenemia—a harmless condition.


title: Jaundice

text: Treatment of jaundice varies depending on the underlying cause. If a bile duct blockage is present, surgery is typically required; otherwise, management is medical.


title: Jaundice

text: Hyperbilirubinemia, more precisely hyperbilirubinemia due to the unconjugated fraction, may cause bilirubin to accumulate in the grey matter of the central nervous system, potentially causing irreversible neurological damage, leading to a condition known as kernicterus. Depending on the level of exposure, the effects range from unnoticeable to severe brain damage and even death. Newborns are especially vulnerable to hyperbilirubinemia-induced neurological damage, so must be carefully monitored for alterations in their serum bilirubin levels.


title: Jaundice

text: Individuals with parenchymal liver disease who have impaired hemostasis may develop bleeding problems.


title: Jaundice

text: Jaundice in adults is rare. Under the five year DISCOVERY programme in the UK, annual incidence of jaundice was 0.74 per 1000 individuals over age 45, although this rate may be slightly inflated due to the main goal of the programme collecting and analyzing cancer data in the population. Jaundice is commonly associated with severity of disease with an incidence of up to 40% of patients requiring intensive care in ICU experiencing jaundice. The causes of jaundice in the intensive care setting is both due to jaundice as the primary reason for ICU stay or as a morbidity to an underlying disease (i.e. sepsis).


title: Jaundice

text: In the developed world, the most common causes of jaundice are blockage of the bile duct or medication-induced. In the developing world, the most common cause of jaundice is infectious such as viral hepatitis, leptospirosis, schistosomiasis, or malaria.


title: Jaundice

text: Risk factors associated with high serum bilirubin levels include male gender, white ethnicities, and active smoking. Mean serum total bilirubin levels in adults were found to be higher in men (0.72 ± 0.004 mg/dl) than women (0.52 ± 0.003 mg/dl). Higher bilirubin levels in adults are found also in non-Hispanic white population (0.63 ± 0.004 mg/dl) and Mexican American population (0.61 ± 0.005 mg/dl) while lower in non-Hispanic black population (0.55 ± 0.005 mg/dl). Bilirubin levels are higher in active smokers.


title: Jaundice

text: Jaundice in infants presents with yellowed skin and icteral sclerae. Neonatal jaundice spreads in a cephalocaudal pattern, affecting the face and neck before spreading down to the trunk and lower extremities in more severe cases. Other symptoms may include drowsiness, poor feeding, and in severe cases, unconjugated bilirubin can cross the blood-brain barrier and cause permanent neurological damage (kernicterus).


title: Jaundice

text: The most common cause of jaundice in infants is normal physiologic jaundice. Pathologic causes of neonatal jaundice include:


title: Jaundice

text: Transient neonatal jaundice is one of the most common conditions occurring in newborns (children under 28 days of age) with more than 80 per cent experienceing jaundice during their first week of life. Jaundice in infants, as in adults, is characterized by increased bilirubin levels (infants: total serum bilirubin greater than 5 mg/dL).


title: Jaundice

text: Normal physiological neonatal jaundice is due to immaturity of liver enzymes involved in bilirubin metabolism, immature gut microbiota, and increased breakdown of fetal hemoglobin (HbF). Breast milk jaundice is caused by an increased concentration of β-glucuronidase in breast milk, which increases bilirubin deconjugation and reabsorption of bilirubin, leading to persistence of physiologic jaundice with unconjugated hyperbilirubinemia. Onset of breast milk jaundice is within 2 weeks after birth and lasts for 4–13 weeks.


title: Jaundice

text: While most cases of newborn jaundice are not harmful, when bilirubin levels are very high, brain damage — kernicterus — may occur leading to significant disability. Kernicterus is associated with increased unconjugated bilirubin (bilirubin which is not carried by albumin). Newborns are especially vulnerable to this damage, due to increased permeability of the blood–brain barrier occurring with increased unconjugated bilirubin, simultaneous to the breakdown of fetal hemoglobin and the immaturity of gut flora. This condition has been rising in recent years. as babies spend less time in sunlight.


title: Jaundice

text: Jaundice in newborns is usually transient and dissipates without medical intervention. In cases when serum bilirubin levels are greater than 4–21 mg/dl (68–360 μmol/L), infant may be treated with phototherapy or exchanged transfusion depending on the infant's age and prematurity status. A bili light is often the tool used for early treatment, which often consists of exposing the baby to intensive phototherapy. A 2014 systematic review found no evidence indicating whether outcomes were different for hospital-based versus home-based treatment. A 2021 Cochrane systematic review found that sunlight can be used to supplement phototherapy, as long as care is taken to prevent overheating and skin damage. There was not sufficient evidence to conclude that sunlight by itself is an effective treatment. Bilirubin count is also lowered through excretion — bowel movements and urination —so frequent and effective feedings are vital measures to decrease jaundice in infants.


title: Jaundice

text: Jaundice comes from the French "jaune", meaning yellow, "jaunisse" meaning "yellow disease". The medical term for it is icterus from the Greek word "ikteros". The origin of the word icterus is quite bizarre, coming from an ancient belief that jaundice could be cured by looking at the yellow bird "icteria". The term icterus is sometimes incorrectly used to refer to jaundice specifically of sclera.


How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (also known as How to Train Your Dragon 3) is a 2019 American computer-animated action fantasy film loosely based on the book series by Cressida Cowell. Produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by Universal Pictures, it is the sequel to "How to Train Your Dragon 2" (2014) and the third and final installment in the "How to Train Your Dragon" trilogy. Written and directed by Dean DeBlois and produced by Bonnie Arnold and Brad Lewis, the film stars the voices of Jay Baruchel, America Ferrera, Cate Blanchett, Craig Ferguson, and F. Murray Abraham. The film follows Hiccup as he seeks a dragon utopia known as the "Hidden World" while coming to terms with Toothless' new bond with a female Fury, as they deal with the threat of a ruthless dragon hunter named Grimmel the Grisly.


title: How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

text: The first discussions about a second sequel to "How to Train Your Dragon" began in December 2010 when DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg announced that there would be a third film in the series. DeBlois stated that the first sequel was being intentionally designed as the second act of the trilogy. The film underwent changes for release dates due to distributor changes. The animation challenges of the production required DreamWorks Animation to update and invent new software to handle complex tasks, such as lighting the Light Fury dragon.


text: "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World" was released on January 3, 2019, in Australia, and on February 22 in the United States. The film marks the first DreamWorks Animation film to be distributed by Universal Pictures, two years after parent company NBCUniversal acquired DreamWorks Animation in 2016. Like its predecessors, it received acclaim from critics, who praised its animation, voice acting, musical score, and emotional weight of the conclusion. It grossed over $525 million worldwide, becoming the fifth highest-grossing animated film of 2019, as well as Universal's highest-grossing animated film not to be produced by Illumination. "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World" received several awards and nominations: five nominations for Annie Awards and a Golden Globe. At the 92nd Academy Awards, the film was nominated for Best Animated Feature.


text: One year after becoming chieftain, Hiccup, his Night Fury Toothless and their fellow dragon-riders continue to rescue captured dragons in order to bring them to Berk and its bustling dragon and human utopia. Their efforts have resulted in the island becoming overpopulated with dragons. In response, Hiccup desires to find the "Hidden World", a dragon safe haven spoken of by his late father Stoick. Meanwhile, a white female Fury dragon, held captive by warlords, is given to infamous dragon hunter Grimmel the Grisly as bait for him to capture Toothless for the warlords' use as an alpha.


text: Toothless discovers the white Fury in the woods, and the two become enchanted with each other until the white Fury, sensing Hiccup's and Astrid's nearby presence, flees. Astrid then dubs the white Fury a "Light Fury". Hiccup and Tuffnut later discover Grimmel's dragon traps in the area. Grimmel visits Hiccup that night demanding he hand over Toothless, while also revealing he single-handedly endangered the Night Fury species, but Hiccup has prepared an ambush for him. Grimmel escapes, while his Deathgripper dragons burn down Hiccup's house and most of Berk in the process. Hiccup then rallies the citizens and dragons to leave Berk on a quest to find the Hidden World and safety from dragon hunters.


text: Mid-journey, the Berkians discover an island on which they initially plan simply to rest, but soon begin to settle there, dubbing it “New Berk”. Seeing Toothless' inability to fly solo hindering his growing relationship with the Light Fury, Hiccup rebuilds an automatic tailfin for him. Upon receiving it, Toothless flies off, meeting the Light Fury on his own and flying with her to an unknown land. Valka, on a scouting patrol, notices Grimmel's approaching army and reports back to Hiccup. Hiccup and the dragon riders head to capture Grimmel, but fall into his trap and barely escape. Ruffnut is captured, but irritates Grimmel until he lets her go.


text: Hiccup, Astrid and her dragon Stormfly, searching for Toothless, find the Hidden World and see Toothless and the Light Fury leading the dragons there as a happily mated couple. When the two humans are soon discovered, Toothless rescues them and returns them to the Berkians, with Hiccup realizing that his people would be intruders and unsafe in the Hidden World. Ruffnut returns, but unbeknownst to her, Grimmel had secretly followed her to New Berk. Grimmel appears and captures Toothless and the Light Fury who had followed them to New Berk. Toothless' alpha status allows Grimmel to capture the rest of Berk's dragons by holding the Light Fury hostage.


text: With Astrid's encouragement, Hiccup sets out with the dragon riders to stop Grimmel and his army. Gliding on wingsuits, they catch Grimmel's army off-guard, igniting a battle, and freeing the dragons. With help from Stormfly, Hiccup frees Toothless, while Grimmel drugs the Light Fury into obeying him. Hiccup and Toothless give chase and defeat Grimmel's Deathgrippers, but Grimmel tranquilizes Toothless midair, causing the dragon to fall helplessly. Hiccup, realizing he cannot rescue Toothless alone, frees the Light Fury and implores her to save Toothless. Hiccup is fully prepared to sacrifice himself in order to save Toothless as both he and Grimmel plummet toward the sea, however, the Light Fury returns to save Hiccup, while Grimmel falls to his death.


text: Back on the island, Toothless and Hiccup fully realize that dragons will never be safe in the human world, at least for the time being. Hiccup bids an emotional farewell to Toothless as the Berkians tearfully set their dragons free to live in the Hidden World, the Light Fury leading the dragons away and Toothless following them. Some time later, Hiccup and Astrid finally marry and become the chieftains of New Berk.


text: About a decade later, Toothless and the Light Fury have mated and given birth to three hybrid dragon fledglings. Hiccup, Astrid, and their two children sail across the sea to visit them at the edge of the Hidden World. After introducing his son and daughter to his old friend, Hiccup and Astrid take their children flying on Toothless and Stormfly, accompanied by the Light Fury and their offspring. Hiccup vows that until humankind is ready to co-exist peacefully with one another, the dragons will stay hidden while the Berkians guard their secret.


text: In December 2010, DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg announced that there would also be a third film in the series: ""How To Train Your Dragon" is at least three: maybe more, but we know there are at least three chapters to that story." Dean DeBlois, the writer and director of the second and the third film, stated that "How to Train Your Dragon 2" was being intentionally designed as the second act of the trilogy: "There are certain characters and situations that come into play in the second film that will become much more crucial to the story by the third." DeBlois said in an interview that the third part would be released in 2016. Although the series has taken a different path of telling a story of Hiccup and Vikings, author Cressida Cowell revealed that the trilogy and the book series will have similar endings (with "an explanation as to why dragons are no more").


text: The film was produced by Bonnie Arnold and Brad Lewis. DeBlois and Chris Sanders were the executive producers; Sanders was an executive producer of the second film and co-director of the first. Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, America Ferrera, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Kristen Wiig returned in the third film, with Justin Rupple replacing T.J. Miller as Tuffnut. DeBlois revealed that Miller did initially return to voice Tuffnut, but DreamWorks recast him after the actor's sexual assault allegations and arrest for calling in a fake bomb threat. Cate Blanchett also reprised her role as Valka from the second film. On November 14, 2017, it was announced that Kit Harington would reprise his role as Eret and F. Murray Abraham had joined the cast. During the earlier stages of production, DeBlois stated that Djimon Hounsou would also return as Drago Bludvist. It was even planned to have Drago redeemed by the film's end, but halfway through development, DreamWorks co-founder Steven Spielberg convinced DeBlois that the story of Drago's redemption required more screen time that they could not provide, causing his inclusion to be scrapped. On April 17, 2018, DreamWorks Animation announced that the sequel's title would be "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World". The animation challenges of the production required DreamWorks Animation to update and invent new software to handle complex tasks, such as lighting the Light Fury dragon.


text: John Powell, who composed the previous two films, returned to compose the film's score. In addition, Powell's collaborators Batu Sener, Anthony Willis, and Paul Mounsey are credited as additional composers. Also returning from the previous films, Jónsi wrote a new song for the film, titled "Together From Afar", which was released as a single on January 31, 2019. Jónsi also provided vocals for a track titled "The Hidden World".


text: In September 2012, 20th Century Fox, DreamWorks Animation's then-distributor partner, and the studio itself announced the film was originally going to be released on June 17, 2016. In September 2014, the film's release date was pushed back a year from its original release date of June 17, 2016 to June 9, 2017. DeBlois explained the release date shifts as such: "It's just that these movies take three years. I think it was a little ambitious to say 2016... As is normally the case, they kind of throw darts out into the future and wherever they land they call that a release date until we start talking about it in practical terms, and then it's like, 'Uh yeah that's not enough time'. So knowing that they take three years from this moment, from outlining and writing the screenplay through to the final lighting of it, it's just a process of building models and doing tests and animating, storyboarding, the whole thing just adds up to about three years."


text: In January 2015, the release date was pushed back a year from June 9, 2017 to June 29, 2018 following DreamWorks Animation's corporate restructuring and lay-offs meant to maximize the company's "creative talent and resources, reduce costs, and drive profitability." On June 18, 2016, the release date was moved up from June 29, 2018 to May 18, 2018, taking the release date of the Warner Animation Group's "". On December 5, 2016, the US release date was pushed back from May 18, 2018 to March 1, 2019. The release date was moved up for a final time from March 1, 2019 to February 22, 2019, taking the slot of "The Turning", a live-action DreamWorks film which in turn was pushed back to January 24, 2020.


text: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment released "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World" for digital download on May 7, 2019, and on Blu-ray, 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, and DVD on May 21. Physical copies contain two 2018 short films: "Bilby" and "Bird Karma".


text: Unlike the first two films of the trilogy, "The Hidden World" does not have a tie-in game based on its plot. Instead, there are two games set before the events of the film, which are the top-down action adventure game "DreamWorks Dragons: Dawn of New Riders" available on consoles and personal computers (Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Microsoft Windows) and the match-3 game "Dragons: Titan Uprising" for mobile devices (iOS and Android).


text: "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World" grossed $160.8 million in the United States and Canada, and $361 million in other territories, for a worldwide gross of $521.8 million, against a production budget of $129 million. "Deadline Hollywood" calculated the film's net profit as $130million, accounting for production budgets, marketing, talent participations, and other costs; box office grosses and home media revenues placed it 12th on their list of 2019's "Most Valuable Blockbusters".


text: In the United States and Canada, "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World" held early screenings at 1,000 theaters on February 2, 2019 and grossed $2.5 million, one of the highest advance showing totals ever. It was released alongside the wide expansion of "Fighting with My Family", and was initially projected to gross $40–45 million from 4,259 theaters in its opening weekend. After making $17.5 million on its first day (including $3 million from Thursday night previews), weekend projections were increased to $60 million. It went


text: on to debut to $55 million finishing first at the box office. The film made $30 million in its second weekend, retaining the top spot, before being dethroned by newcomer "Captain Marvel" in its third.


text: The film grossed $1.5 million on its opening day in Australia, setting a record for a DreamWorks Animation film in that country (surpassing "Shrek 2"). In New Zealand, the film grossed $173,000 on its opening day, ranking as DreamWorks Animation's second biggest opening day in the country, behind "Shrek 2". By its third weekend of international release the film has grossed a total of $41 million. As of March 24, 2019, the film's largest markets in other territories were China ($53.7 million), Russia ($26.8 million), France ($25.0 million), United Kingdom ($24.8 million) and Mexico ($21.0 million).


text: On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of based on reviews, and an average rating of . The website's critical consensus reads, "The rare trilogy capper that really works, "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World" brings its saga to a visually dazzling and emotionally affecting conclusion." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 71 out of 100, based on 42 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale (the same score earned by the first two films), while those at PostTrak gave it a 90% positive score and a 77% "definite recommend."


text: Jennifer Bisset of CNET praised the voice performances of the main characters, while also citing the visuals and action sequences, and singled out the development of the relationship between Hiccup and Toothless, saying, "Continuing a series-long focus on family and love, "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World" narrows on what those values mean for Toothless. He experiences romance. He grows up. And with heavy, satisfied hearts, we let him, and Hiccup, go."


text: Michael Nordine of IndieWire gave the film a B, saying, "Directed once again by Dean DeBlois, "The Hidden World" strikes a bittersweet chord in reminding its young audience that all good things — including the age of dragons — must come to an end." He later went on to applaud the CGI, lauding the "arresting visuals", and stating that "The animation itself is striking — an early sequence in which the sky is filled with dragons is an early sign of the visual treats to come — and ends up being the film's highlight." Ben Kenigsberg of the New York Times gave a positive review of the characters and emotional messages of the film, writing "More bittersweet and less triumphal than its predecessors, and directed by a returning Dean DeBlois, “"The Hidden World"” concerns the exigencies that Hiccup faces as a leader, both politically and personally. If you truly love that dragon you trained, its message says, let him go."


text: Conversely, some critics felt the film had the presence of too many juggled sub-plots and an obligatory ending, with Movie Crypt concluding that "Fans will enjoy seeing their characters grown and progressing as story arcs are closed, but the final resolution rings hollow. Ultimately, none of it appeared necessary other than a need to say goodbye; the dragons and their champions certainly earned a better conclusion than that." Kerry Lengel of Arizona Republic says that "The plot is thin and holey and the characters are mostly just a single gag set on repeat" and calls it "a lazy effort."


title: The Sound of Silence

text: "The Sound of Silence," originally "The Sounds of Silence," is a song by the American music duo Simon & Garfunkel. It is said that the song was written by Paul Simon over several months in 1963 and 1964. The duo's studio audition of the song led to a record deal with Columbia Records, and the original acoustic version was recorded in March 1964 at Columbia Studios in New York City for their debut album, "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M." Released on October 19, 1964, the album was a commercial failure and led to the duo disbanding; Simon returned to England, and Art Garfunkel to his studies at Columbia University.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: In 1965, the song began to attract airplay at radio stations in Boston and throughout Florida. The growing airplay led Tom Wilson, the song's producer, to remix the track, overdubbing electric instruments and drums. This remixed version was released as a single in September 1965. Simon & Garfunkel were not informed of the song's remix until after its release. The remix hit No. 1 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 for the week ending January 1, 1966, leading the duo to reunite and hastily record their second album, which Columbia titled "Sounds of Silence" in an attempt to capitalize on the song's success. The remixed single version of the song was included on this follow-up album. Later, it was featured in the 1967 film "The Graduate" and was included on the film's soundtrack album. It was additionally released on the "Mrs. Robinson" EP in 1968, along with three other songs from the film: "Mrs. Robinson," "April Come She Will" and "Scarborough Fair/Canticle."


title: The Sound of Silence

text: "The Sound of Silence" was a top-ten hit in multiple countries worldwide, among them Australia, Austria, West Germany, Japan and the Netherlands. Generally considered a classic folk rock song, the song was added to the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically important" in 2012, along with the rest of the "Sounds of Silence" album. Since its release, the song was included in later compilations, beginning with the 1972 compilation album "Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits".


title: The Sound of Silence

text: Simon and Garfunkel had become interested in folk music and the growing counterculture movement separately in the early 1960s. Having performed together previously under the name Tom and Jerry in the late 1950s, their partnership had since dissolved when they began attending college. In 1963, they regrouped and began performing Simon's original compositions locally in Queens. They billed themselves "Kane & Garr," after old recording pseudonyms, and signed up for Gerde's Folk City, a Greenwich Village club that hosted Monday night performances. In September 1963, the duo performed three new songs, among them "The Sound of Silence," getting the attention of Columbia Records producer Tom Wilson, a young African-American jazz musician who was also helping to guide Bob Dylan's transition from folk to rock. Simon convinced Wilson to let him and his partner have a studio audition; their performance of "The Sound of Silence" got the duo signed to Columbia.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: The song's origin and basis are unclear, with some thinking that the song commented on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as the song was recorded three months after the assassination, though Simon & Garfunkel had performed the song live as Kane & Garr two months before the assassination. Simon wrote "The Sound of Silence" when he was 21 years old, with Simon explaining that the song was written in his bathroom, where he turned off the lights to better concentrate. "The main thing about playing the guitar, though, was that I was able to sit by myself and play and dream. And I was always happy doing that. I used to go off in the bathroom, because the bathroom had tiles, so it was a slight echo chamber. I'd turn on the faucet so that water would run (I like that sound, it's very soothing to me) and I'd play. In the dark. 'Hello darkness, my old friend / I've come to talk with you again.'" According to Garfunkel, the song was first developed in November, but Simon took three months to perfect the lyrics, which he claims were entirely written on February 19, 1964. Garfunkel, introducing the song at a live performance (with Simon) in Harlem, June 1966, summed up the song's meaning as "the inability of people to communicate with each other, not particularly intentionally but especially emotionally, so what you see around you are people unable to love each other."


title: The Sound of Silence

text: In a memoir by Sandy Greenberg, Greenberg states he believes the song reflected the strong bond he had with his college best friend, Garfunkel, who adopted the epithet "Darkness" so as to empathise with Greenberg's sudden-onset blindness while in college, even though the song was written by Paul Simon.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: To promote the release of their debut album, "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.", the duo performed again at Folk City, as well as two shows at the Gaslight Café, which went over poorly. Dave Van Ronk, a folk singer, was at the performances, and noted that several in the audience regarded their music as a joke. Sounds of Silence' actually became a running joke: for a while there, it was only necessary to start singing 'Hello darkness, my old friend ... ' and everybody would crack up." "Wednesday Morning, 3 AM" sold only 3,000 copies upon its October release, and its dismal sales led Simon to move to London. While there, he recorded a solo album, "The Paul Simon Songbook" (1965), which features a rendition of the song, titled "The "Sound" of Silence" (instead of "The "Sounds" of Silence," as on "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.").


title: The Sound of Silence

text: The original recording of the song is in D♯ minor, using the chords D♯m, C♯, B and F♯. Simon plays a guitar with a capo on the sixth fret, using the shapes for Am, G, F and C chords. He provides the lower vocals for harmony while Garfunkel sings the melody. The vocal span goes from C♯3 to F♯4 in the song.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M." had been a commercial failure before producer Tom Wilson was alerted that radio stations had begun to play "The Sound of Silence" in spring 1965. A late-night disc jockey at WBZ in Boston began to spin "The Sound of Silence", where it found a college demographic. Students at Harvard and Tufts University responded well, and the song made its way down the east coast pretty much "overnight", "all the way to Cocoa Beach, Florida, where it caught the students coming down for spring break." A promotional executive for Columbia went to give away free albums of new artists, and beach-goers were interested only in the artists behind "The Sound of Silence." He phoned the home office in New York, alerting them of its appeal. An alternate version of the story states that Wilson attended Columbia's July 1965 convention in Miami, where the head of the local sales branch raved about the song's airplay.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: Folk rock was beginning to make waves on pop radio, with songs like the Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man" charting high. Wilson listened to the song several times, considering it too soft for a wide release. Wilson had strong feeling about editing the song with explicit rock overtones. As stated by Geoffrey Himes, "If Columbia Records producer Tom Wilson hadn’t taken the initiative, without the singers’ knowledge, to dub a rock rhythm section over their folk rendition, the song never would have become a cultural touchstone—a generation's shorthand for alienation." Wilson had also experimented the previous December with overdubbing an electric band over acoustic tracks by Bob Dylan; these recordings were never officially released, as Dylan and Wilson opted to record new tracks with a live band for what would become the album "Bringing It All Back Home".


title: The Sound of Silence

text: On June 15, 1965, following sessions for Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," Wilson retained guitarist Al Gorgoni and drummer Bobby Gregg from the Dylan sessions, adding guitarist Vinnie Bell and bassist Bob Bushnell. The tempo on the original recording was uneven, making it difficult for the musicians to keep the song in time. Engineer Roy Halee employed a heavy echo on the remix, which was a common trait of the Byrds' hits. The single was first serviced to college FM rock stations, and a commercial single release followed on September 13, 1965. The lack of consultation with Simon and Garfunkel on the remix was because, although the duo was still contracted to Columbia Records, it was no longer a "working entity." It was not unusual for producers to add instruments or vocals to previous releases and re-release them as new products.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: In the fall of 1965, Simon was in Denmark, performing at small clubs, and picked up a copy of "Billboard", as he had routinely done for several years. Upon seeing "The Sound of Silence" in the "Billboard" Hot 100, he bought a copy of "Cashbox" and saw the same thing. Several days later, Garfunkel excitedly called Simon to inform him of the single's growing success. A copy of the 7-inch single arrived in the mail the next day, and according to friend Al Stewart, "Paul was "horrified" when he first heard it ... [when the] rhythm section slowed down at one point so that Paul and Artie's voices could catch up." Garfunkel was far less concerned about the remix, feeling conditioned to the process of trying to create a hit single: "It's interesting, I suppose it might do something, It might sell," he told Wilson.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: The lyrics of the song are written in five stanzas of seven lines each. Each stanza begins with a couplet describing the setting of the scene, followed by a couplet driving the action forward and another couplet expressing the climactic thought of the verse, and closes with a one-line refrain referring to "the sound of silence." This structure is supported by a melodic contour, where the first and second lines are paired with the arpeggio A-C-E-D and a repeat a step lower, respectively. The arpeggio is then stretched to become C-E-G-A-G and repeated twice in the second couplet. For the last three lines, the contour then leaps from C to the higher A, rises to the higher C, and then falls back to the A before singing the stretched arpeggio in reverse and finally retreating to the lower A. The progress of the lyrics through its five stanzas places the singer into an incrementally increasing tension with an increasingly ambiguous "sound of silence." The irony of using the word "sound" to describe silence in the title lyrics suggests a paradoxical symbolism being used by the singer, which the lyrics of the fourth stanza eventually identifies as "silence like a cancer grows." The "sound of silence" is symbolically taken also to denote the cultural alienation associated with much of the 1960s. In the counterculture movements of the 1960s, the phrase "sound of silence" can be compared to other more commonly used turns of phrase such as "turning a deaf ear" often associated with the detachment experienced with impersonal large governments.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: The first stanza presents the singer as taking some relative solace in the peacefulness he associates with "darkness" which is submerged "within" the ambiguous sound of silence. The second stanza has the effect of breaking into the silence with "the flash of a neon light" which leaves the singer "touched" by the enduring ambiguity of the sound of silence. In the third stanza, a "naked light" emerges as a vision of 10,000 people all caught within their own solitude and alienation without any one of them being able to "disturb" the recurring sound of silence.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: In the fourth stanza, the singer proclaims in a declarative voice that "silence like a cancer grows," though his words "like silent raindrops fell" without ever being heard against the by now cancerous sound of silence. The fifth stanza appears to culminate with the urgency raised by the declarative voice in the fourth stanza through the apparent triumph of a false "neon god." The false neon god is only challenged when a "sign flashed out its warning" that only the words of the indigent written on "subway walls and tenement halls" could still "whisper" their truth against the recurring and ambiguous form of "the sound of silence." The song has no lyrical bridge or change of key, and was written without any lyrical intro or outro to start or end the song.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: "The Sound of Silence" first broke in Boston, where it became one of the top-selling singles in early November 1965; it spread to Miami and Washington, D.C. two weeks later, reaching number one in Boston and debuting on the "Billboard" Hot 100.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: Throughout the month of January 1966 "The Sound of Silence" had a one-on-one battle with the Beatles' "We Can Work It Out" for the No. 1 spot on the "Billboard" Hot 100. The former was No. 1 for the weeks of January 1 and 22 and No. 2 for the intervening two weeks. The latter held the top spot for the weeks of January 8, 15, and 29, and was No. 2 for the two weeks that "The Sound of Silence" was No. 1. Overall, "The Sound of Silence" spent 14 weeks on the "Billboard" chart.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: In the wake of the song's success, Simon promptly returned to the United States to record a new Simon & Garfunkel album at Columbia's request. He later described his experiences learning the song went to No. 1, a story he repeated in numerous interviews:


title: The Sound of Silence

text: Simon and Garfunkel's version did not chart in either the UK or Ireland, losing out to a cover version by the Irish group The Bachelors, whose version peaked at number three in the UK and number nine in Ireland.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: 50 years after its original release, a cover version of "The Sound of Silence" was released by American heavy metal band Disturbed on December 7, 2015. A music video was also released. Their cover hit number one on the "Billboard" Hard Rock Digital Songs and Mainstream Rock charts, and is their highest-charting song on the Hot 100, peaking at number 42. It is also their highest-charting single in Australia, peaking at number four. David Draiman sings it in the key of F#m. The chord progression is F#m, E, D, A. The first two verses are sung an octave lower than the original and jumped up an octave for the last three verses. His vocal span goes from E2 to A4 in scientific pitch notation.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: In April 2016, Paul Simon endorsed the cover. Additionally, on April 1, Simon sent Draiman an email praising Disturbed's performance of the rendition on American talk show "Conan". Simon wrote, "Really powerful performance on "Conan" the other day. First time I'd seen you do it live. Nice. Thanks." Draiman responded, "Mr. Simon, I am honored beyond words. We only hoped to pay homage and honor to the brilliance of one of the greatest songwriters of all time. Your compliment means the world to me/us and we are eternally grateful." As of September 2017, the single had sold over 1.5 million digital downloads and had been streamed over 54 million times, estimated Nielsen Music. As of July 2022, the music video has over 826 million views on YouTube, while the live performance on "Conan" has over 131 million, making it the most watched YouTube video from the show.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: Paul Simon released a solo acoustic version of "The Sound of Silence" in the spring of 1974. His version reached No. 84 in Canada and No. 97 on the US "Cash Box" chart.<ref name="Cash Box Top 100 1/29/66"></ref> It was also a minor Adult Contemporary hit (US No. 50, Canada No. 42).


title: The Sound of Silence

text: In 1999, BMI named "The Sound of Silence" as the 18th most-performed song of the 20th century. In 2004, it was ranked No. 156 on "Rolling Stone" list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, one of the duo's three songs on the list. The song is now considered "the quintessential folk rock release." On March 21, 2013, the song was added to the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress for long-term preservation along with the rest of the "Sounds of Silence" album.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: On September 27, 2016, the Disturbed version of "The Sound of Silence" was released as downloadable content for the video game "Rock Band 4". The Disturbed version was used in the episode "Ian Garvey" of "The Blacklist" in November 2017. A live version of "The Sound of Silence" with guest Myles Kennedy is included on "Live at Red Rocks" and "Evolution" (Deluxe Edition). The AMC show "Into the Badlands" features Disturbed's version of "The Sound of Silence" in episode 13 of season 3 ("Black Lotus, White Rose") in April 2019.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: The "a cappella" group Pentatonix recorded a cover of the song, released as a single in 2019. The video amassed more than 50 million views in a year. By the end of 2021, the YouTube video has had almost 114 million views.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: When director Mike Nichols and Sam O'Steen were editing the 1967 film "The Graduate", they initially timed some scenes to this song, intending to substitute original music for the scenes. However, they eventually concluded that an adequate substitute could not be found and decided to purchase the rights for the song for the soundtrack. This was an unusual decision, as the song had charted more than a year earlier, and recycling established music for film was not commonly done at the time.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: With the practice of using well-known songs for films becoming more commonplace, "The Sound of Silence" has since been used for other films, including "Kingpin" (1996), "Old School" (2003), "Bobby" (2006), "Watchmen" (2009), "Trolls" (2016), and "A Twelve Year Night" (2018). In the German TV movie "Ein Drilling kommt selten allein" the song was sung by grandparents to calm down crying triplets.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: The song was used during the fourth season of the television series "Arrested Development" in 2013 as a running gag alluding to characters' (primarily GOB's) inner reflections. It was also used as part of the soundtrack of episode 4 of "The Vietnam War", the 2017 documentary series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The Disturbed cover appeared in the soundtrack of episode 8 of season 5 of the TV series "The Blacklist". In episode 8, season 2 of the mystery-comedy TV series "Only Murders in the Building", titled "Hello, Darkness", the residents of the eponymous building sing the song during a blackout.


title: The Sound of Silence

text: The Canadian band Rush alluded to the song lyrics in the last lines of their 1980 song "The Spirit of Radio."


title: The Sound of Silence

text: The 1994 fifth season episode of "The Simpsons" "Lady Bouvier's Lover" has a parody of the song called "The Sound of Grampa" over a scene that parodies the end of the 1967 movie "The Graduate".


title: The Sound of Silence

text: In January 2020, American rapper Eminem released the song "Darkness", which interpolates "The Sound of Silence" and uses its opening line, "Hello, darkness, my old friend."


title: The Sound of Silence

text: On August 10, 2021, The Holderness Family released a parody version about wanting the children out of the house for school following the lockdowns and school closings due to the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: .com

text: The domain name .com is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. Added at the beginning of 1985, its name is derived from the word "commercial", indicating its original intended purpose for domains registered by commercial organizations. Later, the domain opened for general purposes.


title: .com

text: The domain was originally administered by the United States Department of Defense, but is today operated by Verisign, and remains under ultimate jurisdiction of U.S. law. Verisign registrations in the .com domain are processed via registrars accredited by ICANN. The registry accepts internationalized domain names.


title: .com

text: The domain was one of the original top-level domains (TLDs) on the Internet when the Domain Name System was implemented in January 1985, the others being edu, gov, mil, net, org, and int. It has grown into the largest top-level domain, and has lent its name to an era in the late 1990s, the dot-com bubble, during which excessive speculation in Internet-related companies in a period of rapid growth in the use and adoption of the Internet led to a stock market bubble and crash.


title: .com

text: The domain .com was one of the first set of top-level domains when the Domain Name System was first implemented for use on the Internet on January 1, 1985. The domain was administered by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), however, the department contracted the domain maintenance to SRI International. SRI created DDN-NIC, also known as SRI-NIC, or simply "the NIC" (Network Information Center), then accessible online with the domain name nic.ddn.mil. Beginning October 1, 1991, an operations contract was awarded to Government Systems Inc. (GSI), which sub-contracted it to Network Solutions Inc. (NSI).


title: .com

text: On January 1, 1993, the National Science Foundation assumed responsibility of maintenance, as com was primarily being used for non-defense interests. The NSF contracted operation to Network Solutions (NSI). In 1995, the NSF authorized NSI to begin charging registrants an annual fee for the first time since the domain's inception. Initially, the fee was US$50 per year, with US$35 going to NSI, and US$15 going to a government fund. New registrations had to pay for the first two years, making the new-domain registration fee US$100. In 1997, the United States Department of Commerce assumed authority over all generic TLDs. It is currently operated by Verisign, which had acquired Network Solutions. Verisign later spun off Network Solutions' non-registry functions into a separate company that continues as a registrar. In the English language, the domain is often spelled with a leading period and commonly pronounced as "dot-com", and has entered common parlance this way.


title: .com

text: Although com domains were initially intended to designate commercial entities, the domain has had no restrictions for eligible registrants since the mid-1990s. With the commercialization and popularization of the Internet, the domain was opened to the public and quickly became the most common top-level domain for websites, email, and networking. Many companies that flourished in the period from 1997 to 2001—the time known as the "dot-com bubble"—incorporated the label "com" into company names; these became known as dot-coms or dot-com companies. The introduction of biz in 2001, which is restricted to businesses, has had no impact on the popularity of com.


title: .com

text: Although companies anywhere in the world can register "com" domains, many countries have a second-level domain with a similar purpose under their own country code top-level domain (ccTLD), such as Australia (com.au), China (com.cn), Greece (com.gr), Israel (co.il), India (co.in), Indonesia (co.id), Japan (co.jp), Mexico (com.mx), Nepal (.com.np), South Korea (co.kr), Sri Lanka (com.lk), United Kingdom (co.uk), and Vietnam (.com.vn).


title: .com

text: Many non-commercial sites and networks use com names to benefit from the perceived recognizability of a com domain. However, the registration statistics show varying popularity over the years.


title: .com

text: In December 2011, Verisign reported that approximately 100 million com domains were registered. According to the Domain Name Industry Brief published in March 2020, which publishes every quarter, com domain registration totaled 145.4 million. As of March 2009, Verisign reported that 926 accredited registrars serve the domain.


title: .com

text: On November 29, 2012, the U.S. Department of Commerce approved the renewal of the com Registry Agreement between Verisign, Inc., and ICANN. Through this agreement, Verisign managed the com registry until November 30, 2018.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The Lebanese Civil War () was a multifaceted armed conflict that took place from 1975 to 1990. It resulted in an estimated 120,000 fatalities and an exodus of almost one million people from Lebanon.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The diversity of the Lebanese population played a notable role in the lead-up to and during the conflict: Sunni Muslims and Christians comprised the majority in the coastal cities; Shia Muslims were primarily based in the south and the Beqaa Valley in the east; and Druze and Christians populated the country's mountainous areas. The Lebanese government had been run under the significant influence of elites within the Maronite Christian community. The link between politics and religion had been reinforced under the French Mandate from 1920 to 1943, and the country's parliamentary structure favoured a leading position for its Christian-majority population. However, the country had a large Muslim population to match, and many pan-Arabist and left-wing groups opposed the Christian-dominated pro-Western government. The influx of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967 contributed to the shift of Lebanon's demography in favour of the Muslim population. The Cold War had a powerful disintegrative effect on Lebanon, which was closely linked to the political polarization that preceded the 1958 Lebanese crisis, since Christians sided with the Western world while leftist, Muslim, and pan-Arabist groups sided with Soviet-aligned Arab countries.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: Fighting between Maronite-Christian and Palestinian forces (mainly from the Palestine Liberation Organization) began in 1975; leftist, Muslim, and pan-Arabist Lebanese groups formed an alliance with the Palestinians in Lebanon. Over the course of the fighting, alliances shifted rapidly and unpredictably. Furthermore, foreign powers, such as Israel and Syria, became involved in the war and fought alongside different factions. Various peacekeeping forces, such as the Multinational Force in Lebanon and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, were also stationed in the country during the conflict.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The Taif Agreement of 1989 marked the beginning of the end of the war. In January 1989, a committee appointed by the Arab League began to formulate solutions to the conflict. In March 1991, the Lebanese parliament passed an amnesty law that pardoned all political crimes prior to its enactment. In May 1991, all of the militias in Lebanon were dissolved, with the exception of Hezbollah, while the Lebanese Armed Forces began to slowly rebuild as Lebanon's only major non-sectarian institution. Religious tensions between Sunnis and Shias remained after the war.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: In 1860 a civil war between Druze and Maronites erupted in the Ottoman Mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon, which had been divided between them in 1842. The war resulted in the massacre of about 10,000 Christians and at least 6,000 Druzes. The 1860 war was considered by the Druze as a military victory and a political defeat.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: World War I was hard for the Lebanese. While the rest of the world was occupied with the World War, the people in Lebanon were suffering from a famine that would last nearly four years. With the defeat and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (1908–1922), Turkish rule ended.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: France took control of the area under the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon under the League of Nations. The French created the state of Greater Lebanon as a safe haven for the Maronites, but included a large Muslim population within the borders. In 1926, Lebanon was declared a republic, and a constitution was adopted. However, the constitution was suspended in 1932. Various factions sought unity with Syria, or independence from the French. In 1934, the country's first (and only to date) census was conducted.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: World War II and the 1940s brought great change to Lebanon and the Middle East. Lebanon was promised independence, which was achieved on 22 November 1943. Free French troops, who had invaded Lebanon in 1941 to rid Beirut of the Vichy French forces, left the country in 1946. The Maronites assumed power over the country and economy. A parliament was created in which both Muslims and Christians each had a set quota of seats. Accordingly, the President was to be a Maronite, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim and the Speaker of Parliament a Shia Muslim.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine in late 1947 led to civil war in Palestine, the end of Mandatory Palestine, and the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948. With nationhood, the ongoing civil war was transformed into a state conflict between Israel and the Arab states, the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. All this led to Palestinian refugees crossing the border into Lebanon. Palestinians would go on to play a very important role in future Lebanese civil conflicts, while the establishment of Israel, radically changed the region around Lebanon.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: In July 1958, Lebanon was threatened by a civil war between Maronite Christians and Muslims. President Camille Chamoun had attempted to break the stranglehold on Lebanese politics exercised by traditional political families in Lebanon. These families maintained their electoral appeal by cultivating strong client-patron relations with their local communities. Although he succeeded in sponsoring alternative political candidates to enter the elections in 1957, causing the traditional families to lose their positions, these families then embarked upon a war with Chamoun, referred to as the "War of the Pashas".


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: In previous years, tensions with Egypt had escalated in 1956 when the non-aligned President, Camille Chamoun, did not break off diplomatic relations with the Western powers that attacked Egypt during the Suez Crisis, angering Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. This was during the Cold War and Chamoun has often been called pro-Western, though he had signed several trade deals with the Soviet Union (see Gendzier). However, Nasser had attacked Chamoun because of his suspected support for the U.S. led Baghdad Pact. Nasser felt that the pro-western Baghdad Pact posed a threat to Arab nationalism. However, president Chamoun looked to regional pacts to ensure protection from foreign armies: Lebanon historically had a small cosmetic army that was never effective in defending Lebanon's territorial integrity, and this is why in later years the PLO guerrilla factions had found it easy to enter Lebanon and set up bases, as well as take over army barracks on the border with Israel as early as 1968. Early skirmishes saw the army not only lose control over its barracks to the PLO but also lost many soldiers. Even prior to this, president Chamoun was aware of the country's vulnerability to outside forces.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: But his Lebanese pan-Arabist Sunni Muslim Prime Minister Rashid Karami supported Nasser in 1956 and 1958. Lebanese Muslims pushed the government to join the newly-created United Arab Republic, a country formed out of the unification of Syria and Egypt, while the majority of Lebanese and especially the Maronites wanted to keep Lebanon as an independent nation with its own independent parliament. President Camille feared the toppling of his government and asked for U.S. intervention. At the time the United States was engaged in the Cold War. Chamoun asked for assistance proclaiming that Communists were going to overthrow his government. Chamoun was responding not only to the revolt of former political bosses, but also to the fact that both Egypt and Syria had taken the opportunity to deploy proxies into the Lebanese conflict. Thus the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), led by George Habash and later to become the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and a faction of the PLO, were deployed to Lebanon by Nasser. The ANM were a clandestine militia implicated in attempted coups against both the Jordanian monarchy and the Iraqi president throughout the 1950s at Nasser's bidding. The founding members of Fatah, including Yasser Arafat and Khalil Wazir, also flew to Lebanon to use the insurrection as a means by which a war could be fomented toward Israel. They participated in the fighting by directing armed forces against the government security in the city of Tripoli according to Yezid Sayigh's work.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: In that year, President Chamoun was unable to convince the Maronite army commander, Fuad Chehab, to use the armed forces against Muslim demonstrators, fearing that getting involved in internal politics would split his small and weak multi-confessional force. The Phalange militia came to the president's aid instead to bring a final end to the road blockades which were crippling the major cities. Encouraged by its efforts during this conflict, later that year, principally through violence and the success of general strikes in Beirut, the Phalange achieved what journalists dubbed the "counterrevolution". By their actions the Phalangists brought down the government of Prime Minister Karami and secured for their leader, Pierre Gemayel, a position in the four-man cabinet that was subsequently formed.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: However, estimates of the Phalange's membership by Yezid Sayigh and other academic sources put them at a few thousand. Non-academic sources tend to inflate the Phalanges membership. What should be kept in mind was that this insurrection was met with widespread disapproval by many Lebanese who wanted no part in the regional politics and many young men aided the Phalange in their suppression of the insurrection, especially as many of the demonstrators were little more than proxy forces hired by groups such as the ANM and Fatah founders as well as being hired by the defeated parliamentary bosses.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: During the 1960s Lebanon was relatively calm, but this would soon change. Fatah and other Palestinian Liberation Organization factions had long been active among the 400,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanese camps. Throughout the 1960s, the center for armed Palestinian activities had been in Jordan, but they were forced to relocate after being evicted by King Hussein during the Black September in Jordan. Fatah and other Palestinian groups had attempted to mount a coup in Jordan by incentivizing a split in the Jordanian army, something that the ANM had attempted to do a decade earlier by Nasser's bidding. Jordan, however, responded and expelled the forces into Lebanon. When they arrived they created "a State within the State". This action was not welcomed by the Lebanese government and this shook Lebanon's fragile sectarian climate.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: Solidarity to the Palestinians was expressed through the Lebanese Sunni Muslims but with the aim to change the political system from one of consensus amongst different sects, towards one where their power share would increase. Certain groups in the Lebanese National Movement wished to bring about a more secular and democratic order, but as this group increasingly included Islamist groups, encouraged to join by the PLO, the more progressive demands of the initial agenda was dropped by January 1976. Islamists did not support a secular order in Lebanon and wished to bring about rule by Muslim clerics. These events, especially the role of Fatah and the Tripoli Islamist movement known as Tawhid, in changing the agenda being pursued by many groups, including Communists. This ragtag coalition has often been referred to as left-wing, but many participants were actually very conservative and had religious elements that did not share any broader ideological agenda; rather, they were brought together by the short-term goal of overthrowing the established political order, each motivated by their own grievances.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: These forces enabled the PLO / Fatah (Fatah constituted 80% of the membership of the PLO and Fatah guerrillas controlled most of its institutions now) to transform the Western Part of Beirut into its stronghold. The PLO had taken over the heart of Sidon and Tyre in the early 1970s, it controlled great swathes of south Lebanon, in which the indigenous Shiite population had to suffer the humiliation of passing through PLO checkpoints and now they had worked their way by force into Beirut. The PLO did this with the assistance of so-called volunteers from Libya and Algeria shipped in through the ports it controlled, as well as a number of Sunni Lebanese groups who had been trained and armed by PLO/ Fatah and encouraged to declare themselves as separate militias. However, as Rex Brynen makes clear in his publication on the PLO, these militias were nothing more than "shop-fronts" or in Arabic "Dakakin" for Fatah, armed gangs with no ideological foundation and no organic reason for their existence save the fact their individual members were put on PLO/ Fatah payroll.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The strike of fishermen at Sidon in February 1975 could also be considered the first important episode that set off the outbreak of hostilities. That event involved a specific issue: the attempt of former President Camille Chamoun (also head of the Maronite-oriented National Liberal Party) to monopolize fishing along the coast of Lebanon. The injustices perceived by the fishermen evoked sympathy from many Lebanese and reinforced the resentment and antipathy that were widely felt against the state and the economic monopolies. The demonstrations against the fishing company were quickly transformed into a political action supported by the political left and their allies in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The state tried to suppress the demonstrators, and a sniper reportedly killed a popular figure in the city, the former Mayor of Sidon, Maarouf Saad.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: Many non-academic sources claim a government sniper killed Saad; however, there is no evidence to support such a claim, and it appears that whoever had killed him had intended that what began as a small and quiet demonstration to evolve into something more. The sniper targeted Saad right at the end of the demonstration as it was dissipating. Farid Khazen, sourcing the local histories of Sidon academics and eyewitnesses, gives a run-down of the puzzling events of the day that based on their research. Other interesting facts that Khazen reveals, based on the Sidon academic's work including that Saad was not in dispute with the fishing consortium made up of Yugoslav nationals. In fact, the Yugoslavian representatives in Lebanon had negotiated with the fisherman's union to make the fishermen shareholders in the company; the company offered to modernize the fishermen's equipment, buy their catch, and give their union an annual subsidy. Saad, as a union representative (and not the mayor of Sidon at the time as many erroneous sources claim), was offered a place on the company's board too. There has been some speculation that Saad's attempts to narrow the differences between the fishermen and the consortium, and his acceptance of a place on the board made him a target of attack by the conspirator who sought a full conflagration around the small protest. The events in Sidon were not contained for long. The government began to lose control of the situation in 1975.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: In the run-up to the war and its early stages, militias tried to be politically-orientated non-sectarian forces, but due to the sectarian nature of Lebanese society, they inevitably gained their support from the same community as their leaders came from. In the long run almost all militias openly identified with a given community. The two main alliances were the Lebanese Front, consisting of nationalist Maronites who were against Palestinian militancy in Lebanon, and the Lebanese National Movement, which consisted of pro-Palestinian Leftists. The LNM dissolved after the Israeli invasion of 1982 and was replaced by the Lebanese National Resistance Front, known as "Jammoul" in Arabic.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: Throughout the war most or all militias operated with little regard for human rights, and the sectarian character of some battles, made non-combatant civilians a frequent target.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: As the war dragged on, the militias deteriorated ever further into mafia-style organizations with many commanders turning to crime as their main occupation rather than fighting. Finances for the war effort were obtained in one or all of three ways:


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: As central government authority disintegrated and rival governments claimed national authority, the various parties/militias started to create comprehensive state administrations in their territory. These were known as "cantons", Swiss-like autonomous provinces. The best known was "Marounistan," which was the Phalangist/Lebanese Forces territory. The Progressive Socialist Party's territory was the "Civil Administration of the Mountain," commonly known as the "Jebel-el-Druze" (a name which had formerly been used for a Druze state in Syria). The Marada area around Zghorta was known as the "Northern Canton."


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: Wilton Wynn, a TIME correspondent, visited the East Beirut Christian canton in 1976, the same year as its foundation. He reported that compared to the villages outside of the canton, in Maronite towns and villages no garbage littered the streets, gas was one-fifth the price charged in West Beirut and the price of bread was controlled to levels comparable to pre-war pricing.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: Maronite Christian militias acquired arms from Romania and Bulgaria as well as from West Germany, Belgium and Israel, and drew supporters from the larger Maronite population in the north of the country, they were generally right-wing in their political outlook, and all the major Christian militias were Maronite-dominated, and other Christian sects played a secondary role.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: Initially, the most powerful of the Maronite militias was the National Liberal Party which is also known as Ahrar who were politically led by the legendary president of Lebanon Camille Chamoun and military led by Dany Chamoun (who was assassinated in the 1990), the military wing of the Kataeb Party or Phalangists, which remained under the leadership of the charismatic William Hawi until his death. Few years later, the Phalange militia, became under the command of Bachir Gemayel, merged with several minor groups (Al-Tanzim, Guardians of the Cedars, Lebanese Youth Movement, Tyous Team of Commandos) and formed a professional army called the Lebanese Forces (LF). With the help of Israel, the LF established itself in Maronite-dominated strongholds and rapidly transformed from an unorganized and poorly equipped militia into a fearsome army that had now its own armor, artillery, commando units (SADM), a small Navy, and a highly advanced Intelligence branch. Meanwhile, in the north, the Marada Brigades served as the private militia of the Franjieh family and Zgharta, which became allied with Syria after breaking with the Lebanese Front in 1978.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The Lebanese Forces split with the Tigers in 1980. In 1985, under the leadership of Geagea and Hobeika, they split entirely from the Phalangists and other groups to form an independent militia which was the dominant force in most Maronite areas. The Command Council then elected Hobeika to be LF President, and he appointed Geagea to be LF Chief of Staff. In January 1986, Geagea and Hobeika's relationship broke down over Hobeika's support for the pro-Syrian Tripartite Accord, and an internal civil war began. The Geagea-Hobeika Conflict resulted in 800 to 1000 casualties before Geagea secured himself as LF leader and Hobeika fled. Hobeika formed the Lebanese Forces – Executive Command which remained allied with Syria until the end of the war.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The Tigers Militia was the military wing of the National Liberal Party (NLP/ AHRAR) during the Lebanese Civil War. The Tigers formed in Saadiyat in 1968, as "Noumour Al Ahrar" (), under the leadership of Camille Chamoun. The group took its name from his middle name, "Nemr", meaning 'tiger'. Trained by Naim Berdkan, the unit was led by Chamoun's son Dany Chamoun. After the start Civil War in 1975, the Tigers fought the Lebanese National Movement (LNM) and its Palestinian allies, and were the main party fighting in war of tall el zaatar against the Palestinians.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: Although several Lebanese militias claimed to be secular, most were little more than vehicles for sectarian interests. Still, there existed a number of non-religious groups, primarily but not exclusively of the left and/or Pan-Arab right.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: Examples of this were the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) and the more radical and independent Communist Action Organization (COA). Another notable example was the pan-Syrian Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), which promoted the concept of Greater Syria, in contrast to Pan-Arab or Lebanese nationalism. The SSNP was generally aligned with the Syrian government, although it did not ideologically approve of the Ba'athist government (however, this has changed recently, under Bashar Al-Assad, the SSNP having been allowed to exert political activity in Syria as well). The multi-confessional SSNP was led by Inaam Raad, a Catholic and Abdallah Saadeh, a Greek Orthodox. It was active in North Lebanon (Koura and Akkar), West Beirut (around Hamra Street), in Mount Lebanon (High Metn, Baabda, Aley and Chouf), in South Lebanon (Zahrani, Nabatieh, Marjayoun and Hasbaya) and the Beqqa Valley (Baalbeck, Hermel and Rashaya).


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: Another secular group was the South Lebanon Army (SLA), led by Saad Haddad. The SLA operated in South Lebanon in co-ordination with the Israelis, and worked for the Israeli-backed parallel government, called "the Government of Free Lebanon." The SLA began as a split from the Army of Free Lebanon, a Maronite faction within the Lebanese Army. Their initial goal was to be a bulwark against PLO raids and attacks into the Galilee, although they later focused on fighting Hezbollah. The officers tended to be Christians with a strong commitment to fighting the SLA's enemies, while most of the ordinary soldiers were Shia Muslims who frequently joined for the wages and were not always committed to the SLA fight against the PLO and Hezbollah. The SLA continued to operate after the civil war but collapsed after the Israeli army withdrew from South Lebanon in 2000. Many SLA soldiers fled to Israel, while others were captured in Lebanon and prosecuted for collaboration with Israel and treason.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: Two competing Ba'ath movements were involved in the early stages of the war: a nationalist one known as "pro-Iraqi" headed by Abdul-Majeed Al-Rafei (Sunni) and Nicola Y. Ferzli (Greek Orthodox Christian), and a Marxist one known as "pro-Syrian" headed by Assem Qanso (Shiite).


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The Kurdistan Workers' Party at the time had training camps in Lebanon, where they received support from the Syrians and the PLO. During the Israeli invasion, all PKK units were ordered to fight the Israeli forces. Eleven PKK fighters died in the conflict. Mahsum Korkmaz was the commander of all PKK forces in Lebanon.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The Armenian Marxist-Leninist militia ASALA was founded in PLO-controlled territory of West Beirut in 1975. This militia was led by revolutionary fighter Monte Melkonian and group-founder Hagop Hagopian. Closely aligned with the Palestinians, ASALA fought many battles on the side of the Lebanese National Movement and the PLO, most prominently against Israeli forces and their right-wing allies during the 1982 phase of the war. Melkonian was field commander during these battles, and assisted the PLO in its defense of West Beirut.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The Palestinian movement relocated most of its fighting strength to Lebanon at the end of 1970 after being expelled from Jordan in the events known as Black September. The umbrella organization, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—by itself undoubtedly Lebanon's most potent fighting force at the time—was little more than a loose confederation, but its leader, Yassir Arafat, controlled all factions by buying their loyalties. Arafat allowed little oversight to be exercised over PLO finances as he was the ultimate source for all decisions made in directing financial matters. Arafat's control of funds, channeled directly to him by the oil producing countries like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Libya meant that he had little real functional opposition to his leadership and although ostensibly rival factions in the PLO existed, this masked a stable loyalty towards Arafat so long as he was able to dispense financial rewards to his followers and members of the PLO guerrilla factions.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: Unlike the Lebanese people, the Palestinians were not sectarian. Christian Palestinians supported Arab Nationalism during the civil war in Lebanon and fought against the Maronite Lebanese militias.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The PLO mainstream was represented by Arafat's powerful Fatah, which waged guerrilla warfare but did not have a strong core ideology, except the claim to seek the liberation of Palestine. As a result, they gained broad appeal with a refugee population with conservative Islamic values (who resisted secular ideologies). The more ideological factions, however, included Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and its splinter, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP).


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: Fatah was instrumental in splitting the DF from the PFLP in the early days of the PFLPs formation so as to diminish the appeal and competition the PFLP posed to Fatah. Lesser roles were played by the fractious Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF) and another split-off from the PFLP, the Syrian-aligned Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC). To complicate things, the Ba'athist countries of Syria and Iraq both set up Palestinian puppet organizations within the PLO. The as-Sa'iqa was a Syrian-controlled militia, paralleled by the Arab Liberation Front (ALF) under Iraqi command. The Syrian government could also count on the Syrian brigades of the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), formally but not functionally the PLO's regular army. Some PLA units sent by Egypt were under Arafat's command.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The small Druze sect, strategically and dangerously seated on the Chouf in central Lebanon, had no natural allies, and so were compelled to put much effort into building alliances. Under the leadership of the Jumblatt family, first Kamal Jumblatt (the LNM leader) and then his son Walid, the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) () served as an effective Druze militia, building excellent ties to the Soviet Union mainly, and with Syria upon the withdrawal of Israel to the south of the country. However, many Druze in Lebanon at the time were members of the non-religious party, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: Under the leadership of Jumblatt, the PSP was a major element in the Lebanese National Movement (LNM) which supported Lebanon's Arab identity and sympathized with the Palestinians. It built a powerful private army, which proved to be one of the strongest in the Lebanese Civil War of 1975 to 1990. It conquered much of Mount Lebanon and the Chouf District. Its main adversaries were the Maronite Christian Phalangist militia, and later the Lebanese Forces militia (which absorbed the Phalangists). The PSP suffered a major setback in 1977, when Kamal Jumblatt was assassinated. His son Walid succeeded him as leader of the party.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: From the Israeli withdrawal from the Chouf in 1983 to the end of the civil war, the PSP ran a highly effective civil administration, the Civil Administration of the Mountain, in the area under its control. Tolls levied at PSP militia checkpoints provided a major source of income for the administration.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The PSP played an important role in the so-called "Mountain War" under the lead of Walid Jumblatt: after the Israeli Army retreated from the Lebanese Mountain, important battles took place between the PSP and Maronite militias. PSP armed members were accused of several massacres that took place during that war.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The PSP is still an active political party in Lebanon. Its current leader is Walid Jumblatt. It is in practice led and supported mostly by followers of the Druze faith.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The Shia were slow to form and join in the fighting. Initially, many Shia had sympathy for the Palestinians and some had been drawn to parties of leftist and Pan-Arab orientations, including the Lebanese Communist Party, Communist Action Organization in Lebanon, Al-Mourabitoun, SSNP, Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, Socialist Arab Lebanon Vanguard Party and others. In addition, the PLO had been training in Southern Lebanon under Ahmad Shukeiri in 1968, and some Shia youth had also been drawn to Palestinian factions such as Fatah and PFLP, with many Shia families living in Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. After Black September in 1970, there was a sudden influx of armed Palestinians to Shia areas in Southern Lebanon, where the Palestinians soon set up base there for their attacks against the Israelis.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The Palestinian movement quickly squandered its influence with the Shiite, as radical factions ruled by the gun in much of Shiite-inhabited southern Lebanon, where the refugee camps happened to be concentrated, and the mainstream PLO proved either unwilling or unable to rein them in. Musa Sadr, a staunch Palestinian supporter who criticized Tehran for abandoning Palestinians, publicly denounced the actions of some Palestinian guerillas while making the case that these actions were a minority. However, Sadr's support of national unity among the Lebanese discredited him in the eyes of some Palestinians as an intelligence agent. Unfortunately, Shia support for the Palestinians went unrecognized.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The Palestinian radicals' secularism and behavior had alienated the traditionalist Shiite community; the Shia did not want to pay the price for the PLO's rocket attacks from Southern Lebanon. The PLO created a state within a state in South Lebanon and this instigated a fury among Lebanon's Shia, who feared retaliation from the Israelis to their native land in the South. The Shia predominated in the area of southern Lebanon that in the 1960s became an arena for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The state of Lebanon, which always avoided provoking Israel, simply abandoned southern Lebanon, and dedicated very little resources to the development of the Beqaa Valley. Between the early 60s and 70s, many of the people migrated to the southern suburbs of Beirut, which were known as "poverty belts". The young Shia migrants, who had not participated in the prosperity of prewar Beirut, joined many Lebanese and some Palestinian organizations. Unlike the Maronite groups supported by western countries and Israel, or the Druze & Sunni groups supported by Arab countries, the Shia lacked any external support from any country. However, after many years without their own independent political organizations, there suddenly arose Musa Sadr's Amal Movement in 1974–75. Its moderate Islamist ideology immediately attracted the unrepresented people, even attracting the Shia who had joined the leftist parties, and Amal's armed ranks grew rapidly to around 1,500–3,000 by 1975.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: During the early days in 1975, Sadr and Amal refused to partake in armed action as to avoid damage on the impoverished Shia community, and the former went on hunger strikes to end violence. Amal's early role was limited to thwarting Israeli commando incursions in 1975–1977 on southern villages, with the lead of Mostafa Chamran. Within Lebanon, the party's role was rather secondary among the Shia at the time, whose youth in Beirut had mostly joined the sectarian-wise diverse Leftist parties and PLO. After the Karantina massacre in December 1975, an impoverished slum of 30,000 Bedouins, Kurds, Palestinians and mostly Lebanese Shia refugees; the Lebanese Front besieged from all sides the predominantly Shia neighborhood of Naba'a in East Beirut with a population of 60,000 to 100,000, among whose inhabitants was Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. Unlike nearby Tel el-Zaatar, Naba'a was much weaker and less well-defended. Morality was low and the people started to flee the besieged neighborhood. Fearing a fate similar to Tel el-Zaatar massacre, Sadr contacted Amine Gemayel and stroke a deal to lift the siege and allow the inhabitants to safely pass into West Beirut, a deal that was broken two days later after the area fell. Following the fall, thousands of displaced Shias moved to Dahieh.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: With the victory of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the ranks of Lebanese Shia were attracted to Islamist movements, such as Islamic Amal, Islamic Jihad Organization, Islamic Dawa Party, the Islamic Students Union, Organization of the Oppressed on Earth, and eventually Hezbollah. Hezbollah and its leaders were inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and therefore in 1982 emerged as a faction set on resisting the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, and its forces were trained and organized by a contingent of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Support was greatly met by both military training and funding support.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The Lebanese Alawites, followers of a sect of Shia Islam, were represented by the Red Knights Militia of the Arab Democratic Party, which was pro-Syrian due to the Alawites being dominant in Syria, and mainly acted in Northern Lebanon around Tripoli.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: Some Sunni factions received support from Libya and Iraq, and a number of minor militias existed due to a general reluctance on the part of Sunnis to join military organisations throughout the civil war. The more prominent groups were secular and holding a Nasserist ideology, or otherwise having pan-Arab and Arab nationalist leanings. A few Islamist ones emerged at later stages of the war, such as the Tawhid Movement that took its base in Tripoli, and the Jama'a Islamiyya, which gave a Lebanese expression of the Muslim Brotherhood in terms of political orientations and practice. The main Sunni-led organization was the al-Murabitun, a major west-Beirut based force. Al-Murabitoun, led by Ibrahim Kulaylat, fought with the Palestinians against the Israelis during the invasion of 1982. There is also the Tanzim al-Nassiri in Sidon that was formed through the followers of Maaruf Saad, and who rallied later behind his son Mustafa Saad, and now are led by Usama Saad. The Sixth of February Movement was another pro-Palestinian Nasserist minor militia that sided with the PLO in the War of the Camps in the 1980s.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The Armenian parties tended to be Christian by religion and left-wing in outlook, and were therefore uneasy committing to either side of the fighting. As a result, the Armenian parties attempted, with some success, to follow a policy of militant neutrality, with their militias fighting only when required to defend the Armenian areas. However, it was not uncommon for individual Armenians to choose to fight in the Lebanese Forces, and a small number chose to fight on the other side for the Lebanese National Movement/Lebanese National Resistance Front.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The Beirut suburbs of Bourj Hamoud and Naaba were controlled by the Armenian Dashnak party. In September 1979, these were attacked by the Kataeb in an attempt to bring all Christian areas under Bashir Gemayel's control. The Armenian Dashnak militia defeated the Kataeb attacks and retained control. The fighting led to 40 deaths.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: The Armenian Revolutionary Federation in Lebanon refused to take sides in the conflict though its armed wing the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide and the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia did carry out assassinations and operations during the war.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: Throughout the spring of 1975, minor clashes in Lebanon had been building up towards all-out conflict, with the Lebanese National Movement (LNM) pitted against the Phalange, and the ever-weaker national government wavering between the need to maintain order and cater to its constituency. On the morning of 13 April 1975, unidentified gunmen in a speeding car fired on a church in the Christian East Beirut suburb of Ain el-Rummaneh, killing four people, including two Maronite Phalangists. Hours later, Phalangists led by the Gemayels killed 30 Palestinians traveling in Ain el-Rummaneh. Citywide clashes erupted in response to this "Bus Massacre". The Battle of the Hotels began in October 1975, and lasted until March in 1976.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: On 6 December 1975, a day later known as Black Saturday, the killings of four Phalange members led Phalange to quickly and temporarily set up roadblocks throughout Beirut at which identification cards were inspected for religious affiliation. Many Palestinians or Lebanese Muslims passing through the roadblocks were killed immediately. Additionally, Phalange members took hostages and attacked Muslims in East Beirut. Muslim and Palestinian militias retaliated with force, increasing the total death count to between 200 and 600 civilians and militiamen. After this point, all-out fighting began between the militias.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: On 18 January 1976 an estimated 1,000–1,500 people were killed by Maronite forces in the Karantina Massacre, followed two days later by a retaliatory strike on Damour by Palestinian militias. These two massacres prompted a mass exodus of Muslims and Christians, as people fearing retribution fled to areas under the control of their own sect. The ethnic and religious layout of the residential areas of the capital encouraged this process, and East and West Beirut were increasingly transformed into what was in effect Christian and Muslim Beirut. Also, the number of Maronite leftists who had allied with the LNM, and Muslim conservatives with the government, dropped sharply, as the war revealed itself as an utterly sectarian conflict. Another effect of the massacres was to bring in Yassir Arafat's well-armed Fatah and thereby the Palestine Liberation Organisation on the side of the LNM, as Palestinian sentiment was by now completely hostile to the Maronite forces.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: On 22 January 1976, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad brokered a truce between the two sides, while covertly beginning to move Syrian troops into Lebanon under the guise of the Palestine Liberation Army in order to bring the PLO back under Syrian influence and prevent the disintegration of Lebanon. Despite this, the violence continued to escalate. In March 1976, Lebanese President Suleiman Frangieh requested that Syria formally intervene. Days later, Assad sent a message to the United States asking them not to interfere if he were to send troops into Lebanon.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: On 8 May 1976, Elias Sarkis, who was supported by Syria, defeated Frangieh in a presidential election held by the Lebanese Parliament. However, Frangieh refused to step down. On 1 June 1976, 12,000 regular Syrian troops entered Lebanon and began conducting operations against Palestinian and leftist militias. This technically put Syria on the same side as Israel, as Israel had already begun to supply Maronite forces with arms, tanks, and military advisers in May 1976. Syria had its own political and territorial interests in Lebanon, which harbored cells of Sunni Islamists and anti-Ba'athist Muslim Brotherhood.


title: Lebanese Civil War

text: Since January, the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp in East Beirut had been under siege by Maronite Christian militias. On 12 August 1976, supported by Syria, Maronite forces managed to overwhelm the Palestinian and leftist militias defending the camp. The Christian militia massacred 1,000–1,500 civilians, which unleashed heavy criticism against Syria from the Arab world.