page_title: Tyre, Lebanon
section_title: 1973 Yom Kippur War
hierarchical_section_title: Tyre, Lebanon / History / 1943 Lebanese independence / Musa Sadr era (1959–1978) / 1973 Yom Kippur War
caption_attribution_description: English: Musa al-Sadr &amp; Mostafa Chamran فارسی: شهید fa:مصطفی چمران و امام موسی صدر
context_page_description: Tyre is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, though in medieval times for some centuries by just a tiny population. It was one of the earliest Phoenician metropolises and the legendary birthplace of Europa, her brothers Cadmus and Phoenix, as well as Carthage's founder Dido. The city has many ancient sites, including the Tyre Hippodrome, and was added as a whole to UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites in 1984.
  The historian Ernest Renan noted:
  One can call Tyre a city of ruins, built out of ruins.
  Today Tyre is the fifth largest city in Lebanon after Beirut, Tripoli, Aley and Sidon, It is the capital of the Tyre District in the South Governorate. There were approximately 200,000 inhabitants in the Tyre urban area in 2016, including many refugees.
context_section_description: The 1973 October Yom Kippur War signalled even more Palestinian military operations from Southern Lebanese territory, including Tyre, which in turn increasingly sparked Israeli retaliation.
  In this environment, Imam Sadr was balancing the relations between the Maronite-dominated state, the Palestinian resistance with its leftist Lebanese supporters, and his own Shia community, which increasingly harboured popular discontent with the PLO domination in Southern Lebanon and being caught in the crossfire with Israel. There, Sadr's power struggle with the traditional feudal rulers escalated: thanks to the backing of the SISC Sadr managed to gradually break up the inherited power of Kamil al-As'ad – a close ally of President Suleiman Frangieh – from the Ali al-Saghir dynasty after almost three centuries, although al-As'ad's list still dominated the South in the parliamentary elections of 1972 and the by-elections of 1974.
  Likewise, the large landlord Kazem al-Khalil in Tyre, who had been a fierce opponent of both As'ad and Sadr, re-gained his parliamentary seat in 1972, but was soon marginalised by two other organisations that Sadr set up:
  In 1974, Sadr founded Harakat al-Mahroumin ("Movement of the Deprived"). While it reached out beyond the Shia communities of Southern Lebanon to those fragmeted ones in the Bekaa Valley and Beirut for creating a united Shia identity in the Lebanese context, Sadr also sought close cooperation with the Christian minorities, especially the Greek-Catholic Melkites under the leadership of Tyre's archbishop Georges Haddad.
  It is estimated that some 80 thousand of Sadr's followers rallied in Tyre on 5 May 1974, with weapons on open display. Shortly afterwards, the Israeli military attacked: on May 19th, the Israeli Navy reportedly shelled Rashidieh, killing 5 people and injuring 11. On 20 June, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) bombed the two main refugee camps in Tyre. According to the Lebanese army, 5 people were killed and 21 injured in Rashidieh, while 8 were killed and 30 injured in Burj El Shemali.
  In this context, despite his pledges to nonviolent means, Sadr also founded the de facto military wing of his movement in 1975, just before the outbreak of the civil war: the Afwaj al-Muqawama al-Lubnaniyya (Amal).
  The Iranian director of Sadr's technical school in Tyre, Mostafa Chamran, became a major instructor of guerilla warfare. The US-trained physicist went on to become the first defense minister of post-revolutionary Iran. Other key figures of the Iranian opposition, like Sayed Ruhollah Khomeini's close aide Sadeq Tabatabaei, were frequent visitors of Tyre. In contrast, Khalil al-Khalil - one of the sons of Kazem al-Khalil - served as Lebanon's Ambassador to the Imperial State of Iran from 1971 to 1978.
  On the national stage of politics, one of Sadr's main allies was the Lebanese Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt. However, frictions between them led to a break-up of their coalition soon after the beginning of the civil war in 1975: under Jumblatt's leadership the National Lebanese Movement (NLM) allied itself to the PLO.
caption: Al-Sadr with Mostafa Chamran
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