Tigers Militia

The Tigers militia (Arabic: نمور الأحرار, transliterated: Numūr al-Aḥrar), also known as the NLP Tigers or PNL "Lionceaux" in French and Tigers of the Liberals (Arabic: نمور الليبراليين‎, transliterated: Numūr al-Lībrāliyyīn) was the military wing of the National Liberal Party (NLP) during the 1975-78 phase of the Lebanese Civil War. Established in the late 1960s, the NLP militia was the second major faction within the Lebanese nationalist Christian Lebanese Front coalition under the leadership of Dany Chamoun, son of the NLP's president Camille Chamoun, from 1976 until 1980, when it was forcefully incorporated into the Lebanese Forces.

The NLP militia was first raised in October 1968 by the former President of Lebanon Camille Chamoun at his home town of Es-Saadiyat, in the predominantly Maronite region of Mount Lebanon. Chamoun was an important za'im, or political boss, being the patriarch of the prominent political Chamoun family. He held a number of important political positions in Lebanon, most importantly as Head of State, but he served also as minister of defense, minister of the interior, and minister of finance. While president, he established the National Liberal Party in 1958, and ten years later, he founded the Tigers militia, intended to be the military wing of the party, originally under the title Brigade of the Lebanese Tigers – BLT (Arabic: كتيبة النمور اللبنانية| Katībat al-Numūr al-Lubnāniyya) or Brigade des Lionceaux Libanais (BLL) in French, allegedly taken from his middle name, Nimr – meaning "Tiger" in Arabic. Initially just 500-men strong, the BLT was organized, trained, and led by the "defence secretary" of the NLP, Naim Berdkan; after his death in action in January 1976, he was succeeded by Dany Chamoun, Camille Chamoun's younger son.

Initially located in the NLP party offices' at Sodeco Square in the Nasra (Nazareth) neighbourhood of the Achrafieh quarter in Beirut, the Tigers' military HQ was relocated in 1978 to Safra, a boat marina and tourist beach resort located 25 km north of the Lebanese capital in the Keserwan District, where it remained until the militia's dissolution.

Under the command of Dany Chamoun, the Tigers had become by 1978 the second largest force in the Christian Lebanese Front, and although the Chamouns never achieved with their own militia the same level of organizational efficiency displayed by the rival Phalange' Kataeb Regulatory Forces militia, they were nonetheless capable of aligning 3,500 men and women, though other sources list a total of 4,000, which included civilian recruits and deserters from the Lebanese Army. However, some unconfirmed sources advance an even higher number, about 15,000.^{[citation needed]} Their 500 full-time fighters and 3,000 part-time reservists were organized into armoured, 'commando', infantry, artillery, signals, medical, logistics and military police branches. The Tigers' own chain of command was predominantly Maronite, though the rank-and-file were drawn from the 150,000 Maronite, Greek-Orthodox, Druze and Shi'ite militants of the NLP and trained in-country at clandestine facilities; first set up by the NLP in 1966 these training centres were located at Naas in the Matn District, Es-Saadiyat in the Iqlim al-Kharrub coastal enclave south of Beirut and at Adma in the northern mountainous Keserwan District. Upon the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in April 1975, the government of Israel secretly assisted the NLP Tigers with training and materiel aid, and from 1976 onwards, the israelis provided US$50 million-worth of weaponry and equipment per year to the Tigers and other Christian militias, after several clandestine contacts were made between Dany Chamoun and the Mossad.

NLP militia units operated mainly in East Beirut, the Byblos, Matn and Keserwan Districts and Tripoli, but also had a presence at Zahlé in the Beqaa Valley, at the south in the Iqlim al-Kharrub, the Aley District and the Jabal Amel, where their local militants – after merging with other Christian, Shia Muslim and Druze militias – played a key part in the formation on 21 October 1976 of the Israeli-backed informal "Army for the Defense of South Lebanon" or ADSL (French: Armée de Défense du Liban-Sud or ADLS), later to become known as the "Free Lebanese Army" (FLA), the predecessor of the South Lebanon Army (SLA).

Financing for the NLP Tigers' came at first from both Chamoun's personal fortune and from protection rackets collected in the areas under their control, though they also received outside support. Conservative Arab countries such as Jordan provided covert funding, weapons, munitions, training and other non-lethal assistance. Most of it entered towards the illegal ports of Tabarja and Dbayeh, both located north of Beirut in the Keserwan District, set up in early 1976 and administered by Joseph Abboud, former personal chauffeur and hunting partner of Camille Chamoun, who ran drug-smuggling and arms contraband activities on the behalf of the NLP until October 1980, when the Lebanese Forces brought the ports under their control. The NLP and its military wing did edit their own official newspaper, "The Battles" (Arabic: Ma'arik), but they never set up a radio or television service.

Ruthless fighters with a reputation of aggressiveness, often initiating hostilities with the opposition side, aggravated by their lack of discipline and restraint, the Tigers were also involved in several other acts of sectarian violence. On December 16, 1975, despite a ceasefire established the previous day, the NLP militia forcibly displaced all the 450 residents of Sebnay, a Muslim village southeast of Beirut, in the predominantly Maronite neighborhood of Hadath, Baabda District.

On January 18, 1976, the NLP Tigers participated alongside the Army of Free Lebanon, Al-Tanzim, Kataeb Regulatory Forces, Lebanese Youth Movement and the Guardians of the Cedars in the massacres of the Palestinian refugees and Lebanese Muslim residents of the Karantina and Al-Masklah refugee camps and adjoining slums in east Beirut, and later on June 28, Dany Chamoun led its men in the final assault on the Tel el-Zaatar Palestinian refugee camp, which resulted in a significant loss of life and the forceful displacement of its Palestinian residents when the camp fell. In the aftermath of the Karantina massacre, Dany Chamoun gave on April 22 that year a televised interview to Thames Television in which he denied that it was a "ruthless operation", instead referring to it as a "concise military operation" aimed at reclaiming private property.