In Pictures

Lebanese Civil War began 50 years ago. Here’s how one photographer saw it

Award-winning photojournalist Claude Salhani documented his country’s war for nine years, until he had to turn away.

Claude Salhani rides on top of an amphibIous landing craft with US marines in Lebanon in 1983. [Courtesy of Claude Salhani’s family]

Published On 13 Apr 202513 Apr 2025

On this day in 1975, Claude Salhani was a 23-year-old Lebanese photojournalist working for the Annahar newspaper.

At the time, he dreamed of going to Vietnam and taking the kind of powerful war images he had seen and admired.

However, he wouldn’t have to leave his country to cover war.

On April 13, 1975, the Phalangist militia attacked a bus in Beirut’s Ain el-Remmaneh neighbourhood, kicking off a civil war that lasted 15 years.

The bus was carrying Palestinians and Lebanese home from a political rally by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC).

The Phalangists were responding to a drive-by assassination attempt on their leader, Pierre Gemayel, outside a church. Gemayel was unscathed, but others were killed, including Gemayel’s bodyguard and a Phalangist whose child was being baptised that day.

The lead-up to the Lebanese Civil War was not devoid of other incidents, but Salhani said it was clear something was different after that day.

Over the next nine years, Salhani would capture the brutal reality of the war – Christian and pro-Palestinian militias, the warlords pulling their strings and, most importantly, their victims.

He was threatened by right-wing Christian militias, kidnapped by a Palestinian faction, and wounded by Israeli shelling that broke his ankle and a car crash that left his two front teeth hanging by their roots.

Salhani covered the war for Annahar, the French photo agency Sygma, and the United Press International and Reuters news agencies. His images were featured on the cover of news magazines like Time and Newsweek.

In 1983, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a photo of a young man dressed in US military fatigues, wiping away a tear after two suicide trucks rammed a barracks and killed more than 240 US military members.

He left Beirut in 1984, hurt by what his home had become. He promised never to return but came back for a visit in 2000 and then returned infrequently until his death.

Salhani died in 2022 in Paris at the age of 70.

He spoke of returning to Lebanon until his final days.