The public casus belli for the coup was the complicity of the pro-U.S. regime in the widely despised American-Israeli military occupation of parts of Lebanon. This foreign occupation had begun under America's principal Middle Eastern ally, Israel, in the previous year, 1982.
Bin Laden has shared credit for his unspecified involvement in the Beirut bombing with the joint Sunni/Shiite operation's alleged mastermind, the former head of Iranian Hezbollah's security service, Imad Mugniyah. While failing to install a radical Islamic government in Lebanon, the 1983 Beirut bombing coup forced the American-Israeli military occupation to withdraw from Lebanon in the following year.
