Tigers Militia

The Tigers militia (Arabic: نمور الأحرار, transliterated: Numūr al-Aḥrar), also known as the NLP Tigers or PNL "Lionceaux" and Milice des Tigres 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.

Origins

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.

Structure and organization

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.