Qualla: Assassination of Rafic Hariri

Assassination of Rafic Hariri: Introduction

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The meeting lasted ten minutes. In August 2004, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad summoned Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri to Damascus and told him that the term of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud -- Assad's man in Beirut -- would be extended. "Lahoud is me," Assad reportedly said. "If Chirac wants me out of Lebanon, I will break Lebanon." According to testimony later submitted to the United Nations, Assad added that if Hariri opposed the extension, the Syrians would "blow him up" and hunt his family anywhere in the world. Six months later, on February 14, 2005, a truck bomb detonated on the Beirut Corniche as Hariri's six-car convoy passed the St. George Hotel.

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Assassination of Rafic Hariri: The Builder of Beirut

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Petteri Sulonen from Helsinki, Finland, CC BY 2.0. Rafic Hariri was not a typical politician. A self-made billionaire who had amassed his fortune in Saudi construction, he returned to Lebanon after the civil war with a vision to rebuild Beirut from the rubble. As prime minister through most of the 1990s, he oversaw the reconstruc...

Image: Petteri Sulonen from Helsinki, Finland | CC BY 2.0

Assassination of Rafic Hariri: Six and a Half Minutes

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Petteri Sulonen from Helsinki, Finland, CC BY 2.0. On the morning of February 14, Hariri visited parliament, then stopped at the Cafe de l'Etoile for about twenty minutes. He left in a six-car convoy following a route kept secret until the last moment. Six and a half minutes after departing the cafe, as the convoy neared the St. ...

Image: Petteri Sulonen from Helsinki, Finland | CC BY 2.0

Assassination of Rafic Hariri: The Cedar Revolution

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Petteri Sulonen from Helsinki, Finland, CC BY 2.0. Hariri's assassination did the opposite of what his killers intended. Rather than silencing opposition to Syrian influence, the bombing ignited it. Massive demonstrations -- eventually numbering over a million people in a country of four million -- filled Martyrs' Square in downt...

Image: Petteri Sulonen from Helsinki, Finland | CC BY 2.0

Assassination of Rafic Hariri: Fifteen Years to a Verdict

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Petteri Sulonen from Helsinki, Finland, CC BY 2.0. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon, established in 2007 and seated at The Hague, became the first international court to prosecute terrorism as a distinct crime. The trial proceedings, which began in January 2014, were conducted entirely in absentia -- the four Hezbollah operatives...

Image: Petteri Sulonen from Helsinki, Finland | CC BY 2.0

Assassination of Rafic Hariri: A Crater on the Corniche

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sahar.Ahmed, CC BY-SA 3.0. The assassination site along the Beirut Corniche, near the St. George Hotel that itself had been a landmark of the civil war's Battle of the Hotels, has been rebuilt. A memorial shrine marks the spot where Hariri and his bodyguards died. The Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque, its blue dome...

Image: Sahar.Ahmed | CC BY-SA 3.0