Hanf: Franjieh accepted Karami's condition for sending the army between Tripoli and Zgharta, Ghanem's removal; his replacement, Hanna Said, was a 'politically uncontentious' colonel.

Cardinal Paolo Bertoli's mission lasted from 9 to 14 November 1975 (de Clerck and Malsagne's chronology). Like the French envoy Couve de Murville, he backed a limited revision of the National Pact.

Bishop Yuhanna Bassul's diary records 500 shells hitting Zahleh on the night of 22 December, with some 15,000 fedayeen gathered in the plain; at his appeal the army's Maghawir commando regiment came to help. Hanf writes that 3,000 men of the PLA's Yarmouk Brigade had entered from Syria on 20 December and besieged the town, which Syrian positions also shelled.

Dates differ between historians: 16 January (Ménargues), 18 January (de Clerck and Malsagne; consistent with Fisk), 19 January (Hanf), 20 or 22 January (Traboulsi). Maslakh, next door, fell at the same time. Most of the district's people were Shi'is, living alongside Palestinians, Kurds and Armenian Lebanese. Haugbolle estimates 150-500 dead, de Clerck and Malsagne 600-1,000; some 30,000 people were driven out to West Beirut and the southern suburbs.

Traboulsi, de Clerck and Malsagne, and Yara El Khoury date the Syrian-mediated cease-fire to 23 January. PLA and Saiqa units attacked Zgharta in the north but were repulsed, and Zahleh, besieged, held out.

Barely a tenth of American and British residents accepted the evacuation, Fisk writes. The British went by road, the PLO escorting them through West Beirut and a Libyan officer on to the Syrian lines; a day later a US landing craft took evacuees off from a PLO-guarded bathing club on the Corniche.

Ménargues dates the formal unification of the Christian militias under Bashir Gemayel's command to 31 August 1976; Yara El Khoury has it announced to President Frangieh in early September 1976. According to de Clerck and Malsagne, 'Lebanese Forces' was not the official name until 1981, but the unified command was officially founded on 25 March 1976.

In 1976 Major Saad Haddad's force was known as the Army of Free Lebanon; it took the name South Lebanon Army only in 1985. Agreed through American mediation, the 'red line' kept Syrian and other Arab troops out of the south, where Palestinians and Christian militias kept fighting and Israel backed Haddad (Hanf).

Fisk dates the arrival in Tyre of UNIFIL's first unit, Colonel Jean Germain Salvan's French paratroopers, to 23 March. That morning, at the nearby Hassan Borro barracks, Palestinians and Lebanese officers nearly opened fire over the handover.

Avoiding the risk of hitting their own men, and leaving positions hard to hold, were the main aims of the Syrian pull-back in Hanf's reading: a tactical move.

Musa al-Sadr travelled to Libya on 25 August (de Clerck and Malsagne) at the invitation of the Libyan government (Ménargues) and was never seen again; Hanf dates the disappearance to September. Beirut papers speculated about the Shah's secret police or Libyan intelligence. Fisk writes that he was almost certainly killed in Libya. The loss mobilised the Shi'a and later strengthened Amal.

According to de Clerck and Malsagne, a Mossad agent detonated a bomb in a Volkswagen as Salameh's Chevrolet passed. His wife, Georgina Rizk, had been Lebanon's first Miss Universe.

De Clerck and Malsagne and Picard agree that Haddad declared his 'State of Free Lebanon' at Marjayoun on 18 April 1979, in reaction to the army being sent towards the UNIFIL area under the March 1979 defence law; de Clerck and Malsagne put its size at 250 square kilometres and call it entirely reliant on Israel. Hanf has Haddad's troops stopping the battalion; de Clerck and Malsagne and Picard, Israeli aircraft bombing it; Fisk, Israel letting its militia shell it. Traboulsi dates Haddad's break to his Army of Free Lebanon of June 1976, Ménargues to a secession at the end of 1977. Hanf adds that once Haddad had lost his rank and been dismissed in disgrace, Israel paid his men.

Hanf writes that West Beirut's Sunnis sided with the Shi'is on National Day, which became a protest against every foreign armed presence; cedar flags hung all over the city.

Hanf places it in early 1980. Palestine Liberation Army units under Syrian or pro-Syrian command took over the Syrian posts in and near Beirut, while the Syrian troops, bar one garrison, quit the city's dividing line and the coast road to the south and redeployed to the heights above the capital.

Fisk: violating the UN's agreements with Israel, Haddad's militia set up positions inside the UNIFIL zone in spring 1980, beside At-Tiri, near Beit Yahoun and at ruined Rashaf, where it parked a Sherman tank reached by a road built with Israeli help.

In Ménargues's account the appointment came on 25 October, after Damascus had vetoed Takieddine Solh and put up three candidates including Hoss; by picking none of them Sarkis disregarded Syrian advice for the first time in his presidency.

Ménargues counts 10 dead and 62 wounded from two car bombs in Achrafieh, Bashir Gemayel's power base.