On this day in 1975, Claude Salhani was a 23 -year -old Lebanese photographs journalist who worked for Annahar’s Newpaper.
At that time, I dreamed of going to Vietnam and prohibiting the child of powerful war images he had seen and admired.
However, he would have to leave his country to cover the war.
On April 13, 1975, the Falangist militia attacked a bus in the neighborhood Ain El-Remmaneh in Beirut.
The bus took the Palestinians and the Lebanese house from a political rally by the Popular Front for the Liberation of the General Palestine Command (PFLP-GC).
The Falangists were responding to an attempt to murder by their leader, Pierre Gemayel, outside a church. Gemayel was unscathed, but others were killed, including Gemayel’s bodyguard and a phalangist whose son was being baptized that day.
The period prior to the Lebanese civil war was not devoid of other incidents, but Salhani said it was clear that something was different after that day.
Around the next nine years, Salhani would capture the brutal reality of Christian and pro-palestinian war militias, the lords of the war pull their strings and, most importantly, their victims.
He was threatened by the Christian right -wing militias, kidnapped by a Palestinian faction, and injured by the Israeli bombings that broke his ankle and a car accident that left his two front teeth hanging from his roots.
Salhani covered the war for Annahar, the French photographic agency Sygma and the United Press International and the Reuters news agencies. His images appeared on the cover of news magazines such as Time and Newsweek.
In 1983, he was nominated for a Pulitzer award for a photo of a young man dressed in US military fatigors, cleaning after two suicidal trucks attacked a barracks and killed more than 240 members of the US military.
Beirut left in 1984, wounded by what his home had become. He promised to return, but came to visit in 2000 and then returned to his death.
Salhani died in 2022 in Paris at age or 70.
He spoke back to Lebanon until his last days.
