Between 1975 and 1976, Beirut saw some of the fiercest fighting of Lebanon’s civil war, which lasted more than fifteen years. The Holiday Inn in Beirut, with its downtown location and strategic heights, became a central focus of the urban warfare, the frontline of the warring factions. It’s opulent past and glamorous fixtures gave way to bullets and bombs and later the notorious ‘battle of the hotels’. Once a venue for wedding receptions and hospitality events, it gradually became a bloody battleground. Most war reporters and photographers stayed in the safer western areas of the city, at the Commodore Hotel, and would make the daily trip downtown to the hotel district and the towering Holiday Inn. After several attacks on the Holiday Inn, from the National Movement militiamen against the Christian Phalangist militia, the hotel was looted and totally burnt. Peppered with bullets and bomb holes, the Holiday Inn became a giant tomb in the city, and is still today a ruined reminder of their bloody civil war.
