The Amal militia was founded in 1975 as the militant wing of the Movement of the Disinherited, a Shi'a political movement founded by Musa al-Sadr[1] and Hussein el-Husseini a year earlier. It became one of the most important Shi'a Muslim militias during the Lebanese Civil War. Amal grew strong with the support of, and through its ties with, Syria[2] and the 300,000 Shi'a internal refugees from southern Lebanon after the Israeli bombings in the early 1980s.