Musa al-Sadr

Musa al-Sadr was an Iranian-born Lebanese Shia cleric who became the most prominent leader of Lebanon's Shia community in the 1960s and 1970s. He founded the Movement of the Deprived in 1974 and co-founded its military wing, the Amal Movement, with Mostafa Chamran. He worked closely with Chamran to establish training facilities for Shia fighters in southern Lebanon. His political mobilization of the Shia community laid the social and organizational groundwork from which Hezbollah later emerged. He disappeared during a visit to Libya on 31 August 1978 under mysterious circumstances widely attributed to Muammar Gaddafi, and is presumed dead.