[4] The organization, advocating for the withdrawal of all Americans from Lebanon, claimed responsibility for a number of kidnappings, assassinations, and bombings of embassies and peacekeeping troops which killed several hundred people.

[6] Possibly formed in early 1983 and reportedly led by Imad Mughniyah, a former Lebanese Shi'ite member of Palestinian Fatah's Force 17, the IJO was not a militia but rather a typical underground urban guerrilla organization.

[7] Based at Baalbek in the Beqaa valley, the group aligned 200 Lebanese Shi'ite militants financed by Iran and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' contingent previously sent by Ayatollah Khomeini to fight the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

[12] Not all of IJ's claims of responsibility were credible, as "in some cases, the callers seemed to be exploiting the activities of groups that had no apparent ties to Islamic Jihad," while working with some success to create "an aura of a single omnipotent force in the region.

"[13] Wright has compared Islamic Jihad to the Black September wing of the Palestinian Fatah,[14] serving the function of providing its controlling organization, in this case Hezbollah, with some distance and plausible deniability from acts that might provoke retaliation or other problems.

The last recorded attack claimed by the IJO as an independent group took place outside the Middle East in March 1992, when the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was blown up in retaliation for Israel's assassination of Hezbollah's secretary-general Abbas al-Musawi in February that year.