Formed in 1979, the LARF emerged from the break-up of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations (PFLP-EO), a joint Lebanese/Palestinian radical guerrilla faction, upon the assassination by the Israeli Mossad of its leader and founder Wadie Haddad in March 1978.

Modelled after parent western militant leftist/urban guerrilla organizations, the LARF was made of left-wing Maronite Christian activists who had previously fought with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO),[2] led by Georges Ibrahim Abdallah (noms de guerre "Salih al-Masri", "Abdul-Qadir Sa'adi"),[3] a former school teacher; after being arrested by the French authorities in 1984, he was replaced by a collective leadership trio formed by his younger brothers' Robert, Maurice, and Emile.

Based at his home town of Al-Qoubaiyat in the Akkar District of northern Lebanon and financed by Syria, the LARF aligned by 1981 some 30 active members specialized in urban guerrilla warfare, organized into scattered cells of three to five militants.

These include the assassinations in Paris of the assistant US military Attaché to the American embassy, Lieutenant colonel Charles R. Ray on January 18, 1982,[4] followed on 3 April of that year by the Israeli diplomat Yaakov Barsimantov.

However, after Abdallah was sentenced by a French court to life imprisonment in March 1987 his group's actions in Europe sharply declined, and the subsequent disbandment of the CSAPP forced most of its members to return to Lebanon.