Many Americans first heard of Hezbollah in the mid-1980s after the shadowy organization was formed with the help of more than 1,000 Iranian revolutionary guards ostensibly dispatched by Tehran to help protect besieged Shiites from Israel's invasion of Lebanon to crush the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Hezbollah's anti-Western operatives subsequently were blamed for carrying out three suicide truck bombings in 1983 that killed 63 people at the U.S. embassy, 241 U.S. Marines at a barracks at Beirut airport and 58 French troops at the headquarters of a multinational force.

Hezbollah or its allies also have been blamed for kidnaping and killing U.S. Marine Col. William R. Higgins and Beiruit CIA Station Chief William Buckley as well as seizing more than two dozen other western hostages, some of whom were later released.

Distant terrorist attacks also have been attributed to Hezbollah, including car bombings of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1992 that killed 28 people and a seven-story building in a traditionally Jewish section of the Argentine capital in 1994 that killed 96 people.

"It opposes the West, seeks to create a Muslim fundamentalist state modeled on Iran and is a bitter foe of Israel," says the Council on Foreign Relations. The terrorist organization has been blamed "for nearly 200 attacks since 1982 that have killed more than 800 people."