David Patrikarakos

It’s a time for delivering messages in the Middle East, where messages rarely come without their near constant attendant: violence. On Monday night a volley of rockets struck a base hosting US troops in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. International media reported that one rocket landed in the base and another on residential areas nearby; one civilian contractor was reportedly killed, and six others were wounded, including a US service member. At least five Iraqi civilians were also injured, with one in a critical condition. The militia group Saraya Awliyah al-Dam has claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack. The group remains, superficially at least, a mystery.

The Middle East is changing. Israelis now splurge at Gucci and Rolex in Dubai. Saudi women speed down desert highways; and once again Turkish leaders kneel before the call to prayer. One thing, however, remains unchanging: the Iranian government’s ability to find new and evermore sadistic ways of persecuting its own people. Yesterday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced on live TV that Iran would reject the American BioNTech-Pfizer and British Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines. 'Imports of US and British vaccines into the country are banned. I have told this to officials and I'm saying it publicly now,' he said. This statement is typical in that it both defies belief and is yet utterly unsurprising. Coronavirus hit Iran hard.

History is accelerating in the Middle East once more. Nuclear scientists are dying in Iran; and again, in Egypt, the regime is cracking down on anyone who dares to criticise it. Kareem Ennarah, the director of the criminal justice and policing unit at human rights organisation, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), was arrested on 18 November and accused of joining a terrorist group and spreading false information. Ennarah worked to shine a light on Egyptian torture, police brutality, arbitrary detention and execution; no wonder he and his colleagues had become unpopular with the authorities. But in recent months, things started to become a lot worse.

Yesterday afternoon someone assassinated yet another scientist working on Iran’s nuclear programme. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh headed up the ministry of defence's research and innovation organisation, and he was ambushed and killed in his car just east of Tehran, by gunmen who opened fire on him and his bodyguards. I’ve been writing about Iranian nuclear scientists getting whacked for almost a decade now, with my book on Iran’s nuclear programme published in an updated edition this month. It appears that another cycle of nuclear violence is starting once again – and Fakhrizadeh is the most important hit yet. He genuinely was at the heart of the Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Once more Lebanon is in crisis, and once more its leaders turn to what they most understand to solve things: ties of blood. Families are a big deal in that part of the world. And as Lebanon has stumbled into financial and political ruin over the past year, it is to family, or more correctly a family, its elites have turned. Former prime minister, and the nation’s most famous Dauphin, Saad Hariri, has been invited back into office. It’s not only the country’s economy that’s going backwards. Hariri was Prime Minister from December 2016 until he quit in October 2019, following huge popular protests across the country in the wake of an imploding economy. His successor, Hassan Diab, who was brought in to shore up finances, failed miserably.

If 2020 is generally accepted to be a global annus horribilis, then it is perhaps fitting that the Islamic Republic of Iran’s ability to do mischief has seemingly just received a hefty boost. On Sunday morning, the UN lifted its 13-year long arms embargo on the Iranian armed forces. Iran is now (technically at least) free to buy and sells arms in the international marketplace.  It seems an odd time to be easing up on Iran. At the end of last year, just before coronavirus set in, the regime was making an excellent fist of massacring its own people. It machine-gunned them from rooftops, it beat them in the streets, and then hauled away the corpses so they couldn’t be examined. Now it can buy weapons and technology to do all these things even more fastidiously.

Could war finally be coming to the eastern Mediterranean? It’s not as excitable a question as it might first appear. In an article titled, 'Erdogan’s calculated war,' the German newspaper Die Welt quoted sources from the Turkish military saying that president Recep Tayyip Erdogan had recently ordered his generals to sink a Greek warship, without inflicting casualties. They refused. Then came the suggestion to down a Greek aircraft. Again, they refused. Such reports would be alarming at any time. Now they are acute. Tensions between Greece and Turkey are greater than they have been since the 1990s. Ostensibly, the problems come from longstanding competition over resources.

Almost a decade ago, I went to Lebanon to investigate who had killed its Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. It was a momentous event in the Middle East, and it changed this tiny, beautiful state forever. Hariri was killed on Valentine’s Day 2005 alongside 21 others after a bomb exploded as his motorcade drove through central Beirut. Today, 15 years later, the UN-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), set up in the wake of his death to bring those responsible for it to justice, finally returned its verdict. Salim Ayyash, Hussein Hassan Oneissi, Assad Hassan Sabra and Hassan Habib Merhi, all accused of being members of the terror group Hezbollah, have been on trial in absentia since 2014.

The last time I was in Israel people were preparing for the worst. 'This crazy bastard is going to annex the West Bank and then we’re all screwed,' my Israeli friend bemoaned to me. It turns out he was wrong. The United Arab Emirates and Israel have just agreed to normalise relations. In return, Israel has agreed to suspend its plan to annex large chunks of the West Bank. Make no mistake: what has happened is historic. The UAE has been politically hostile to Israel since even before it gained independence from Britain in 1971. There has not been a single day in its existence where it has not officially called for an end to the Jewish state. Now the two are allies – and no one saw it coming. In politics pretty much everything leaks, but sometimes it doesn’t.

It had to happen. On Monday evening, just under a week after 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse at Beirut’s port exploded and killed over 160 people, the entire Lebanese government resigned. This was not a surprise. The blast resulted from negligence of the grossest kind. Three cabinet ministers and seven members of parliament had already quit. And frankly, in these times: who would even want the job? Prime Minister Hassan Diab made the announcement in a national TV address. It came after days of protests in which demonstrators hung effigies of Lebanese President Michel Aoun, and even Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Once again, crisis comes to Lebanon. Once again, people are dying young in the Middle East. Last night an explosion in the port of Beirut killed at least 100 people and injured more than 4,000 others. They say the blast was heard almost 150 miles away in Cyprus. They say it shook the earth all the way across the eastern Mediterranean. It was colossal; first one bang, then another, before a mushroom cloud fanned out over the capital – yet one more tragedy to smother those beneath. Even for a country on as intimate terms with tragedy and as long inured to bombs (one killed its former president Rafik Hariri) as Lebanon, this is a day to remember. The country is already in chaos. Coronavirus has intensified long-standing social and economic woes.

Here in Greece the temperature is rising. As July rolls on, the heat thickens: people become irritable in 40 degrees. Now they have even more reason for anger. Last Friday, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia would open for Muslim prayers as a mosque. He made the announcement after a Turkish court ruled that Kemal Atatürk’s 1934 conversion of it to a museum was illegal. Hagia Sophia is both historic and religiously central to millions of people. Completed in 537, it served first as the cathedral of Constantinople and stood as an Orthodox church until the Fourth Crusade in 1204, when Christian knights from the west converted it to a Roman Catholic church.