Even before COVID-19 became the main concern for the region, the Middle East was already traversed by multiple political, economic, and social crises — some of them structural rather than merely temporary or fleeting.
Nearly a hundred thousand (mostly American) foreign soldiers are stationed in the region. The state of Israel — meticulously destroying any possibility of a future Palestinian state — is no longer hesitating from military intervention in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.
Millions of people, forced to flee wars, are now living in refugee camps. Interconfessional fractures widen, and authoritarian regimes continue to rule, as if according to some inexorable destiny. Non-state groups attempt to convert their military gains into formal political power.
These dynamics are particularly evident in Iraq. There, the American-led invasion in 2003 saw the conscious destruction of the state — using the pretext of “de-Baathification” — under the orders of proconsul Paul Bremer and the creation of a constitution by which citizens and the state are connected by nothing more than religious affiliation. The American occupation provoked a yearslong civil war and handed power to an elite that has siphoned off billions of dollars.It is in this context that the coronavirus pandemic has appeared — in a country and region exhausted by wars, with almost nonexistent public institutions and swathes of the population destitute.
‘Forward’