As oil prices crash, the West and Russia are losing grip on the Middle East

The conundrum facing the Middle East can be summed up in three ‘c’s – Covid, conflict, and collapse – the collapse of oil prices, that is.

The Middle East has ever been a conundrum. Reporters, diplomats and academics wonder if the very term Middle East, coined roughly 100 years ago, has outlived its usefulness.

Covid’s impact on the Middle East is an enigma because of a lack of accurate reporting from all sides – governments, NGOs, health authorities and journalists. “It’s as if the Middle east has dropped from the news agenda altogether,” says Alan Philps of the Chatham House think tank, a veteran correspondent in the region for decades. Figures published by the WHO are reliant on what the accredited government and health authorities report to them.

Some official statistics, including those from Egypt, Lebanon, and Libya, are suspiciously low. Egypt, with its huge population of around 100 million, has reported 66,754 testing positive and 2,872 deaths. Lebanon, faced with economic collapse, and with its population of seven million hosting 1.5 million refugees, has reported 1,745 testing positive and 34 deaths .

Syria has reported only nine deaths, but nine million refugees and displaced are existing on the breadline, according to the UN special envoy, Geir O’Pedersen. They are especially vulnerable to Covid.

Libya has reported 34 deaths according to the Government of National Accord, which governs only the north west of the country. At least the GNA has been candid enough to say that two hospitals which were providing care for coronavirus patients in the south of Tripoli had been shelled by the insurgent forces of Khalifa Haftar, the Benghazi warlord claiming sovereignty over the country. The GNA admitted that it was desperately short of essential equipment such as ventilators.

Israel gives the most detailed account of the pandemic, and the government fears that the first wave is far from over . In Israel itself 26,688 positive tests have been registered and 320 deaths from Covid. In East Jerusalem and the West Bank, 2,015 have tested positive and nine have died. In Gaza, which is largely sealed off, 72 positive cases have been reported and one death, despite squalid conditions.

The statistics from Israel suggest serious under-recording from elsewhere, and give an indication that the pandemic may only just be beginning in the most vulnerable populations of the great cities such as Beirut, Alexandria and Cairo. So far few cases have been reported among the 5.5 million Syrian refugees distributed across five neighbouring countries.

The problem is the lack of first hand news reporting from the multiplying and shape-shifting hot spots around the region.

In Syria itself, the ceasefire brokered by Turkey and Russia in the Idlib pocket is more or less holding, though there is still plenty of low-level fighting by different insurgent groups. The UN and Turkey fear that anywhere between 600,000 and 900,000 refugees could soon be on the move from the enclave if the Damascus regime resumes aerial and artillery bombardment. Turkey says it cannot handle a further influx. The number of low-level incidents officially recorded – 500 – is double those of a year ago.

The forces of Islamic State, or Daesh, are resurgent across the region. Covid lockdown for government forces has given the insurgents space for action and manoeuvre, according to the former UN envoy for Libya, the Lebanese diplomat Ghasan Salamé. Insurgents have been finding new space and opportunity from the borders of Iraq and Syria, and in Sinai. Both regions are now playgrounds for Daesh extremists.

In Somalia the al-Shabaab insurgents have been on the offensive, as have the Touareg insurgents in Mali and in the southern desert areas of Algeria. So too have Boko Haram in northern Nigeria.

In two key conflicts, Libya and Syria, the big regional players and international sponsors are caught in a bloody impasse. Russia, Egypt and Turkey are tied to difficult and unreliable clients. For the time being at least Moscow has to stick to backing Assad’s military junta in Damascus, although he and his clan look like a waning asset. The rump state has run out of cash and cannot hope to rule an entire country, two thirds of whose basic facilities have been trashed in nine years of war.

Russia will want to hang on to the naval bases at Tartus and Latakia, and its airfield at Hmeimim – they are its keys to the eastern Mediterranean. That seems to be as far as it goes. Moscow has set its face about putting in a substantial ground force to prop up Assad, and it doesn’t want to tangle with his Iranian allies or their proxies in Lebanese Hezbollah. There are no roubles for Syrian reconstruction.

Russia is locked in a wary armistice with Turkey in Syria – their mutual interest is cool but clear – but they are on opposite sides in Libya. Moscow has sent in planes, air defence missiles of the type that downed Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 in July 2014, and mercenaries of the Wagner Corporation, to back General Khalifa Haftar, the Caesar of Benghazi. Having laid siege to the capital, Tripoli, for the best part of a year, his forces have had to pull back and are in retreat.

They are now battling over two key strong points: Sirte on the coast, and al-Joufra in the desert, recently reinforced with Russian Mig 29 fighters and the Buk air defence missiles. In the past two days Russian Wagner Corp mercenaries backed by 200 Sudanese hired fighters have attempted to occupy Libya’s biggest oilfield, the Sharara, which is capable of producing 300,000 barrels of crude a day.

All Libyan oil production is still nominally under the unified control of the National Oil Corporation, based in Tripoli. The Corporation has accused Russia of entering the field to halt chances of the oil industry getting back to production across the country. Enraged allies of the Tripoli government, such as Turkey, have told the Russians to get out. On the other side a key Haftar sponsor, the United Arab Emirates, has urged its ally Egypt to do all it can to defend the line of Sirte and al-Joufra and save Haftar, including sending in ground troops.

President al-Sisi of Egypt has huffed and puffed about mobilisation but has not promised anything about moving into Libya. The UAE has said it wants more done in Syria, as well as Libya, to stop the allies of the subversive Muslim Brotherhood.

The UAE is engaged in an increasingly vain and desperate fight. The drones and other kit it gave to Haftar, courtesy of China, have been destroyed by Turkish forces. The UAE cause is on the back foot, along with their Saudi allies. The same is true in Yemen.

But in Russia’s move to hold the Sharara oilfield, the common thread of interest between the UAE and Russia is revealed: the bid to control and repress Libyan oil production. Both Russia and the UAE are badly affected by the dive in oil prices catalysed by the Covid crisis this year. They want their hands on the stopcocks of Libyan oil and gas.

Russia’s presence and long-term interest are tenuous in Libya, said Ghasan Salamé in a recent webinar discussion on the Middle East. Russia doesn’t want a permanent base in Libya like Tartus in Syria, he says, but merely the right of access to the country.

“Above all, Russia and Turkey don’t want direct confrontation . So they eye each other warily and try to avoid physical contact”, he said.

Talks are mooted by Russia, Turkey, and their various interlocutors and partners, to resolve the Libyan and Syrian conflicts . Salamé sees little chance of an enduring settlement in either fight.

He is critical of the willful shortsightedness of the US and Europe in both theatres: “The US is less and less interested in the region. In Libya and Syria they were obsessed with the war on international terrorism, especially IS, Daesh. The Europeans obsess about migrants, and little more. Now the Europeans will be asked to pay up for reconstruction in Syria.

“They shouldn’t comply. They should only be prepared to pay if there is a lasting political settlement and reconstruction on the lines of the UN Security Council Resolution (which provides for a sequence of ceasefire , new constitution and fresh elections).”

He said there should be no deal for Libya based on ceasefire lines and temporary division of the country.

Egypt’s dilemma points to an old truth and a new type of crisis for the region, which renders the familiar tropes and think-tank debates about the Middle East a little threadbare.

An Egyptian friend, from a highly placed banking family, told me she was surprised I was so focused on Egypt’s role in Libya. It was clear, she explained, that if President al-Sisi was poised to commit to war, it would be with Ethiopia and over the Renaissance Dam. The monster barrage on the Blue Nile threatens severely to reduce the flow of the river across Sudan and Egypt. The tap could be turned off on Herodotus’s great dictum, “Egypt is the gift of the Nile.”

As the great reservoir fills up behind the dam, a project once blessed by none other than Donald Trump, all sides are pledged to daily talks for the next month to head off physical confrontation. If it all goes wrong, we could see the first transcontinental water war of modern times.

Water as much as oil is becoming the lubricant of conflict across the region. The West will want and need Gulf oil in diminishing quantities – a trend towards which the Covid pandemic is giving a mighty shove. Increasingly, the flow and sales of hydrocarbons from the Gulf and Arabia will go east and not west.

The meta-historian and geographer Parag Khanna, leading guru of FutureMap, and author of the best-seller, The Future Is Asian, believes we should now ditch the term “Middle East.” It is, after all, a product of the British imperial lexicon. We should refer, rather, to “West Asia.”

“That’s where these countries belong physically– and increasingly where they’re looking and heading.”