TUESDAY 20 AUGUST 2019

A time when Christians and

Muslims got along together

The exodus of Christians from the Middle East is tragic,

as are attempts by the Saudis to reheat divisions between Sunnis and

Shia. Are we right to view the region as a place of sectarian strife or is

that a western view, asks Robert Fisk

An Iranian Christian lights candles during the Christmas Eve mass at the St Gregor Armenian Catholic church in Tehran (AFP/Getty)

There are two stories that I and my colleagues have been writing about the Middle East for more than 40
years. Both are wrong. The first is that the next war will be about water. Or the lack of it. I started writing
about the conflict over H2O when I visited Aleppo and found that the Queiq river – which was supposed to
run beneath the fine white stone bridges in the city centre – only reached the outskirts as a two-foot wide
stream of sewage. Turkish dams had destroyed the Quieq. Then Turkey decided to build dams on the Tigris

• and the waters of that great river started to fall in Iraq. The Lebanese claimed that the Israelis were
  stealing water from the Litani river in southern Lebanon. There were secret pipelines in deep valleys

Section 2 /The Big Read