BEIRUT: Brit Emma Sky fell in love with the Middle East from the moment she first set foot in the region aged 18.
On returning to the UK in September 2010 after serving in Iraq as political adviser to a top US general, the country no longer felt like home.
Perhaps it was no surprise that not long after, Sky found herself back in the Middle East travelling through a region in transition.
Her book “In a Time of Monsters: Travels Through a Middle East in Revolt” is one of the latest accounts of the aftermath of the Arab Spring, sparked on December 17, 2010, when Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest over municipal authorities withdrawing his trading license.
The revolution that followed saw three strongmen ousted from power, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. However, the social, economic and political reforms that people had hoped for did not happen, and the movement’s effects are still reverberating today.
Sky had always felt a warmth and sense of belonging in the Middle East that she found lacking in the West, and so she set out to make sense of the great upheavals taking place in the Arab world.
Between 2010 and 2016 she travelled across the Middle East and North Africa, from Syria to Iraq, Egypt to Sudan, and documented what she witnessed along the way. Embarking on risky and tough journeys to remote places, she has been compared to Gertrude Bell, the British political adviser who helped create the state of Iraq.
“In a Time of Monsters,” with its sharp insights, daring encounters and incisive writing, sheds light on “a region in transition during a time of changing world order.”
One of the most intense moments in the book features Jaber Al-Jaberi, an adviser to then Iraqi finance minister, Rafi Al-Issawi, asking why America had allowed Iraq to fall under the control of Iran.
Sky admits her inability to provide an answer at the time. In view of what is happening today, it is clear that Iran’s meddling in Iraqi politics added considerable weight to its designation by US President Donald Trump as a rogue state.
