Beirut, Lebanon
‘You can still smell it in the wind,’ says Maria. She points out from the neon-lit bar along Beirut’s shorefront to the dark port area just across the road, where tangled metal and broken concrete jut out into the sky.
Maria had been working from home on August 4, 2020, when 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate left to rot in a warehouse on the harbour suddenly detonated, killing more than 200 people and levelling much of the Lebanese capital. Her usual daily drive back from her job as a reporter on a local newspaper – since shuttered due to lack of funding – took her along the seafront. Had she gone into the office that day, she’s convinced she would have died.
‘It’s a burning smell – like plastic. One day we’ll find out that it has been poisoning everyone here this whole time, giving us all cancer.’
Like most young Lebanese people, 26-year-old Maria grew up in one of the most stable countries in the Middle East. The brutal 15-year sectarian civil war that pitted the country’s Christians and Muslims against each other, and saw Israeli troops invade the neighbouring nation, ended in 1990, half a decade before she was born. The scars of the fighting still dot downtown Beirut, with the burned-out shell of the Holiday Inn, once used as a snipers’ nest, towering above the city centre, the walls pockmarked by artillery fire.
Around it though, high-rise office buildings, luxury apartment blocks and even a giant honeycomb department store designed by Zaha Hadid had sprung up. Fuelled by foreign investment and a banking sector that profited from helping the Iranian regime avoid international sanctions, Beirut quickly became the region’s most exciting economy.
A power-sharing agreement had ended the civil war and brought stability.
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