Murder on the Orient Express

 　　She left her husband, who was conducting archaeological excavations, handed her passport to a uniformed Turkish train ticket inspector, and boarded the express train from Nusaybin to Aleppo to the sound of the whistle. After arriving at her destination, she chose to stay at the only first-class hotel in the area, the Baron Hotel, and in Room 203, she began writing what may be the most famous suspense novel of all time.

　　"Winter in Syria, five in the morning. There is a train parked next to the platform of Aleppo station, the Toros train advertised in train travel brochures. The express train has a dining car with a kitchen, a sleeper cars and two ordinary cars." Agatha Christie's "Orient Express" set off. Using her own homecoming journey across the Middle East as a reference, she constructs a lost world: connected coach carriages, uniformed conductors, embroidered handkerchiefs and passengers in formal attire for dinner.

　　The deceased was an American fraudster who was stabbed more than a dozen times in his sleeper compartment. Although this story is wonderful enough to help Agatha become the best best-selling novelist in the world in one fell swoop, compared to what happened around her, the "crimes" that have not been exposed to the sun are nothing but insignificant—— As the first scene of the crime, the huge Middle East railway network has been dismembered by the "murderers" step by step.

　　Passengers on train 0500 may be from Baghdad, or from Alexandria, Jerusalem, Damascus or Basra. The railroad tracks identified on the map criss-cross and cover major cities in the Middle East. As the "sick man of Europe", the Ottoman Empire "returned" in the last decades of its life. In 1888, Sultan Abdul Hamid II launched the most ambitious project in more than 600 years of imperial rule - connecting the four sides of the empire by rail.

　　The railway construction in Hamid started from the Islamic holy site. Funded by Christians and Jewish industrialists, the Ottoman Empire opened a route from the Mediterranean coast across the Judean wilderness to Jerusalem. In 1892, the first pilgrims to come to Jerusalem via the railway line arrived at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Eight years later, Hamid began construction of the Hejaz Railway, which was 15 times longer than the Jerusalem Line. The route begins in Damascus, the traditional starting point of the pilgrimage, and ends in Medina, the burial place of the Prophet Muhammad. When the railway line was completed in 1908, what had been a dangerous 40-day pilgrimage across the Arabian desert on camels became a short journey by train and three days of camel rides. The Damascus Station of the Hejaz Railway was renamed "God of Allah", and its architecture is a perfect example of the perfect combination of Islamic art and Baroque art.

　　This is just one branch of the Middle East's vast railway program. In the twilight of the empire, the Ottoman sultans connected the three prosperous ports of Tripoli, Beirut and Haifa with cities along the ancient Silk Road, such as Damascus, Homs and Aleppo. On the eve of World War I, the Sultan allied himself with the German Emperor of the Second Reich to build a railway line from Baghdad to Berlin in order to avoid the British-controlled "shipping chokepoint" of the Suez Canal. At the last moment of the war, German engineers erected a railway bridge across the Taurus Mountains in Turkey, but it was too late, the railway line was no longer able to support the front line against the British army marching northward.

　　The European empires that took over the Middle East also took over the railroad construction plans left over from the Ottoman Empire. By the 1930s, passengers only needed to transfer three trains from the English Channel to Cairo, Egypt. If departing from Haifa, the train will leave daily at 8.30am and travel south all the way to the Mediterranean port of Gaza at lunchtime, then west across the Sinai Peninsula to Cairo at 10.30pm. The 14-hour journey was equivalent to two days of work for workers at the time.

　　From Cairo, travelers can continue on air-conditioned trains along the Nile to the Valley of the Kings in Luxor and on to Sudan. "The fastest direct route to Damascus, Beirut, Baalbek and Aleppo," reads a brochure at Haifa's railway station. "And from Jaffa, you can commute across the Arab world," adds Palestinian historian Sami Shehah.

| Suspect Statement |

　　Since the beginning of human civilization, the Middle East has been the center of language, ethnic and religious exchanges. The railway brought these different cultures together in the same carriage, just like the 13 suspects on Agatha's "Orient Express", "from all classes and different countries." Muslim pilgrims who boarded the train from Tulkarem, Palestine, crammed into the same compartment as Jewish workers who boarded the train from Haifa for vacation and traveled to Damascus on a train organized by Zionist trade unions. Lebanese authorities have printed advertisements in Hebrew to lure Israeli tourists to their ski resorts. Mahmoud Zahar, one of the leaders of Hamas in Palestine, remembers when he was a child on a train from his mother's hometown of Alexandria to Gaza, when passengers crowded into the car to fight for sleeper berths. The conductors also come from all over the world. Jews, Arabs and people from 30 other countries work for the British-run Palestinian Railway Company. The conductor on Agatha's "Orient Express" is French.

　　70 years later, these tracks linking the three continents of Asia, Europe and Africa are buried by yellow sand. No more train whistles on the Morocco-Iraq railway. Rusted carriages and engine wreckage are strewn across the desert, cedar trees sprout on Lebanese tracks, railroad tracks are smelted into bullets, sleeper sheets are removed to reinforce trenches, and stations and repair shops are converted into barracks and prisons. Like the murder on that train, the Middle East rail network was "killed" by multiple killers, and the process of holding it accountable could write the best detective fiction in the region.

　　The first suspect was another traveler at the Baron Hotel, who lived next door to Agatha. During World War I, British intelligence officer Thomas Edward Lawrence incited tribes behind enemy lines to destroy the Hejaz Railway and harass the Ottoman army. He formed a Bedouin guerrilla group and instigated them to declare war on the Ottoman Empire in the name of jihad, blowing up 79 bridges and derailing dozens of trains. "Lawrence of Arabia" is honored to return to his hometown. Behind his exploits with terrorist tactics are the countless civilian casualties who fell into the canyon. "This slaughter of the Turks is so horrific," Lawrence wrote in a letter from home.

　　Like the murder on that train, the Middle East rail network was "killed" by multiple killers, and the process of holding it accountable could write the best detective fiction in the region.

　　Even so, the British have an "alibi". They were involved in railway construction during the Ottoman Empire and after World War I. Beginning in the 1850s, the pioneer of steam locomotives, the Englishman Robert Stephenson, worked on laying the Egyptian railways. The British army continued to advance, and the railway line was also extended.

　　The investigation of Lawrence revealed other clues. Many of his Bedouin recruits hated the Hejaz Railway, which broke the Bedouin's monopoly on transporting pilgrims and food. They called the Hejaz Railway "Sultan's donkey". Along with the railway line came the alien culture, which disturbed long-standing traditional norms. The Bedouins, disobedient to the rule of the Saudi monarchy, destroyed the railroad tracks from the New Frontier to Medina. Today, only the bare sleepers are left on the 800-kilometer southern line of Jordan, winding in the rust-colored mountains. Occasionally, the broken walls of the station and the fortress are still standing silently, waiting for the train that has not passed in a hundred years.

　　However, Saudi Arabia also has an "alibi". Saudi Arabia pointed out that there were other forces behind the Bedouin attack on the railway. Britain and France have long sought to stem the influx of Muslims into Mecca and limit access to anti-colonial Islamists.

　　The crime scene also bears traces of Zionists, with activists even viewing the railway line as a "steel cobweb wrapped around the Promised Land." Zionists have killed multiple people in dozens of attacks. On "Train Night" on November 1, 1945, three Zionist militias blew up more than 150 key nodes along the railway line and planted bombs at railway stations in Jerusalem and Lud. Seven months later, on "Bridge Night", they blew up ten more rail bridges from Palestine to the Arab world. A website commemorating the Zionist military organization "Irgun" still highly praises its actions: "Achieving the goal of completely isolating Israel from its Arab neighbors."

　　After Israel was established in 1948, the dismantling of the railway line continued . Israel blew up bridges on the Israel-Lebanon border, cut off traffic to Beirut and blocked railway tunnels in the mountains of southern Lebanon, cutting off the Europe-Africa railway line. The Israeli government also disbanded the Palestinian Railway Company and laid off a large number of non-Jewish employees. After the third Middle East war in 1967, Israel abolished the Ottoman railway line in the West Bank, blocked the transportation hub city of Gaza in the Asia-Africa-Europe continent, and dismantled the railway tracks in the Sinai Peninsula to strengthen its Balev defense along the Suez Canal. fortifications.

　　Israel also produced its own "alibi". In the eyes of the Israelis, if there is no blockade, the Arabs will smuggle arms and troops to attack them. The Israelis argued that it was the Arabs who destroyed the railway. They say Palestinian militants began attacking railway installations as early as the 1930s and smelted Gaza's last railroad tracks into rockets and missiles.

　　Regional conflicts and civil wars have completely "killed" the "victims" of this case. The French controlled their colonies in North Africa with the help of a railway network from Algiers. After the region became independent, war broke out between Morocco and Algeria in Western Sahara. In 1994, the Maghree line train stopped at a distance of 1,300 kilometers from Tunis. Due to the war, two closely linked border towns nearby, Oujda in Morocco and Magnia in Algeria, were inexorably separated by military roadblocks. The once bustling railway station was closed to civilians, and wild peacocks picked up food waste between the platforms that had turned into deserted fields.

　　In 1975, when the Lebanese civil war broke out, Beirut Railway Station welcomed the last train from Tripoli. Syrian forces have turned a large transport hub near its border into a military base and a nearby hotel into an interrogation room. By the time Israel ended its occupation of Lebanon in 1982, the Beirut railway line had been completely destroyed.

　　Over the years, only the express train that Agatha rode in survived. Rail lines to Baghdad were cut in the 1980s, but night trains from Aleppo to Turkey continued to run until the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011. The Aleppo train station, where Agatha's "murder" started, survived the artillery fire, but the railroad tracks eastward to Iraq were destroyed in the bombing. The Baron Hotel, which had hosted Agatha, also ceased operations in 2014 after a series of bombings.

How did people travel across the Middle East by train in the past? The poster reads, "From London to Baghdad, take the Simplon-Orient Express/Taurus Express, arrive in seven days".

　　Like the 12 murderers on the "Orient Express", every force in the region has a "motivation". The powers have carved up the Middle East, and the warlords, as their successors, also give priority to grabbing territory, rather than the trade market and culture developed over thousands of years. The rulers see cosmopolitanism and connectivity as threats. Religion has lost its universal significance and has been reduced to a wicked thing that binds the land. Syria expelled French train inspectors and Iraqi railway authority fired Jewish administrators. The railway line is in disrepair due to lack of professional maintenance. They are buried in the desert like the ancient Silk Road Bazaars.

| Judgment announcement |

　　Agatha's novel ends the moment the truth of the crime is revealed, but the story of the Middle East never ends. The accumulation of wealth in the past relied on regional trade, not the sale of a single energy source; the military defense of the past relied on neighborhood solidarity rather than distant superpower interference. As the oil age draws to a close, the Middle East is rediscovering the value of the old. Many countries plan to develop trade and tourism markets and diversify their economies. The rulers no longer rely solely on the United States, but gradually turn to regional diplomacy. The bloody conflict between sects has gradually lost the market for identity politics, and the government has begun to carefully consider the benefits of religious diversity. Jewish communities are taking root across the Middle East, and Israel has its first coalition government that includes a Muslim party.

　　At the same time, the railway branch continued to expand outwards. Morocco opened its first high-speed rail network in 2018 and plans to expand it to the rest of West Africa within 20 years. “Trade will follow with access and circulation,” said Mohamed Klee, the head of Morocco’s railways. “This is the backbone of development.”

　　With similar aspirations, Israel is building four rail lines extending eastward. In a bid for influence, Iran said it had reached a deal with Iraq to fill a 32-kilometer rail gap along the old Silk Road to Syria. In October 2021, Iraq reopened the railway to Mosul and announced plans to advance the railway to Turkey. A railway plan to connect Arab countries along the Gulf is being conceived. Egypt is also pursuing rail expansion, including the construction of a monorail, as well as proposals for new lines to Libya, Sudan and Saudi Arabia. Unlike the ending written by Agatha, the "Oriental Express" is likely to carry the "Levant Dream" again, honking its whistle and starting across the Middle East.