Ashes of Middle East by Panesar, Hardev

They came for oil and left behind ghosts.

From the deserts of Arabia to the ruins of Gaza, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the banks of the Nile, this is the untold chronicle of how power, greed, and silence conspired to set a region on fire.
In Ashes of the Middle East, Hardev Panesar traces a century of betrayal — colonial borders drawn in ink and blood, dictators rising and falling under foreign hands, and empires old and new feeding on the world’s most contested resource: oil, the “liquid gold.”

Blending history, reportage, and moral witness, Panesar takes readers through the wreckage of Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and beyond. He reveals how Western intervention and regional ambition reduced nations to rubble and turned millions into refugees. Yet amid the ruins, he finds what no bomb can kill — the courage of ordinary men and women who continue to rebuild and remember.

At once indictment and elegy, Ashes of the Middle East ends with a call that history can no longer ignore: those who profited from destruction must pay the price of restoration. It is both a requiem for the dead and a manifesto for the living.

“The Middle East may lie in ashes, but its people still breathe truth — and truth, once spoken, is the one fire no tyrant can extinguish.”