Euphrates Gone!

Foreword

Although, in the holy texts, apocalyptic events are usually mentioned without an exact location, the entertainment industry depicts such events to take place on their own lands. So, I wanted to try my own version based on two hadiths narrated from Prophet Muhammad pbuh.

"Soon the river "Euphrates" will disclose the treasure (the mountain) of gold, so whoever will be present at that time should not take anything of it."  

(Hadith, recorded in Bukhari, Kitab-ul Fitan, 24/7119)

"It (the last hour) will not come until you see ten signs... and land-slides in three places, one in the east, one in the west and one in Arabia"

(Hadith, recorded in Muslim, Kitab-ul Fiten, 54/2891)

After the swarm of earthquakes that took place in the Dardanelles in 2017, others followed throughout the Anatolian peninsula in the decade that followed. These quakes were so frequent that they had become part of the everyday life. As with anything else that is frequent, predicting their time and magnitude became popular among the geologists.

News on the prime time always included a quake forecast, so that people would be ready. But to be honest, people did not care about these forecasts as much as they did in the beginning, not because they were inaccurate but rather because they were very accurate. So, having gotten used to them, people were immune to the usual quakes. What they would really care about would be a high magnitude one.

Comfort brought about by this knowledge of geology was everywhere. Life was just like any other time in history. Turkish people watched TV shows on whether they were part of the east culture or west culture, they certainly rejected belonging to the middle eastern culture. At the same time they went through arguments on how the peace in the middle east could be established, and some of them insisted on the importance of their country for this goal. After all, they claimed, they had been a world power for six centuries, and had distributed peace and civilization to all under their wings. Still, they bought their China-made, Western-designed high-tech products, and taught the ideal of "catching up with the level of contemporary civilizations".

In any event, people were very keen on their position as a unique culture that combined the Western democracy and the eastern interpretation of Islam. So, whether religious or not in their daily lives, their self perception was a bit higher than the other people around them. After all, they were not as eastern as others... In fact, Anatolian land was historically regarded as the Roman land, as implied in the name of the famous poet Rumi, and this land was to the west of the Arabian peninsula.

As much as westernized, these people still listened to the conspiracy theories a lot. One thing they were very much afraid of was the earthquake gun. They knew that it was used once in 1999 against them, and the swarm of earthquakes in 2017 had awakened that idea again. What if the same gun is active again? This idea was scrutinized a lot by the media, religious officials and politicians. Although most scientists did not believe the idea, a few of them were always on TV with their commentaries on such issues.

If you left aside these salts and peppers of life, people were just getting along well with their earthquakes, and were living by with their usual goods and sins. Until that day...

In 2029, the chain of earthquakes stopped for a few months. Then, during the summer, over a period of one week, the country shook with quakes that had never ever occurred to the human mind. The catastrophic events changed the map of Turkey beyond imagination. The satellites captured the motion of the land much like a movie scene.

What had happened was that the major fault lines under the Anatolian peninsula had mobilized, literally, and the western and the central parts of the land were separated from the main land by a major canyon. During that week, emergency services could not even get started on anything, because the very land they were supposed to move on was moving itself. Deaths amounted to millions with a much greater number for the wounded.

But more was to come. With the formation of the Anatolian canyon, the Mediterranean Sea started to fill in from the south, and the Aegean Sea from the West. The water progressed over a period of a month, and the new canyon became part of the sea, and the Anatolian Plate became an island. What is more, the Euphrates River stopped flowing. The source of life and the source of peace for countless people dried up. At first, its place turned to desert. A year later, the same river bed started to get wet with another fluid: oil!

This river of oil was originating in Turkey as did Euphrates, but it was fed by a continuous line of "springs" throughout its path to central Syria. Of course both countries claimed ownership of the new energy source. Neither country was strong enough to deal with the each other due their losses during the earthquakes of the previous year.

To back them up, two opposing alliances formed with their own plans of exploiting the oil. Soon, all resources available to the authorities were channeled towards the fight to claim ownership of the oil, instead of helping the millions in need.

About a century after the first world war, the Middle East, the bleeding heart of the world, was at peril again. And people did not care about it! Because they were strong enough to sacrifice everything for their homeland! They had done it in the history, and they could do it once more!