On 1 March, at three minutes past midnight, an Iranian-made drone came down inside the Western Sovereign Base Area at Akrotiri. The base had radar, fighter aircraft and counter-drone systems. The drone flew too low to be seen in time. Villages were emptied that night; the evacuation order arrived the next day. Nobody has ever claimed the attack.
Six months on, American aircraft are striking southern Iran, Iranian missiles are falling on Jordan, Bahrain and Kuwait, and four people are dead at a wedding in Kuhestak.
Our new Deep Dive episode explains why the war that began on 28 February has no exit — and why it does not stay in the Gulf.
The argument runs in three tiers. The great power can start a war it cannot end: decapitation produced consolidation, not collapse. The middle powers — Pakistan, Oman, Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia — now sit at every table and have produced no binding decision. Several are opening new files of their own: the Aegean marine parks, a three-billion-euro Greek-Israeli defence architecture. The small actors pay.
We read the Islamabad Memorandum line by line and show the three holes that killed it in ten days: an Article One that never names Israel, three hundred billion dollars with no payer, and an Article Five that handed the world's most contested waterway to two maps and no referee.
Then we come home. Cyprus carries the risk and does not decide. Eight leaders' meetings, no negotiations. And still no written protocol for saving life at sea.
Everyone at the table. Nobody deciding.