When I began writing Beirut Extraction, I didn’t set out to mirror the nightly news. But it’s impossible to write a spy novel set in today’s Middle East without absorbing the real world—the shifting borders, the uneasy alliances,

the quiet deals made in back rooms by men who never appear on television.

Beirut itself is a crossroads of unresolved politics. Regional powers treat it like a chessboard; Western services treat it like a listening post. Everyone is watching everyone else, and yet nobody seems fully in control. That tension—between influence and instability—is the oxygen of espionage fiction, and it was the backdrop that shaped the novel from its first pages.

What fascinated me wasn’t the headline events but the quieter realities beneath them. How intelligence officers must negotiate with warlords because the state can’t act alone. How foreign governments can claim moral clarity while financing factions that contradict it. How civilians, simply trying to live normal lives, are constantly navigating decisions shaped by forces far beyond their reach.

In Beirut Extraction, those political undercurrents become personal. A colonel trying to serve his country finds himself pulled between duty and survival. A foreign agent sent to do a simple job discovers the job is anything but simple. Even the institutions that claim to protect them are hamstrung by agendas and compromises whispered across continents.

I wanted to write a story where the politics felt real—not neat, not heroic, but recognisable. Where alliances are temporary, favours have long memories, and no player has clean hands. Because in today’s world, the moral landscape is rarely black and white; at best, it’s a muted shade of grey.

Real-world politics didn’t just inspire Beirut Extraction—they shaped every character’s choices. They reminded me that in espionage, as in life, the truth is seldom convenient, and survival often depends on understanding the forces that move unseen.

In a city like Beirut, those forces are always at work.