Tanus Shrugged

How It All Happened
When people first started to realize the significance of steel as a whole, it was at the time of the initiation of the world's biggest financial miracle: "The Surge" as many called it started on January 23rd, 1995. The London Stock Exchange had reported an increase in shares since yesterday - but tragedy struck only 4 years later on July 11, 1999, when Iran & Saudi Arabia went to war with each other, in a war known as the "Great Middle East War". Regional allies like Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait & the U.A.E were on the Saudi payroll, but Iraq, Syria, Palestine & Egypt were formidable Persian supporters, and Israel, Lebanon, Oman, Bahrain, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia & Pakistan remained nonaligned, to avoid war with either the Saudis or the Iranians. The Great Middle East War was the deadliest war the world had ever seen. The Mid East had seen such bloodshed during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, but not on the scale of the Great Middle East War. The war would only end 13 years later in 2012, with the signing of Moscow I & II.

The 13 years of war heavily inflated gas prices, and all of a sudden, the world economy collapsed in 2010, after reaching approximately 11 years of conflict. Unfortunately, the later stages of the war (2007 - 2012) were the bloodiest - suicide bombings, assassinations, chemical gas attacks, massacres - those years were disastrous for the Middle East. So many people died in the past 13 years, and the population dropped from 250,385,919 in 1990, to roughly 100,245 in 2011. Chemical & biological weapons were heavily used, specifically during the later stages of the war. If you'd go to a city like Baghdad, Kuwait City, Damascus, or Basra today, you'd see nothing but bodies & ruined buildings for miles/kilometers on end. The cities were abandoned years ago when the heavy usage of chemicals prevented agribusiness from prospering.

With the collapse of the world economy known as the "Lost Years", communism & the social democratic movement started to become bigger & bigger with time. But no one expected what was next.