It's been a busy, crazy week in the Middle East. Forget Iraq. Forget Gaza. Forget Iran. The big Middle East story was the damage to four telecommunications cables in the region. Actually, don't forget Iran -- they might be involved after all.
Last week, two of the world's fiber-optic cables -- Flag Telecom's Europe-Asia cable and the consortium-owned SEA-ME-WE 4 system  -- were cut. That cut off several Middle East countries, not including Iran, and pinched access to India.
Then Flag reported that its Falcon cable -- which runs between Dubai and Oman -- was cut. And then a fourth cable -- the Qatar-UAE Submarine Cable System -- was said to be cut. That last cable suffered a power outage, not a physical cut, according to the news site ArabianBusiness.com.
Repairs complete by Sunday
The good news, Flag Telecom reports, is that it has repair ships on the job and its two cables should be fully repaired by Sunday. For the Europe-Asia cut between Alexandria, Egypt, and Palermo, Italy, "the ship loaded with spares has reached the fault location and has initiated the repair work," Flag reported on its daily bulletin. It said there had been some interruption on capacity to London, but customers had been re-routed.
On the Falcon cut, Flag said, "The ship loaded with spares, marine experts and optical engineers have reached the site yesterday. The crew has recovered the one end of the cable and cable-joining work is in progress."
Flag reported it had found the abandoned anchor that caused the two cuts last week.
Conspiracy Theories
But news of four cable breaks in one week had a big effect on the blogosphere. Among the conspiracies suggested were that the U.S. engineered the breaks in order to cut Iran off from the Internet while the U.S. launched an attack during the Super Bowl.
"A communications disruption can mean only one thing -- invasion," wrote a conspiracy theorist who goes by Sio Bibble, according to a group called 911 scholars.
"03:00 and the troops are up, file into the mess to get a cup of coffee, sandwich and watch the game," Bibble wrote. "Meanwhile, an Israeli sub in the Gulf goes to Battle Station alert. The game starts, the troops go wild, they get pumped with adrenalin [sic] and into combative psychic. 10 minutes into the game, a micro-nuke goes off in the stadium. The aforementioned sub commander gets the signal and launches his surface to surface missiles at various Iranian sites and several American ships." (continued...)
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