It's gotten better in the last year. But there are still problems with the locals buying a small ix port and it gets congested. The biggest challenge in the area is the the asymmetry. I could learn the routes if a network in the gulf I want, but they will refuse to accept my prefixes and force the return traffic by Europe unless I pay in some fashion.

> I believe Germany is the 'big transit upstream' of Iran.

There's a bunch of countries in between, so how does that work?

A set of networks, cables, and routers, presumably :)

On my routes to parsonline I see this: dubai -> italy -> france -> germany (ffm) -> iran

The germany to iran leg might be doing mpls or something, I don't see anything in between it other than a lot of timed out hops.

Domestic carrier buys optical transport from their country that goes back towards europe. They'll drop some network infra in Europe and buy transit from folks like tata/dtag/telecom Italia.

Check https://as49666.peeringdb.com to see where they land in eu.