Collecting Lycaenidae and need help please

Since I'm coming more from a scientific perspective I would steer you towards genera that are not very well explored as of now. I always found Cigaritis species very interesting because of the ecology and the distribution isn't very well recorded for the Middle East regions. Also, there remain some cases where the taxonomy is unclear. A much more challenging and broader genus would be Agrodiaetus (or the stuff that sometimes is or isn't; it gets thrown into Polyommatus quite often), where taxonomy is really a bit of a mess at the moment. In the region you mentioned are many different species of Agrodiaetus/Polyommatus to be found. For a beginner that may be a little hard, but on the other hand what's the point of doing the easy stuff? I mean collecting Riodinidae in the Palearctic region is done pretty quickly. I would almost recommend focusing more on a smaller region and work on all Lycaenidae in that region than choosing a specific genus. You could do that, but there are not many genera that are restricted to a small geographic area, so you'd have to expand on your geographic range. If you throw out Russia and China for example, the number of species in Western Asia is not that big if you think about it. If you want to focus more on Russia and the steppe/taiga belt you could get rid of the more southern countries and expand eastwards to include Mongolia, northern China and the Russian Far East and get also not that many species to work on. I mean it's all up to you, that's just my thoughts on this.

Greetings Dennis