I was seven when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. The memories of a child are vague and grainy, and I cannot vouch for their fidelity, but three images have stayed with me with the sharpness of things that mattered before one knew why they mattered. The first: my father, an officer in the United Arab Emirates’ Coast Guard at the time, returning home after a prolonged absence to collect a change of clothes and a firearm kept at the back of his wardrobe. He kissed us before he left with a tenderness that I would only later understand was a possible goodbye. The second: our British teachers announcing at school that they were evacuating the country. Jalal, the only Iraqi boy in our year told us his family was leaving too. Iraqis, he said, were no longer welcome. The third: the piercing sounds of car horns, relentless and jubilant, and the sight of a motorcade of Kuwaitis driving through our neighborhood, bodies thrust through windows and out of open roofs, flags snapping in the cool February air, making their way home after liberation.
At no point in the oblivious ease of my Emirati childhood did I register any sense of danger. My corporeal memory holds no explosions, no public panic, no rupture in the daily rhythm of things. We did not even get to miss school. The Gulf War of 1990 was, for many of us, a faraway event that concerned others—others who became our guests, whose grief and trauma passed through our streets and flickering TV screens without quite entering our collective memory. In hindsight, it may have been christened a Gulf War because it involved Kuwait—a proposition that geographic reality is not what defines this highly politicized term, rather who belongs within the circumscribed retelling of its imposed parameters. The idea of who was Khaleeji or belonged to the Khaleej crystallized over the erasure of former mobilities—the easy shuttling between the two fronting shores of the Gulf—constrained by the establishment of the nation-state. Iraqis, who spoke a dialect not dissimilar to that of Kuwaitis, with whom they share genealogies, histories, and familial ties, were not Khaleejis. The war hardened that border.
The Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), which by any measure should count as the first Gulf War, left an even shallower imprint. The displaced did not take refuge in our countries. The grieving mothers did not linger long enough on our TV screens to elicit lasting compassion. Eight years of war on the region’s doorstep, bankrolled in part by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, and yet it produced almost no reckoning with what such a catastrophe meant for the region, for its neighbors, and for the very idea of a Gulf that might understand itself as implicated in the fates of others as it was then, and is today.
The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was received, for the most part, as a cautionary tale about what might happen elsewhere. Set against its full context—the widening of the US “War on Terror,” the manufactured case for weapons of mass destruction, the coalition assembled on the strength of a lie—the story as retold in the Gulf would often narrow to a question of character. Saddam Hussein, once an ally, then a treacherous neighbor who had violated the sanctity of good neighborliness in the way Iran stands accused of doing today, was resurrected after his death as a kind of folk hero—defiant in the end, mourned in one sheikhly verse. That requiem was a hairline crack: a wound to the Kuwaiti spirit and a reminder that Gulf solidarities had never quite solidified, not even after 1981, when the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) was established expressly to contain them.
What proved unforgivable was that part of the Iraqi diaspora that cheered the US invasion, a specter that returns today among pockets of the Iranian diaspora. Gulf opinion read the enthusiasm of those exiles who welcomed the coalition as liberators as a betrayal of origin, a hand extended to the destroyer of one’s own home. The cautionary tale, it turned out, was not only about what great powers do to other countries. It was about what a people can do to itself. That, in Gulf memory, sealed Iraq’s fate. A country that had facilitated its own undoing, condemned ever since to the permanent condition of failure and fragmentation, at least in the imagination of its neighbors.
The shock of the US invasion of Iraq never quite left. It settled into the Gulf’s political unconscious, though not before a brief, uneasy fracture had opened between Gulf governments and their people in those suspended days before the invasion. When the Arab uprisings came, the haunting of Iraq returned, weaponized. Dissent, opposition, and the desire for change were all recast as the first steps towards ruin, the exile’s cheer echoing beneath these demands. These calls had further fragmented Gulf societies along a faultline that has never fully closed.
Has the Gulf always been this fragmented? I suppose it has.
But the fragmentation does not stop at the borders between Gulf States. It seeps downward, into the nucleus of each polity, where older tensions of belonging, representation, and exposure have long been suspended in time, unresolved and largely unexamined. The Bidoon of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, stateless for generations, present in plain sight but absent from official census. The Shia communities of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia; the naturalized and unnaturalized; the citizen of Persian heritage whose loyalty is perpetually in question; the long-term resident whose decades of presence confer no security. These are not new wounds, but ones that are kept just below the threshold of crisis. Thus, how the current US–Israeli war on Iran is experienced in the Gulf, and who absorbs its first costs, is not incidental to these tensions but expressive of them. The question of who speaks for the Gulf, or for singular states within it, is therefore not a matter of political representation. It is a question of which lives are legible enough to count as affected, and which populations are visible enough to warrant a story.
What is immediately clear is that the impulse to internationalize this war, to render it as geopolitics, a confrontation between civilizational blocs, has produced its own form of erasure. Gulf citizens and long-term residents, the people inside the radius, have been made peripheral to the very accounts of a war unfolding around them. The Bidoon officers who were among the first to fall in defense of Kuwait, mourned in death, even as mass denaturalization stretches the boundaries of dispossession in the country. The long-term resident who risks a generational presence over filmed footage of a damaged façade. The Shia citizens of Bahrain accused of treason for celebrating—or facilitating, according to the official account—the Iranian strikes against their own country. Each of these is a window into domestic tensions that will outlast this war. Their experience, fractured along lines of citizenship, class, ethno-sectarianism, and the precarious geometries of mobility available to people from the Global South, does not fit neatly into the international frame. And so, it is left out.
Fragments of Lives
In the immediate aftermath of Iran’s retaliatory strikes on US bases across the Gulf, a flurry of headlines emerged to obituarize, with a hint of schadenfreude, the death of the Dubai model and the collapse of the Gulf’s long-cultivated narrative of exceptionalism: a safe haven, insulated by wealth and political sedation from the wars that have consumed the rest of the region. The subjects of these elegies were perplexing. Column inches were devoted, with an urgency bordering on lamentation, to the departures of the wealthy, those tax-advantaged migrants who prefer the designation “expatriate,” a word that does considerable work in the Gulf, quietly encoding distinctions of class and, not infrequently, of race. Their hastened exits, cases wheeled through departure terminals beneath skies still streaked with the debris of interceptions, were narrated as a kind of loss. The temporary, perhaps permanent, surrender of dream lives conducted under pristine skylines, in cities that had promised immunity from history. It was a promise that had almost held until it did not, and Kuwait became the lesson no one quite learned.
But history does not escape the poor. It meets them where they stand.
When crisis arrives, some leave by choice and others are pushed. Evacuations, rescue, and respite for some; displacement and deportation for others. If the 2008 financial crisis was a wound to the pocket—workers with no savings, no end-of-service gratuities, wages withheld in the casual cruelty of exploitative employment—then the COVID-19 crisis of 2020 was a wound to the body. The poor expatriate was recast as a reservoir of contagion, stamped unclean by class, by race, and to a degree, by gender. The streets they walked had to be purified in grotesque public theatre: men in hazmat suits dispensing disinfectant onto empty roads, and the neighborhoods where the poor were quartered.
This current war has inflicted a different order of wound: a wound of existence. Most of the casualties across the Gulf have been South Asian expatriates. Their deaths did not initially make headlines in the countries where they died. They were reported as numbers attached to nationalities; three from this country, two from another. No obituaries. No profiles. No names given the space to become people. Foreign media eventually began to pay attention, and only then did local media offer the dead the dignity of being named.
#MyDubai
But between these sharp contrasts lies another demographic that rarely features in stories about Gulf cities: citizens and second- and third-generation noncitizens, whose roots run deeper. In almost every account of Gulf urban life, and of Dubai in particular, this local stratum is rendered invisible. And yet it is precisely this group that bears the inheritance of all these distant wars and societal fractures. But the city, as narrated from outside, no longer belongs to them. They have been folded into the sepia of a romanticized past, photographs from the 1980s and 1990s, figures frozen at the threshold of modernity; quaint and inert. That is where their stories are meant to stay: safely in the past, archived and unthreatening. The grievances they carry, the continuities they represent, the harder truths their presence implies; these are spoken over by newer arrivals who have mastered the art of loyalty declaration, who out-patriot them with the enthusiasm of those who have chosen this place rather than simply come from it.
Their cities do not exist either. I know this most intimately in Dubai, which is my own. Dubai has been recast as a cosmopolitan space that anyone may claim, a global transit hub of refillable drinks, curated malls, avant-garde cultural districts, and lives lived at altitude, unanchored. The new inhabitants tell different stories. They move through the city without deference, without the particular weight that comes from having watched it change and having had no say in that change, without the mourning of the old neighborhood when it was rezoned. Deference requires a debt to the place, and they have not yet incurred one. What holds them is a sense of comfort, and the life the city made possible, the selves assembled from its offerings. What holds others is something harder to name and harder to sever: the personal losses, the fragments of memory, the buried dead that no length of residency can conjure and no passport can confer.
To bury one’s dead in a land is to anchor one’s past to it and seal one’s future there, too. The workers killed in this war will be repatriated as a matter of course. There are no families here to keep vigil over their graves, no roots deep enough to hold them to soil. But for the noncitizen who has lived here not for years, but for generations, the texture of loss is different. A brief departure, no longer than the years it takes to earn a degree, can be enough to trigger an arbitrary visa denial upon return. What was once a full life becomes, overnight, a former life. And the relative buried in Gulf soil, in the ground of the only place that ever cohered into home, lies there unreachable. No pilgrimage is possible. No grave can be tended. An ancestry is severed not by war or exile or the violent displacement of history, but by an ethnonational bureaucracy that in the same breath rolls out its welcome for globe-trotters and influencers, rewarding their luminous transience with the permanency it withholds from those who gave this land the quiet, unremarkable devotion of an entire life.
Then there are the citizens, those who are so often cast as the master class, vilified by reflex, caricatured by convenience. Some accounts go further, attributing to them an inherent racism and chauvinism so congenital that no education, no exposure, no accumulation of experience could redeem them from it. The caricature is useful. It absolves those who arrive to indulge in the Gulf’s excesses while loudly professing to deplore them, the moral contradictions conveniently displaced onto a people rendered inveterate by design. Lack of citizenship becomes, in this telling, a kind of innocence: the expatriate as passive victim, the citizen as active beneficiary. The choice to come, the choice to stay, the life quietly built on terms one claims to find unconscionable; none of this trouble the righteous self-portrait. The conscience travels light when the citizen stands ready as the villain.
These are citizens who have become tourists in their own cities, rarely sought as spokespeople for the places that have since outrun their own origins. Their stories do not circulate, because the world has already decided on its cast: the Western protagonist and the Subaltern victim, a clean binary that flattens the Gulf. The gradients in between—the citizen navigating a city transformed around her and the second-generation noncitizen with nowhere else to call home—disrupt a narrative that too many find too convenient to surrender. Among them, not infrequently, are the expatriates themselves, who pass through, take what the city offers, and depart, leaving their most comfortable certainties intact.
Wound of War
Wars have a way of resetting time. They create a before and an after, a common wound around which memory sediments and identity quietly reorganizes itself. This war, if it continues, may produce the first truly collective Gulf memory: national and transnational at once, the kind that does not ask for a passport before it admits you to its grief.
The same crucible that forges solidarity can just as easily harden into its opposite. The question that will outlast this war is whether our societies will emerge from it capable of a belonging large enough to hold everyone who endured it—citizens, long-term residents, and voluntary remainers—or whether they will recoil inwards to a space held sacred, where the right to belong is rationed by blood and burial ground.