Kuwait

• 1. Introduction

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  Kuwait sits at the head of the Persian Gulf, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have built their delta for thousands of years. This small country on the northeastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula holds roughly 10 percent of the world's proven crude oil reserves, has the world's most valuable currency as of early 2026, and hosts the largest US military presence in the Middle East. It is a place where ancient Mesopotamian settlements, Greek colonies named by Alexander the Great, and a pearl industry that once led the global luxury market all preceded the oil economy that defines it today. How did a small fishing village become one of the wealthiest states on earth? What happened when a neighboring country invaded and tried to erase it? And what does it mean to live in a nation where citizens are outnumbered more than two to one by foreign nationals? These are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. Layers of Antiquity

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  Site H3 in Subiya yielded one of the world's earliest reed boats, dating to the Ubaid period roughly 5,500 to 3,700 years before the common era. That single find tells you how long the coastline of present-day Kuwait has drawn people who needed the sea. By 2000 BC, traders from the Sumerian city of Ur had settled on the Kuwaiti island of Failaka, building structures recognizable as Mesopotamian architecture. Around the same era, the Dilmun civilization controlled Persian Gulf trading routes from sites including Failaka, Akkaz, Umm an Namil, and Al-Shadadiya.

  The Achaemenid Empire absorbed the bay around 550 BC, leaving behind Aramaic inscriptions and archaeological strata that confirm their presence on Failaka. Then in the fourth century BC, Alexander the Great's Greeks arrived and renamed the bay's landmarks in their own tongue. They called mainland Kuwait Larissa, the bay Hieros Kolpos, and Failaka they renamed Ikaros, according to the ancient writers Strabo and Arrian, because the island resembled an Aegean island of the same name in size and shape. Large Hellenistic forts and temples were uncovered there. Greek remains also appeared at Akkaz, Umm an Namil, and Subiya.

  By 127 BC the Parthian Empire held Kuwait, and the kingdom of Characene was established around Teredon. Coins from Characene turned up at Failaka, Akkaz, and Umm an Namil, tracing the commerce of that era. The Sassanid Empire followed in 224 AD, knowing the territory as Meshan. A tower of silence - the distinctive funerary structure of the Sassanid religion - was found in northern Akkaz. Torpedo-jar pottery shards recovered from beach ridges on Bubiyan Island bridge the Sassanid and early Islamic periods. Each successive empire left something readable in the ground beneath Kuwait.

• 3. Port, Pearl, and Protectorate

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  In the early to mid 1700s, Kuwait City was a small fishing village ruled by sheikhs of the Bani Khalid clan. Its transformation began when the Bani Utbah settled in the city and, through successive matrimonial alliances, took control after the fall of the Bani Khalid Emirate. By the late 1700s Kuwait had reinvented itself as a transit hub, routing goods between Baghdad, India, Persia, Muscat, and the Arabian Peninsula all the way north to Aleppo.

  The Persian siege of Basra in 1775-79 accelerated that rise sharply. Iraqi merchants sheltered in Kuwait, and the Indian trade routes to Baghdad, Aleppo, Smyrna, and Constantinople were diverted through it. The East India Company followed in 1792, securing sea lanes between Kuwait, India, and the east coast of Africa. After the Persians withdrew from Basra, Kuwait kept attracting commerce away from its rival. The flight of Basra's leading merchants was still affecting Basra's commercial stagnation well into the 1850s.

  Kuwait's pearl industry grew alongside its maritime trade, and at its height it regularly sent out between 750 and 800 ships to supply European elites with pearls. In the mid 19th century the territory also exported an estimated 800 horses to India every year. Then the Great Depression arrived, European demand for luxury goods collapsed, and Japan introduced cultured pearls. The writer Freya Stark visited Kuwait and described how poverty had settled more heavily since her previous trip, with the pearl trade continuing to decline by sea and a Saudi blockade squeezing merchants by land.

  In 1899, ruler Sheikh Mubarak Al Sabah signed the Anglo-Kuwaiti Agreement, making Kuwait a British protectorate. The arrangement blocked Ottoman and German access to a Persian Gulf port while giving Britain exclusive trade. During World War I, however, Kuwait's ruler Sheikh Salim Al-Mubarak Al-Sabah supported the Ottoman side, and Britain imposed a trade blockade that heavily damaged the economy. The oil that would change everything was not discovered until the 22nd of February 1938, when the Burgan field came in.

• 4. The Golden Era and Its Limits

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  From 1946 to 1980, Kuwait experienced what its own historians call the golden era. Crude oil was exported for the first time in 1946. By 1952, Kuwait had become the largest oil exporter in the Persian Gulf region, and that same year the British planning firm Minoprio, Spenceley, and Macfarlane designed the country's first masterplan.

  The influx of oil revenue drew foreign workers from Palestine, Iran, India, and Egypt. Al-Arabi magazine launched in 1958, and Kuwait's press was described as one of the freest in the world. Many foreign writers relocated there because they could publish with greater freedom than elsewhere in the Middle East. Kuwait University opened in 1966. The Iraqi poet Ahmed Matar left Iraq in the 1970s specifically for the more liberal environment in Kuwait. Most Kuwaiti women did not wear the hijab during the 1960s and 70s, and mini skirts were reportedly more common than the hijab among female students at Kuwait University.

  The Kuwait Investment Authority was established as the world's first sovereign wealth fund. Its roots go back to 1953, when the Kuwaiti government began directing investments into Europe, the United States, and the Asia-Pacific. The National Bank of Kuwait, founded in 1952, was the first local publicly traded corporation in the entire GCC region. By the late 1970s and early 1980s an informal stock market called the Souk Al-Manakh had grown so large that its market capitalization ranked third in the world, behind only the United States and Japan.

  Kuwait's independence arrived in June 1961, when the British protectorate formally ended and Sheikh Abdullah Al-Salim Al-Sabah became Emir. Iraq immediately refused to recognize the new state, claiming Kuwait as its own territory. The short-lived Operation Vantage crisis unfolded in July 1961 as Iraq threatened invasion; Arab League support and a British show of force kept that threat at bay. Iraq recognized Kuwait's 1932 borders in a friendship treaty signed in 1963, after Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim was killed in a coup.

• 5. Invasion and Liberation

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  After the Iran-Iraq War ended, Kuwait declined an Iraqi request to forgive a debt of US$65 billion. Kuwait then raised its oil production by 40 percent. Tensions sharpened further in July 1990 when Iraq accused Kuwait of stealing oil through slant drilling into the shared Rumaila field near their border.

  In August 1990, Iraqi forces invaded and annexed Kuwait without warning, installing a puppet government under Ba'athist Iraq led by Saddam Hussein. During the occupation, nearly 1,000 civilians were killed inside Kuwait. Another 600 people went missing; the remains of approximately 375 were later found in mass graves in Iraq. The Um Alaish satellite station complex, which Kuwait had inaugurated in October 1969 as the first satellite ground station in the Middle East, was destroyed by Iraqi forces during the occupation.

  A US-led international coalition launched military operations and, on the 26th of February 1991, Operation Desert Storm succeeded in driving Iraqi forces out. As they retreated, Iraqi soldiers set oil wells on fire in a scorched earth campaign. More than 500 oil lakes formed, covering a combined surface area of roughly 35.7 square kilometers. The resulting soil contamination made eastern and southeastern parts of Kuwait uninhabitable, reducing large portions of the desert to semi-asphalt surfaces. Kuwait celebrates that February date as Liberation Day.

  The post-war period brought its own harsh turns. In the early 1990s Kuwait deported nearly 400,000 Palestinians, as collective punishment for the PLO's alignment with Saddam Hussein. Thousands of Iraqis and Yemenis were expelled as well. Hundreds of thousands of stateless Bedoon were also forced out; a 1995 report at the UK House of Commons revealed that 150,000 stateless Bedoon had been sent to camps in the Kuwaiti desert near the Iraqi border with minimal water, insufficient food, and no basic shelter.

• 6. Oil Wealth, Political Deadlock

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  Kuwait holds proven crude oil reserves of 104 billion barrels, estimated at 10 percent of the world's total reserves. The Burgan field alone has a capacity of approximately 70 billion barrels of proven reserves. As of February 2026, one Kuwaiti Dinar is worth 3.25 US dollars, giving Kuwait the world's most valuable currency.

  That wealth coexists with deep political dysfunction. More than 70 percent of government spending flows to public sector salaries and subsidies. Public sector wages account for 12.4 percent of GDP, the highest such ratio in the GCC. The Polity data series and the Economist Democracy Index both categorize Kuwait as an autocracy. The Emir has suspended articles of the constitution on three occasions: in August 1976, in July 1986, and in May 2024. The National Assembly has been suspended since May 2024.

  Chronically unresolved political deadlocks have produced multiple cabinet reshuffles and dissolutions. Since the end of the Gulf War, Kuwait's infrastructure projects market has regularly underperformed as a direct result of those deadlocks. In the early 2020s Kuwait was described as the region's most oil-dependent country with the weakest infrastructure quality and the lowest share of economic diversification among Gulf states. The COVID-19 pandemic added a budget deficit of $46 billion in 2020, the first fiscal deficit Kuwait had recorded since 1995.

  On the 26th of June 2015 a suicide bomber killed 27 people and wounded 227 at a Shia Muslim mosque in Kuwait. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant claimed responsibility. It was the largest terror attack in the country's recorded history. In March 2014, senior US officials publicly accused Kuwait of funding extremist organizations including ISIS and Al-Qaeda. These episodes sit alongside the country's standing as the host of the largest US military presence in the Middle East, with over 14,000 US personnel at bases including Camp Arifjan, Camp Buehring, Ali Al-Salem Air Field, and Camp Patriot.

• 7. Citizenship, Space, and Survival

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  Kuwait's 4.82 million people include only 1.53 million Kuwaiti citizens; the remaining 3.29 million are foreign nationals from over 100 countries. In 2024, Kuwait ranked seventh in the world for the percentage of its population made up of foreign nationals. Citizens account for fewer than 30 percent of the total population, a proportion shaped by decades of deliberate labor policy and what critics call demographic engineering.

  In early 2024, the Emir began revoking citizenship by decree. Within six months, an estimated 42,000 people had lost Kuwaiti nationality. By December 2025 that figure had grown to an estimated 200,000. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace described the policy as the weaponization of citizenship, calling it one of the largest citizenship revocation campaigns since World War II. In January 2026, the United States suspended immigrant visas for Kuwaiti citizens alongside nationals of 74 other countries, making Kuwait the only GCC country on that list.

  Between February and April 2026, Iranian forces and affiliated factions struck Kuwait repeatedly during the wider conflict that year, targeting Kuwait International Airport, oil refineries, the PIFSS tower, the Ministries Complex, and multiple desalination plants despite Kuwait's declared neutrality. The attacks tested the country's energy and water security simultaneously. Kuwait relies on desalination as its primary source of fresh water, a technology it pioneered for large-scale domestic use in 1951 when the first distillation plant was commissioned.

  While the geopolitical pressures mount, Kuwait has been quietly building upward, literally. QMR-KWT, Kuwait's first satellite, launched on the 30th of June 2021 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and deployed into sun-synchronous orbit on the 16th of July 2021. A second mission, QMR-KWT 2, launched on the 28th of December 2025 from Vostochny Cosmodrome aboard a Soyuz-2.1b rocket. A student experiment called Kuwait's Experiment, testing E. coli consuming carbon dioxide, reached the International Space Station on the 6th of December 2020 aboard SpaceX CRS-21, where astronaut Shannon Walker of Expedition 64 conducted it in orbit. The name chosen for both satellites, QMR-KWT, translates from Arabic as Moon of Kuwait.