The Invisible Casualties: How Gulf War Strikes Are Killing the Migrant Workers Who Built the Region

As missiles arc across the Persian Gulf and air raid sirens wail in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha, the dead are being counted. Almost none of them are citizens of the countries where they fell.

Since Iran began retaliatory strikes on Gulf Cooperation Council states on March 1, 2026 — responding to the U.S.-Israeli military operation launched against Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure on February 28 — at least 11 civilians have been killed across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain [1]. Every one of them was a foreign national. The overwhelming majority were low-wage migrant workers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal — the same people who drive the taxis, guard the airports, clean the offices, and build the skyscrapers of the world's wealthiest petrostates [2].

Their deaths are not a coincidence. They are a consequence of demographics, economics, and a labor system that human rights organizations have criticized for decades.

The Dead

The names have been emerging slowly, announced not by Gulf governments but by the embassies and families of the nations that sent them.

Murib Zaman, a Pakistani driver, was killed by debris from an intercepted Iranian missile in Abu Dhabi. He had lived and worked in the UAE for 20 years [2]. Dibas Shrestha, a 29-year-old Nepali security guard at Zayed International Airport, died on March 1 when Iranian missile and drone attacks struck near the airport. In his last phone call home, he told his parents not to worry about the conflict [3]. Mosharraf Hossain, a Bangladeshi cleaner in Saudi Arabia, was killed alongside a coworker when a military projectile struck their company housing [2].

In the UAE alone, where Iran has launched more than 1,700 missiles and drones over the first ten days of the conflict, four civilians have been killed — all foreign nationals from Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh [4][5]. Over 112 have been injured, with the wounded representing a cross-section of the global labor force: Emirati, Egyptian, Ethiopian, Filipino, Pakistani, Iranian, Indian, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, and others [4].

In Kuwait, an 11-year-old girl named Elna Abdullah Nea, an Iranian national, was killed by shrapnel that fell on her home [2]. None of the Gulf states' own citizens have been among the dead.

A Region Built by Outsiders

The demographic math makes the casualty pattern almost inevitable. In the UAE and Qatar, foreign nationals comprise approximately 88 percent of the population [6]. In Kuwait, the figure is 60 percent; in Bahrain, 55 percent; in Saudi Arabia, 44 percent; and in Oman, 43 percent [6]. Across the six GCC nations, the International Labour Organization estimates there are over 24 million migrant workers — accounting for more than 70 percent of the employed population and over 95 percent of private-sector workers in Qatar and the UAE [7][8].

Source: World Bank — International Migrant Stock

Data as of Feb 24, 2026CSV

World Bank data confirms the scale: as of 2024, international migrants comprise 76.7 percent of Qatar's population, 74 percent of the UAE's, 67.3 percent of Kuwait's, 52.3 percent of Bahrain's, 43.2 percent of Oman's, and 40.3 percent of Saudi Arabia's [9]. These are not temporary visitors. They are the permanent underclass that has powered the Gulf's transformation from desert outposts into global financial and tourism hubs over the past half-century.

The workers perform what labor researchers call "3D" jobs — Dirty, Dangerous, and Difficult — in construction, engineering, healthcare, sanitation, and domestic service [6]. They are the grocery cashiers, delivery drivers, and security guards who keep Gulf cities running. When missiles fall, they are the ones still at their posts.

The Kafala Trap

The reason these workers cannot simply leave — even as ballistic missiles strike residential neighborhoods — is rooted in the kafala sponsorship system that governs labor migration across the GCC. Under kafala, a foreign worker's visa and legal status are tied to their employer. Changing jobs, leaving the country, or even moving between cities typically requires the employer's permission [10][11].

The system, which the Council on Foreign Relations describes as granting employers "legal power over their employee, including restrictions on changing work or leaving the country," creates what human rights organizations characterize as conditions that "may amount to forced labor" [10][11]. Workers routinely face wage theft, illegal recruitment fees, and passport confiscation. Human Rights Watch reported in 2023 that Gulf states "treat migrant workforce as disposable" [12].

Some reforms have been enacted. Qatar in 2020 became the first GCC state to allow workers to change jobs without employer consent. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have followed with partial measures [7]. But as a 2024 analysis from the Migration Policy Institute noted, "the largest benefits have fallen to foreign investors and white-collar workers, leaving behind those with lower skill levels who often come from countries in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa" [7].

Now, those same structural barriers are preventing workers from reaching safety. Commercial airports across the region are closed. Bangladesh has reported that its workers are stranded due to airspace closures [13]. The Philippine Department of Migrant Workers has said the situation has not yet reached "Alert Level 4" — the threshold for mandatory repatriation — though it is monitoring the situation [14]. Workers who might want to flee face a stark calculus: leaving means abandoning debts incurred to recruitment agencies, forfeiting wages often held by employers, and cutting off remittance flows that entire families depend on.

The Remittance Lifeline at Risk

The economic stakes extend far beyond the Gulf. Remittances from migrant workers in the Middle East represent a critical share of GDP for their home countries. Philippine overseas workers sent home $35.63 billion in 2025, equivalent to 7.3 percent of GDP. For Nepal, remittances constitute 25.2 percent of GDP. For Pakistan, the figure is roughly 10 percent, and for Bangladesh, 4.6 to 5 percent [6].

India, with approximately 9 million workers in the Gulf, has the largest stake. The Philippines has an estimated 2 million overseas workers in the Middle East [13]. Any disruption to this labor pipeline — through casualties, evacuations, or economic collapse in the Gulf — would ripple through some of the world's most economically vulnerable communities.

"We rush outside our labour camps or workplaces to try to save ourselves, but we don't know what to do," one Pakistani dairy worker told reporters [2]. The workers remain because they have no choice: the same economic desperation that drove them to the Gulf in the first place now keeps them there, even as missiles fall.

A Pattern of Disposability

The current crisis did not create the vulnerability of Gulf migrant workers — it merely exposed it with lethal clarity. The Vital Signs Project, a research partnership tracking migrant worker deaths in the Gulf, found that as many as 10,000 migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia die in the region every year, with more than half of those deaths effectively unexplained [15]. Death certificates routinely list causes such as "natural causes" or "cardiac arrest" without any reference to underlying conditions — in many cases, workers in their 20s and 30s dying in the extreme heat of Gulf construction sites [15].

Government data on migrant worker deaths, the Vital Signs researchers concluded, is "fragmented, incomplete and inconsistent" [15]. The coalition Anti-Slavery International and its allies issued an urgent call to action in early March, expressing solidarity with over 31 million migrant workers across the conflict zone and demanding that destination governments uphold workers' rights to "humane treatment, protection against violence, non-discrimination based on nationality, and voluntary departure" [16].

Source: GDELT Project

Data as of Mar 11, 2026CSV

The pattern has precedent. During previous Middle East conflicts, workers have been abandoned without wages or travel documents. The 1990-91 Gulf War displaced hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from Kuwait and Iraq. The current conflict threatens disruption on a far larger scale, given the vastly expanded migrant workforce across the region.

Targets and Collateral

Iran's retaliatory campaign has targeted both military installations and civilian infrastructure. Strikes have hit Dubai's Palm Jumeirah resort and Burj Al Arab Hotel, Dubai International Airport, Jebel Ali Port, Bahrain's Crowne Plaza Hotel, Kuwait International Airport, and the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar — the largest U.S. military installation in the region [5]. In the UAE, the defense ministry reported that of 165 ballistic missiles, 2 cruise missiles, and 541 drones fired at the country, 21 drones struck civilian targets [5].

The civilian deaths have not been from direct hits. In the UAE, all fatalities have resulted from falling debris and shrapnel from missile interceptions — a grim distinction that underscores how even successful air defenses create lethal ground-level hazards in densely populated areas [4]. Workers living in overcrowded housing with "insufficient exit routes" — a common condition in labor camps — face particular danger [2].

Source: FRED / U.S. Energy Information Administration

Data as of Mar 4, 2026CSV

The oil market has already responded to the conflict's threat to Gulf energy infrastructure. Crude oil prices spiked from $66.96 per barrel on February 27 — the last trading day before the strikes began — to $71.13 on March 2, a jump of over 6 percent [17]. Iran's strikes have targeted oil facilities in Fujairah in the UAE, Saudi Arabia's Shaybah oil field, and Bahrain's only oil refinery, threatening the energy exports that underpin the Gulf economic model and, by extension, the demand for migrant labor [5].

The Structural Inequality of War

The fact that nearly all civilian casualties in the Gulf have been migrant workers is not merely a statistical artifact of demographics. It reflects a system in which millions of workers occupy the physical and economic margins of societies they sustain. They live in the most exposed housing. They work the most exposed jobs. They lack the financial cushion to shelter in place without income. They lack the legal freedom to leave.

Gulf governments have urged residents to shelter in place and have activated civil defense systems. The UAE declared itself "in a state of defence" on March 8 [18]. But civil defense infrastructure — reinforced shelters, alert systems, evacuation corridors — is not equally distributed. Labor camps on the outskirts of cities, where many low-wage workers live, are often far from the protective infrastructure available in wealthier residential areas.

The governments of sending countries — the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia, and Thailand — are monitoring the situation, urging citizens to shelter in place, and preparing potential evacuation plans [6][13]. But with regional airspace closed and the conflict showing no signs of abating, the options are limited.

The Accounting

As of March 11, the civilian toll across the Gulf stands at roughly a dozen dead and hundreds injured — numbers that are small compared to the devastation inside Iran, where at least 201 people have been killed including more than 100 children in a single school strike [5]. But in the Gulf, the casualty list tells a particular story: a war waged by the United States and Israel against Iran, with retaliation absorbed by the bodies of Pakistani drivers, Nepali security guards, and Bangladeshi cleaners who had traveled thousands of miles from home seeking a living wage.

They are, in a sense, casualties three times over — of the conflict, of the labor system that trapped them in its path, and of a global economy that treats their presence in the Gulf as essential but their safety as an afterthought.