How Iran's Key Gas Refinery Fire Evokes Memories Of 1991 Kuwait Oil Infernos

NDTV

3 days ago

In the early hours of Saturday, a fireball lit up the Iranian skyline as an Israeli drone strike hit Phase 14 of the South Pars gas field, one of the world's most vital energy hubs. Within minutes, production came to a halt, choking off 12 million cubic metres of daily gas output. The strike threatened regional supply chains, and also stirred haunting echoes of another firestorm decades ago.
Operation Desert Storm
For months in 1991, the sky over Kuwait burned black. Not from nightfall, but from war. The air was thick with smoke, acrid and choking. The sun disappeared behind layers of soot. And across the desert, the horizon flickered in an eerie orange glow. Oil fields were on fire, hundreds of them. This was not a natural disaster. It was a deliberate act of destruction, the last time the Middle East's lifeblood, its oil, was turned into a weapon of vengeance.
It happened at the tail-end of the First Gulf War, when Iraqi forces, under dictator Saddam Hussein, began retreating from Kuwait after a massive international military campaign, codenamed Operation Desert Storm, forced their withdrawal.
But Saddam wasn't going to leave quietly. In a final act, his soldiers set fire to more than 600 oil wells across Kuwait. They used explosives, dynamite, and sophisticated traps. What followed was one of the largest man-made environmental catastrophes in history.
A Man-Made Apocalypse
The infernos began in February 1991. Within days, massive plumes of thick black smoke began billowing from the wells. The fires were not easy to extinguish. The intense pressure underground meant oil shot out of the wellheads like geysers, and burned non-stop. Some flames reached hundreds of feet into the air. It took nearly nine months and a global coalition of expert firefighters to control and extinguish them. The last blaze was capped on November 6, 1991.
Each day, as much as five million barrels of oil went up in flames. Crude oil also gushed into trenches and formed vast oil lakes, some the size of football fields. Others drained into the Persian Gulf, creating slicks that stretched for miles along the coastline.
One Kuwaiti scientist, Samira Omar, recalled seeing dead animals submerged in toxic pools of oil. "The sound of gushing oil and roaring fires is still in my memory," she said years later.
These weren't only environmental disasters, they were strategic attacks. Iraqi forces dumped oil into the sea and set fire to it, hoping to prevent a beach landing by the US Marines. They torched refineries and oil terminals, leaving nothing usable behind.
Life In The Fire Zone
For those living in Kuwait, the war wasn't over when the tanks rolled out. Residents emerged from shelter only to find a landscape turned alien.
It was a desert of fire.
Daylight vanished.
"The maximum you could see in front of you was two metres," said Sara Akbar, a chemical engineer who would later play a key role in firefighting efforts. "We didn't participate in the celebrations of the liberation. In the last days of the occupation, we ventured out to see our offices burning."
Ms Akbar and other engineers began work immediately, not just to stop the fires but to restart production. "We needed oil for cars and power plants, which were damaged," she said. She led a survey team in North Kuwait, where 85 per cent of infrastructure were destroyed. Working in the heart of the smoke zones, she later developed severe lung damage.
Firefighters from the US, Hungary, Canada, China, Russia, and elsewhere arrived in waves. They brought equipment and knowledge. Some used a bizarre tank-like vehicle nicknamed "Big Wind," with MiG-15 jet engines mounted on it, blasting water and steam at the fires. One by one, they capped the wells.
But the work was dangerous. The terrain was full of landmines. There was no proper planning space. Government buildings had been torched too. The port was mined, the airport wrecked, and the sea polluted.
The Aftermath
In the years that followed, Kuwait tried to recover. Oil production slowly resumed. But many scars remained. From the air, even today, you can still see dark, dead patches where oil lakes once stood. Health issues continued to plague firefighters and engineers. And Kuwait's fragile ecosystem, already stressed by the desert climate, has still not fully healed.
The Gulf War's oil fires changed global perspectives on warfare and the environment. The United Nations declared November 6 as the International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict, largely in response to what had happened in Kuwait.