Thirty-five years after the retreating Iraqi army ignited more than 600 oil wells and unleashed the largest oil spill in human history, the long-term environmental impact of the 1991 Gulf War continues to shape the ecological and human geography of the Middle East. As a new conflict engulfs the region, with strikes on oil infrastructure and military sites from Iran to Israel, scientists and environmental watchdogs are looking back at the 1991 catastrophe not as a closed chapter, but as a warning of the centuries-long damage modern warfare can inflict on the natural world .
The events of early 1991 were an unprecedented assault on the environment. Iraqi forces, in their withdrawal from occupied Kuwait, perpetrated an act of “environmental terrorism,” sabotaging oil wells, terminals, and tankers . For an estimated 10 months, the world watched as nearly 700 Kuwaiti oil wells burned, turning day into night and creating a blanket of toxic smoke that stretched from the Gulf to the Himalayas . Simultaneously, an estimated 4 to 6 million barrels of crude oil were deliberately released into the Persian Gulf, a slick four times larger than the Exxon Valdez disaster that smothered coastlines and marine life . For decades, the prevailing narrative, spurred by a 1993 study, suggested the damage would be short-lived. However, three and a half decades of subsequent science have painted a starkly different picture .
The most visible and persistent legacy is the contamination of the terrestrial environment. The oil well fires and gushing wells created hundreds of “oil lakes”—vast, toxic pools of crude mixed with desert sand that hardened into asphalt-like “tarcrete.” These formations covered nearly 5% of Kuwait’s land area, poisoning the soil and threatening the fragile underlying groundwater .
*”For nearly 10 months, everything in Kuwait was turned upside down,” recalls Mohammad Mubarak Al-Qahtani, head of the environmental remediation program at the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC).* “Daylight was obscured by thick smoke, and nights were lit up by the distant glow of burning oil wells. A third of Kuwait’s territory was polluted, and its ecosystem was devastated.”
For years, the question of how to cleanse this poisoned land remained unanswered. But now, on the 35th anniversary of the war, a quiet revolution is taking place in the Burgan oil field, the world’s second-largest. Since 2021, a consortium including Chinese environmental startup Hangzhou Zaopin ST Co Ltd has deployed cutting-edge bioremediation and soil-washing technologies to reverse the damage . At one site, nearly half a million tons of contaminated black soil are being treated with water infused with specially engineered “oil-eating” bacteria, reducing oil content from 5% to below 1% in just three months.
*”We succeeded in identifying and cultivating microbes from more than 2,000 bacterial strains collected from Kuwait’s oil sludge,” explained Dai Baiping, founder and CEO of Zaopin. “We then bioengineered them into highly efficient ‘oil-eaters’.”*
While this technological triumph offers hope for Kuwait’s terrestrial scars, the marine environment tells a more cautionary tale. The 1991 oil spill, estimated at between 700,000 and 900,000 tonnes, immediately devastated marine life, killing an estimated 30,000 seabirds and severely impacting coral reefs, mangrove forests, and sea turtle nesting sites . Crucially, the recovery has been far from complete. In 2017, researchers found that while open waters showed improvement, secluded bay areas still contained “alarming levels” of hydrocarbons threatening benthic organisms .
US geochemist Dr. Jacqueline Michel asserted in 2010 that the spill had dramatic long-term effects, explaining that her research found a large amount of the oil remained after 12 years due to its abnormally high ability to penetrate Gulf sediments . The slow flushing rate of the shallow, semi-enclosed Persian Gulf means that pollutants can remain trapped for generations. The full recovery of salt marshes, critical nurseries for marine life, has taken decades, with some areas still showing signs of stress from the 1991 event .
The atmospheric impact of the 1991 fires was immediate and global. The burning wells released millions of tons of soot and greenhouse gases, creating massive smoke plumes that blocked sunlight and caused a temporary drop in regional surface temperatures of 1-2 degrees Celsius—a phenomenon known as “radiative cooling” . While the fires were eventually extinguished by November 1991, the long-term health consequences for those exposed to the plumes have been a subject of study for decades. The concentration of gaseous pollutants and particulate matter during the fires was dramatically higher than in subsequent years, contributing to a range of respiratory and other illnesses among the exposed population .
Today, as the US-Israeli conflict with Iran escalates, these historical scars serve as a dire warning. Watchdog groups like the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS) have already identified hundreds of incidents of environmental harm in the current conflict, with strikes on oil facilities and tankers echoing the “ecoterrorism” of 1991 . The recent sight of “black rain” falling on Tehran after strikes on oil facilities is a grim reminder of the 1991 fires. Professor Zongbo Shi of the University of Birmingham warns that such smoke includes “fine particulate matter and sulfur dioxide, but also toxic volatile organic compounds and other hazardous combustion by-products” that pose severe risks to human health .
Furthermore, the current conflict introduces new, potentially more catastrophic risks. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has warned that any strikes on nuclear facilities could result in a radioactive release requiring the evacuation of areas the size of major cities . Meanwhile, the disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz forces vessels on longer routes around Africa, increasing their carbon footprint by as much as 70% , adding a global climate cost to the regional conflict .
As the nations of the Gulf grapple with the legacy of 1991, using new technology to heal old wounds, the unfolding events of 2026 threaten to create new environmental catastrophes that will burden the region for another 35 years and beyond. The question that remains, as it did after Saddam Hussein’s forces retreated, is whether the post-war period will prioritize ecological recovery or leave it as an afterthought in a region already strained by climate change and resource scarcity.
