Ghost in the Gulf

Standing on the beach looking at the oil revenue skyline across the Arabian gulf, the sound of muscle cars and construction have been replaced with the sound of wind dusting the roads and desert. The voyage on the ferry from Kuwat city not only takes you twenty miles east, but forty years back.

 

Failaka island is where the Gulf War of 1990, where Iraq invaded Kuwait, continues. The residents of this small island off the coast were forcefully displaced to the mainland, leaving the main town of Zoor to suffer severe damage in the hands of the Iraqis. Since the expulsion, virtually nobody has returned. What is left on the island today is exactly how the Iraqi forces left it, with looted homes and destroyed buildings still bearing the scars of the conflict. In homes, children’s toys and family belongings have sat in the dust unmoved from when an Iraqi soldier would have torn through looking for valuables. Despite the occasional car from a camper or archaeologist, the island’s most striking feature is its silence, with often only the sound of the wind meandering around the buildings and throwing up dust, if looking at what the end of the world would look like, Failaka would be it.

 

During my time of Failaka, I befriended a lone policeman who was waiting to bring a squad car back to the mainland from a training exercise. He took me around the island, and showed me his grandfather’s old house in Zoor, inside the same furniture and hanging pictures he remembers as a small child, now mummified by the sun and dust. He is part of the ‘Failakan’ community in the city, the original islanders kept the tight nit community after the war, and the children and grandchildren of former islanders remain connected almost four decades on.

 

This photo journal captures Zoor, the Iraqi remnants on the island, and the schools, shops, mosques and homes of those who were uprooted by war, never to return.