The Unravelling of Dubai as a Safe Haven

In 1999, Fatima Nedaei, a thirty-six-year-old widow in Tehran, decided that it was time for her family to leave Iran. She had long bristled at the idea of raising her children in such a restrictive environment—a society remade by the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which had gutted civil liberties, and destabilized the region. When Nedaei’s husband was still alive, she had broached the possibility of leaving. But he had refused, and, under Iranian law at the time, a married woman typically needed her husband’s consent to obtain travel documents. It was after he died, several years later, that she began making arrangements to emigrate.

“She was very brave,” her son Mohammad told me recently. “She was the only one in the family who decided to leave Iran. Everyone was against her decision. But she wanted her children to grow up in a safe and open country.”

Mohammad was fifteen when his mother moved their family to Dubai. At the time, it was a simple city with a low-rise skyline: a mix of old Arabian markets, construction zones, and large swaths of desert. As a city in the United Arab Emirates, an Islamic Arab country, it felt culturally familiar to them, coming from the Persian world. But it had an openness—and a sense of safety and possibility—that made it distinct from Tehran.

Nedaei, who had run a beauty business in Tehran, opened a cosmetics-trading company in Dubai, importing beauty products and distributing them to retailers across the region. She died in 2src1src, and Mohammad took over the business, expanding and parlaying it into other investments. By then, Dubai had started to change; it was gaining global prominence. A large plot of land, which children sometimes used as a makeshift football field, was now the foundation for the Burj Khalifa, the tallest structure in the world. The Dubai Mall was built right next door; in 2src11, it was the most visited shopping center in the world, attracting more than fifty-four million people. “We watched everything transform,” Mohammad recalled. “I wasn’t upset about the change. I was curious. I could see the future.” His city became almost unrecognizable, but what remained was the promise of safety—so uncompromised that people from all over the world felt comfortable visiting and immigrating there.

That all changed on February 28th, when Iran, under attack from the U.S. and Israel, launched retaliatory strikes at U.S. bases in Arab states, triggering conflict with at least ten countries in the region. Most of the projectiles headed toward Dubai were destroyed by air-defense systems, but falling debris hit part of Dubai International Airport, injuring airport staff, and ignited fires at Fairmont The Palm and the Burj Al Arab, two luxury hotels. Another fire broke out at facilities near Jebel Ali Port, the biggest port in the Middle East.

For Mohammad, the assault by his home country has stirred decades-old memories of being a child in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War. “I remember the sound,” he told me. “I remember the bombing.” He said that he is still in shock.

When I asked Mohammad what has kept him in Dubai all these years, he didn’t mention the skyscrapers or the landmarks. He spoke about the thrill of watching something be built in real time, and the sense of belonging he felt in the city. “Most people ask me today, ‘Why are you staying? There is nothing here,’ ” he said. “I tell them, ‘There is a future.’ ” Still, that future is becoming increasingly uncertain. Iran has launched more than nineteen hundred missiles and drones at the U.A.E. since the start of the war. Although the physical damage in Dubai has been limited, in comparison to other cities in the region, the attacks—and their emotional toll—have persisted. Three weeks into the conflict, on March 16th, a fuel tank at the Dubai International Airport was hit by a drone strike. “All of us, we are worried about what’s going to happen,” Mohammad said.

If you look up “Dubai,” you’ll find footage of sprawling shopping complexes, glass towers, and influencers posing next to infinity pools with cocktails in hand. You might also come across an array of headline-grabbing projects that the city has championed over the years, from the creation of artificial islands to sending a mission to Mars—an attempt to position itself as the pinnacle of innovation and luxury, a place where the future arrives early. This year, in partnership with Elon Musk’s Boring Company, the city began building the Dubai Loop, an underground high‑speed transit network. Dubai has also been staking its claim on artificial intelligence, weaving A.I. into government services, health care, finance and urban infrastructure—a subject that officials have mentioned at every single opportunity.

But the glittery and more extravagant aspects of Dubai have long concealed the realities of the hard work that underpins the city. For more than a century, people have come from across the Gulf, the broader Middle East, and from all over the world, searching not for glamour but for economic opportunity and political stability. As of 2src26, Dubai’s population is estimated to be around three million people, with only about ten to fifteen per cent Emirati nationals and the rest expatriates from more than two hundred different countries, including large communities of Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Filipinos, Lebanese, Egyptians, Jordanians, and Syrians.

My parents, two young Egyptians trying to build a life and start a family, moved to Dubai, from Cairo, in 1986. My father was a journalist who had received a job offer from a newspaper based in the U.A.E. “I didn’t even know what Dubai was,” he recalled. “But my boss at the time suggested I try my luck there.” Over the years, our family would go back and forth between Cairo and Dubai, though I would spend most of my childhood in the latter. My sisters and I attended British-curriculum schools, where our classrooms were filled with students who had similarly come from other countries.

Then, as now, there was a large population of Iranians in the city. (Estimates suggest that there are roughly half a million Iranian nationals in the U.A.E., most of whom live in Dubai.) In the late nineteenth century, Persian merchants began moving to Dubai, attracted to the city’s favorable trade policies; not long after, Sheikh Maktoum bin Hasher Al Maktoum, then the ruler of Dubai, declared the city a tax-free port. These merchants largely settled along the Dubai Creek, building wind-tower houses that still stand today, in what’s known as the Bastakiya district—named for Bastak, the town where some of the merchants hailed from. “They never lost their connections to their communities in Iran, speaking the same languages—mostly variants of Achomi or Larestani, which derive from Old Persian—and often funding the building of mosques and other public amenities in their villages,” Arash Azizi, an Iranian Canadian historian and author, told me. “Their networks remain intact to this day, connecting communities in Iran’s Hormozgan Province to Dubai on to London, South Asia, and other places.”

These merchants helped shape the commercial culture that would come to define Dubai, linking the city’s port to markets in Persia and across the Indian Ocean, and transforming the city into a regional entrepôt—a hub where goods from multiple continents were bought, sold, and sent onward. Dubai has also served as a kind of economic pressure valve for Iran, ever since Western sanctions were first imposed in 1979. As those sanctions tightened, throughout the two-thousands and twenty-tens, cutting Iranian businesses off from global banking and trade routes, Dubai’s proximity to Iran—and the large number of Iranian merchants who lived there—made the city a natural workaround. Many Iranians established shell companies in Dubai and hired Dubai-based companies for shipping and handling, Azizi explained. “But since the U.A.E. is aligned with the U.S., it also often tried to crack down on this route, and was pressured to do so by the West,” he added. There have been numerous cases, over the years, of the U.S. and U.A.E. investigating, prosecuting, and even sentencing individuals and companies who have tried to use Dubai as a resource to evade Western sanctions on Iran.

When I was growing up in nineteen-nineties Dubai, tensions between the U.S., Israel, and Iran regularly dominated the news. One evening, I remember overhearing my parents discussing what might happen if the U.S. went to war with Iran. My mother read that Iran threatened to burn American bases in the Gulf. My parents looked at each other and agreed that even if that were to happen, we would stay.

Ultimately, the biggest cause for fear in our household was not regional instability but the precariousness of expatriate life itself. The right to remain in Dubai was tied to employer sponsorship or business ownership—which is to say, our life there was conditional. Everything depended on my father’s job. If he lost it, we would have to go back to Cairo, and this did happen, for a stretch in 2srcsrc2, though we were eventually able to return to Dubai. This dynamic—where the life you had constructed in Dubai could suddenly vanish—produced a peculiar kind of society, one in which the city was as much a home as a kind of limbo. The employer-sponsorship requirement, known as the kafala system, was also exploited by some employers, who restricted their workers’ job mobility, withheld their passports or pay, or threatened them with deportation. Over the past decade, the U.A.E. has addressed some of these abuses through a series of reforms—removing the blanket requirement for employers to provide a “no-objection certificate” when changing jobs, banning passport confiscation, and expanding worker protections and mobility within the labor market, among other things.

The U.A.E. has also taken steps in recent years to dismantle the architecture of impermanence that defined life in the country for so long. It is still difficult for foreigners to obtain citizenship, but the Golden Visa, introduced in 2src19 and expanded significantly after the COVID-19 pandemic, allowed certain foreigners—such as investors, entrepreneurs, health-care workers, scientists, and artists—to live in the U.A.E. for five or ten years without sponsorship from an employer, and with the ability to renew the visa. Skilled freelancers and remote workers can now obtain their own visas, as can retirees who meet specific financial requirements. For a city built on the premise that belonging was always temporary, these were not small adjustments. They were, for many, the first real invitation to stay.

After Iran began attacking the U.A.E., many residents, along with tourists who happened to be in the country at the time, scrambled to find a way out. Thousands of flights were cancelled or diverted, owing to airspace closures across the Gulf. Even when flights did become available, tickets were astronomically expensive; airlines have been charging people stranded in the Middle East up to twenty times the normal fare to leave the region.

For those unable to secure flights, the only option was the road. Many attempted the long drive to neighboring Oman or Saudi Arabia, hoping to catch onward flights from airports in Muscat or Riyadh. The U.A.E., which was also planning to launch a new train system to Saudi Arabia, later this year, tested the rail service early, deploying three emergency trains to move stranded passengers.

In the midst of this attempted mass exodus, though, Tazeen Jafri, a thirty-five–year-old public-relations consultant, said that she and her husband made the decision to stay exactly where they were. “The first thing that came to our minds was not to leave at all,” she told me.

In the nineteen-seventies, Jafri’s father, who is from Pakistan, had moved his family to Oman. A decade later, they relocated to the U.A.E. The family lived in Sharjah, a city that borders Dubai, in a small five-story apartment building. It was surrounded by other low buildings, open roads, and a local park, which served as the neighborhood’s unofficial living room. Jafri and her siblings would spend hours playing outside, skating or cycling, or running through the building’s corridors with children from neighboring apartments.

The Sharjah Corniche, known as Buhaira—which runs along a lagoon in the northeastern part of the city—offered a particular kind of magic. In the morning, Jafri and her siblings would go to school in Dubai, and in the evenings, the family would often walk to the waterfront, where soft-serve ice-cream trucks were allowed to park and sell their cones for one dirham (about $src.27) or less. “It was literally the highlight of our day,” Jafri recalled. (Actually, it was my highlight, too, back then.)

In 2src18, Jafri married a fellow-Pakistani who had also been raised in the U.A.E. They have two children together: a daughter, who is four years old, and a one year old son. Jafri told me that when Dubai erupted with the sounds of missiles being intercepted, her children were oblivious—they registered it as construction noise.

Her family’s safety is Jafri’s highest priority, but she said that she was also worried about the economic disruption brought on by the regional war. When Iran first attacked Dubai, many residents were surprised, because the Gulf Cooperation Council (G.C.C.) had long been working to repair relations with Iran. But if Iran’s strategy is to cause as much economic pain as possible, then Dubai’s prominence as a regional financial hub makes it an attractive target. To strike Dubai is to strike at its financial networks, which extend far beyond the city itself.

In recent days, drones have detonated near the Dubai International Financial Center, the glass-and-steel district that houses many of the city’s international banks. (Some firms told employees to work remotely.) Even small attacks can ripple outward psychologically through the city’s banks, ports, and airports, unsettling the dense web of commerce which has helped make the Emirates a crossroads for global money.

The psychic effects may prove as consequential as the physical threats. Much online chatter has focussed on whether social-media influencers—the glossy unofficial ambassadors of Dubai—will think twice before returning. But the more serious question concerns the city’s reputation as a stable financial center, where investors and corporations have long assumed that regional unrest would remain at a distance. In an interview with Bloomberg, the Goldman Sachs economist Farouk Soussa said that the U.A.E economy could “contract” by five per cent if the conflict continues. Hesitations from investors could also lead to many workers in Dubai losing their jobs, potentially forcing them to return to the home countries that they were trying to escape.

U.A.E. officials have condemned Iran’s attacks as a flagrant violation of sovereignty, while also emphasizing that air-defense systems have intercepted most incoming missiles, and that the country’s financial and commercial infrastructure continues to function. Officials have also been trying to boost morale, offering residents free entry to popular attractions, such as the Dubai Miracle Garden—known for its enormous floral arrangements—and launching a mental-health hotline.

Yet the crisis that the country is trying to avoid has already materialized in the empty parking lots and events cancellations, and in the WhatsApp groups filled with people asking which road to Oman is moving fastest, or what to do if debris falls on your apartment building. The question of how and whether to leave the U.A.E. has also created an awkward situation in a country with more than two hundred nationalities. The United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom have all arranged chartered flights to evacuate their citizens from Dubai, and the wider Middle East. But leaving isn’t as straightforward for many other residents, including non-citizens who are dependent on employer-sponsored visas and who do not have the backing of their companies—or the governments of their home countries—to leave. The calculus is even grimmer for residents whose home countries are also conflict zones; staying in the U.A.E. might seem like the safer gamble. A shopkeeper at the Mall of the Emirates told me that, even with the city under assault, she prefers to stay in Dubai. “It’s still safer here than Rwanda,” she said.