When Kuna Khuntia last spoke to his father on the evening of March 6, the 25-year-old pipe fitter from Naikanipalli village in Odisha, India, gave no indication that anything was wrong. By the following morning, he was dead — killed not in combat, but by debris from missile interceptions near his residence in Doha, Qatar. He had moved to the Qatari capital in late 2025, driven by a family debt of 300,000 rupees ($3,200) taken on to fund the marriages of his two sisters.
Kuna earned 35,000 rupees ($372) a month and sent nearly half of that — 15,000 rupees ($164) — home each month. His father, Jaya Khuntia, received no warning. The last call came at approximately 10pm on March 6. The next news was of his son’s death.
Kuna’s fate is not an isolated tragedy. Across the Gulf, Iranian strikes targeting oil refineries, construction zones, airports, and port facilities have killed and endangered a workforce that numbers close to 21 million South Asian nationals. The six Arab Gulf states — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — host 35 million foreign nationals out of a combined population of 62 million, making migrant labour the structural backbone of the region’s economy.
The casualty figures reflect that demographic reality with grim precision. Of the eight people killed in the UAE during Iranian attacks, five were South Asian: three Pakistani nationals, one Bangladeshi, and one Nepali. Two were Emirati military personnel and one was a Palestinian civilian. In Oman, all three fatalities were Indian nationals. Saudi Arabia recorded two deaths — one Indian and one Bangladeshi.
In the UAE, a drone struck an oil storage facility where a Pakistani migrant worker named Hamza was employed. In Saudi Arabia, a Bangladeshi worker identified as Noor witnessed drone strikes near his workplace at an oil facility, describing the chaos that has become routine for labourers with nowhere else to go and no means to leave.
A $103 Billion Lifeline Under Threat
Beyond the immediate human toll, the conflict is placing enormous economic pressure on South Asia’s most remittance-dependent economies. India alone has 9 million nationals working across the Gulf, generating $50 billion in annual remittances — a figure that exceeds the entire GDP of Bahrain. Pakistan, with 5 million Gulf-based workers, receives $38.3 billion, a sum representing nearly 10 percent of its approximately $400 billion economy. Bangladesh and Pakistan each maintain 5 million nationals in the region; Bangladesh draws $13.5 billion annually from those workers.
Sri Lanka’s 650,000 Gulf-based nationals send home $8 billion each year, while Nepal’s 1.2 million workers contribute $5 billion in remittances. Collectively, the five nations — India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal — receive $103 billion annually from the Middle East, a financial artery that sustains tens of millions of families who have no alternative income source.
The workers themselves have little recourse. Most are employed on fixed contracts in sectors — energy infrastructure, construction, logistics — that have become primary targets in the Iranian campaign. Evacuation is costly, contract abandonment carries legal and financial penalties, and the governments of origin, while issuing advisories, have limited capacity to extract workers at scale.
Invisible in the Conflict, Indispensable to the Economy
South Asian migrant workers occupy a paradoxical position in the Gulf’s geopolitical crisis: they are among the most exposed to its violence yet almost entirely absent from diplomatic calculations. The strikes have hit the infrastructure they build and maintain — the refineries, the terminals, the airport expansions — and it is their bodies that absorb the consequences when interception systems fail or drones find their targets.
For families like the Khuntias of Naikanipalli, the geopolitical architecture of the Middle East is an abstraction. What is concrete is a 300,000-rupee debt, a monthly transfer that will no longer arrive, and a father who received his last phone call at 10pm on a Thursday night, unaware it would be the last.
Kuna Khuntia was 25 years old. He was a pipe fitter. He was not a combatant in any conflict. He died because he was close enough to hear the missiles.
