Three dead. No names.

Three people were killed in the UAE between 28 February and 5 March as Iranian missiles and drones fell across Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The UAE Defence Ministry named their nationalities: Pakistani, Nepali, Bangladeshi.

It did not name them. No ages. No jobs, beyond one official statement identifying the first victim as a driver, caught in Al Barsha when debris from a shot-down missile landed on his car. The other two remain datapoints. Foreign nationals. Casualties of interception.

The Ministry did not name them. It had no mechanism for doing so. The UAE state does not have a direct relationship with migrant workers. It holds a relationship with its sponsors.

The UAE runs on kafala, the sponsorship regime that ties a migrant worker’s legal right to remain in the country to a specific employer. You cannot change jobs without your sponsor’s permission. You cannot leave without it in some configurations. If your sponsor cancels your visa, you become undocumented overnight.

The state does not consider itself in a relationship with you. It is in a relationship with the Emirati national or company that brought you in. You are, in the technical sense, their responsibility. When something goes wrong, the chain of accountability runs to the sponsor or dissolves entirely.

Roughly 90% of the UAE’s population is migrant. The majority are South Asian: Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Nepali. They drive the taxis, build the towers, staff the warehouses, serve your coffee, pump your fuel, run the logistics chains that make Dubai function as a global hub.

They live in labour camps in the industrial districts and shared flats in the cheaper neighbourhoods. They are, in aggregate, the city. But the state does not represent them, does not protect them in any meaningful political sense, and does not grieve them when they die.

When Iran began its strikes, the UAE government issued shelter-in-place alerts by mobile phone. The alerts reached everyone with a UAE number. What they could not do was equalise exposure. The Emirati family in a villa in Emirates Hills had different options than the Nepali labourer in a room in Mussaffah industrial city, which is exactly where six Pakistani and Nepali workers were injured by falling debris on 5 March. Mussaffah is where you put people whose proximity to risk you have decided is acceptable.

The kafala system did not cause the Iranian strikes. But it constructed a population that would absorb their consequences. It sorted people by dispensability before the first missile launched. The workers who died were not in the UAE by accident or by their own free choice.

They were there because the Gulf labour system recruits from countries where wages are low, and remittances matter, charges recruitment fees that indenture workers to their contracts before they arrive, and keeps them compliant through legal precarity. You do not protest unsafe conditions when protest can cost you your visa.

Western coverage of the strikes has centred on the spectacle: drones over Palm Jumeirah, fires at Jebel Ali port, and the Burj Al Arab taking debris. The implied victim is the Dubai brand, the image of stability, the investment climate.

Occasionally, a reporter notes that three people were killed, that they were foreign nationals, and moves on. The dead have no names in this coverage because they have no names in the system that produced their deaths.

There is a word for an arrangement where one class of people is recruited to perform dangerous and essential labour, stripped of political rights, denied exit, and killed without ceremony when the violence their host state is implicated in comes home. It is not a word used by the Gulf states.

It is not a word their Western partners use either, because the investments are too large and the bases too useful. But when the debris settles, and the Defence Ministry publishes its next update, three men from Karachi, Kathmandu, and Dhaka will still not have names in the official record. Their sponsors have been notified.

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