Kuwait oil fires
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The Kuwait oil fires were the February 1991 sabotage by retreating Iraqi forces of an estimated 600,800 Kuwaiti oil wells. Per John Kiriakou, CIA intelligence in the weeks before the liberation had picked up "in little bits and pieces that the Iraqis were placing explosives ... on all of the oil wells in the country. All of them."

Effect on the country

Photos Kiriakou took from Kuwait City around noon look like nighttime: the fumes and oil droplets blanket the sky. "The whole desert was blackened ... you can't see if you're driving off the road." From Taif, Kiriakou flew to Riyadh, where "the fires were so bad that they blocked out the sun in Riyadh. And I remember saying, 'Oh my god, what's it going to be like in Kuwait City when we get there?'"

The fires were hot enough to turn the sand to glass. Two French journalists driving in behind Kiriakou's convoy on Liberation Day drove off the road onto "this sheet of glass of melted sand ... they got out of the car to look, and they all fell through the glass, and their bodies were just vaporized. ... They never found the bodies."

Red Adair and the Rolls-Royce jet engine

The American oil-fire specialist Red Adair, from North Dakota, assembled an international team, Americans, Kuwaitis, British (North Sea), likely Norwegians. Per Kiriakou the two problems were the fire and, once the fire was out, the oil itself "still gushing out of the ground ... shooting 100 meters into the sky." Adair's solution: "He bought a Rolls-Royce jet engine and they rigged it to put it over the fire, and you turn on the jet engine and it was so strong that it blew the fire out. ... When it was finally cool enough, they could cap it like they could any broken well. And little by little, they capped every one of those 600-plus wells."

Health legacy for Kiriakou

On return to CIA headquarters Kiriakou was required to fill out a workman's compensation form: "just in case you develop lung disease, it'll be on the record that you've been breathing in oil for all these months."

Broader Iraq War toll

Discussing the Gulf War's legacy alongside the later Iraq War, Kiriakou estimates the U.S. lost roughly four thousand men dead, with tens of thousands more wounded, and that the Iraq War may have killed as many as a million Iraqi civilians, or perhaps only 500,000, with contamination from depleted-uranium munitions expected to linger in the region for a long time.

The method, recalled in 2026

Asked during the 2026 Iran war about the risk of a large-scale oil or gas fire in an active war zone, John Kiriakou described the technical problem and then the Kuwaiti solution. Putting out such a fire is "extremely difficult and complicated"; it requires "incredible amounts of brilliant engineers" and "huge amounts of demolitions, well placed, to cave in the hole."

The Kuwaiti method he recalled was mechanical: "like they put out the Kuwaiti oil fires, you put Rolls-Royce jet engines above the holes and then blow them out."

What makes the 2026 case worse is access. Unlike a peacetime spill, "it's not like the Exxon Valdez, where everybody just runs there and starts taking dish soap and cleaning off animals", the Gulf gas fields sat inside an active war zone. The discussion arose from underground fires elsewhere that have burned for decades, including a gas crater in Turkmenistan alight since 1971 and the abandoned coal-seam town of Centralia, Pennsylvania.

See also

- Saddam Hussein
- John Kiriakou
