The Unraveling of Dubai as a Safe Haven

NEWYORKER-March19th2026

March 19, 2026

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 2010, 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 2011, 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.

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