Sebastião Salgado. Kuwait. A Desert on Fire

“We must remember that in the brutality of battle another such apocalypse is always just around the corner.” —Sebastião Salgado

In January and February 1991, as the United States-led coalition drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein’s troops retaliated with an inferno. At some 700 oil wells and an unspecified number of oil-filled low-lying areas they ignited vast, raging fires, creating one of the worst environmental disasters in living memory.