On February 26, 1991, during the Iraqi army's retreat from Kuwait, soldiers carried out a premeditated plan to ignite oil wells as part of a deliberate environmental strategy. This act, known as a "scorched earth policy," aimed to cause widespread ecological damage. Iraqi forces set fire to between 605 and 732 oil wells and also ignited oil-filled areas in the desert. The result was a massive environmental disaster that darkened the sky for months and affected the lives of Kuwaiti residents for nearly a year. At its peak, over 650 oil wells burned simultaneously, creating a thick layer of black smoke that turned daylight into a dim, twilight-like state. This event marked one of the most severe environmental crises in modern history. The scale of the disaster was immense. Iraqi soldiers had trained on dummy wells to ensure maximum destruction. The fires began in January 1991 and reached their peak in late February, just as the U.S.-led coalition forces broke through Iraqi lines. According to estimates by the company Bechtel, which led much of the cleanup, the fires burned between 4 to 6 million barrels of crude oil per day—equivalent to the daily consumption of a country like France. Some wells did not burn but instead spewed oil into the desert and even into the Persian Gulf. The black smoke from the fires was so thick that satellite images showed a plume 60 kilometers wide covering Kuwait, blocking sunlight and reducing temperatures. To address the crisis, a global team of 11,450 workers from 38 countries came together to extinguish the fires. The effort involved using both conventional and experimental methods. According to a 2009 study, 90% of the fires were put out using seawater sprayed through powerful hoses, with the water transported via reversed oil pipelines. Some teams used a unique device called "Big Wind," which combined two jet engines to blow out the flames like a giant candle. Despite the complexity of the task, the operation was completed in just nine months, with the last well sealed on November 6, 1991. However, extinguishing the fires did not fully resolve the environmental damage. Approximately 300 "oil lakes" remained in the desert, and a hardened layer of soot and sand, known as "tarcrete," still covers about 5% of Kuwait's land today. The total amount of oil spilled—between 1 and 1.5 billion barrels—far exceeds the scale of other major oil spills, such as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. While cleanup efforts have removed 21 million barrels from the desert, an estimated 1 million barrels remain trapped in the sand. Even today, nearly 35 years after the event, the oil from 1991 continues to linger beneath the dunes in southern Kuwait.