The first thing Tofazzal Hossain does every morning now is look up.
For 11 years in Dubai, the sky was a backdrop of blank blue stretched over glass and cranes, static and safe. That has changed. Stepping out of a room shared with seven others, he scans the horizon for the metallic glint of a drone or an unfamiliar flash.
“I was scared,” said Hossain, a municipal cleaner in Dubai who comes from Bangladesh’s Narsingdi district, recalling the first night the explosions began. Reports of American strikes in Iran had broken, and rumors of retaliation began to spread.
“It was hard to believe. It’s Dubai. It always felt peaceful, glitzy. Now, I’ve lived in constant fear for a month,” he told The Three by phone.
In the same city, Shorafot Ali, a construction worker from Kishoreganj, has stopped counting days and started thinking of ways to go home. But the mechanics of migrant labor hold him in place.
“If I could, I would go home now,” he said. “But my employer has my passport, and tickets are far beyond my reach.”
Hossain and Ali are two of the millions of Bangladeshi migrant workers in the Gulf whose lives have been upended by the shadow of the Iran conflict. A full war has yet to arrive, but its psychological and economic weight has already settled over them. It shows in broken sleep and the dawning awareness that the gleaming cities they built are now potential targets.
For Ali, the crisis is also a slow financial strangling. Construction has ground to a halt, and inflation is soaring. “We have no money,” he said. “The war has pushed up the price of everything: vegetables, meat, everything.”
Unlike Ali, Hossain cannot shelter in place. As a street cleaner, his job demands he stay in the open. “I have to go out every day,” he said. “Sometimes the explosions happen at night, sometimes in broad daylight.”
The unpredictability is what breaks him. “It’s a psychological toll,” he said, his voice dropping. “I am scared for my life.”
The fear of losing life is not abstract. It has already taken lives.
In Bahrain, a Bangladeshi worker, A.M. Tarek, was struck by shrapnel while leaving work. In the United Arab Emirates, Saleh Ahmed, a driver, was killed when debris hit his water tanker. Another Bangladeshi, a delivery worker, died while on duty in Saudi Arabia, as reported by Al Jazeera.
According to Human Rights Watch, migrant workers across the Gulf face growing danger, often without clear safety guidance or adequate protection.
“Millions of migrant workers employed across the Gulf countries are navigating threats to their physical safety and job security amid the conflict,” said Michael Page, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.
“The conflict has brought new risks to migrant workers while also exposing gaps in labor and other rights, including those enabled by the kafala (sponsorship) system.”
The HRW report noted that many migrant workers live in packed housing near industrial zones, areas that can sit close to strategic infrastructure.
That compulsion to keep working despite the risk lies at the heart of the migrant experience. For Bangladeshi workers, leaving is seldom an option.
“I have to keep working. If I die, my family will have no money,” Kawsar, a Bangladeshi cleaner at Doha’s international airport, told The Three by phone. He did not want to share his last name. “If I go home, my family will have no money.”
The Gulf economies (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain) are built on migrant labor. Over decades of rapid growth fueled by oil wealth, these countries have relied on imported workers to construct cities and staff service industries. In some Gulf states, migrants make up more than 80 percent of the population.
Bangladesh is one of the largest suppliers of this labor. Roughly six to seven million Bangladeshis work in West Asia, forming the backbone of construction, domestic work, transport, cleaning, and retail. They are the men and women who pour concrete in 45 degree heat, the drivers on endless highways, the cleaners who keep the cities running unseen, and the household workers who labour through the day to keep their employers’ homes in order.
Their earnings, modest by Gulf standards, are transformative back home.
Remittances from migrant workers have become one of Bangladesh’s most vital economic pillars, bringing in more than $20 billion a year in recent years. Around 70 percent of that flows from the Gulf.
In villages across the country, that money has reshaped landscapes and aspirations. In South Mahini, a village in Cumilla documented by The Business Standard, rows of concrete houses have replaced tin roofed structures. Duplexes rise where paddy fields once stretched. Of the village’s roughly 6,000 residents, about 500 work abroad.
“Remittances have transformed this village,” a local resident told the paper.
The change is visible everywhere: children attending private schools, families opening small businesses, new roads and shops appearing in once quiet areas. Migration has become an economic strategy and a social expectation. In many communities, success is measured by whether someone in the family works abroad.
That transformation rests on a fragile foundation, one now under strain.
Economists and policymakers in Bangladesh are watching the Gulf crisis closely. The Asian Development Bank has warned that remittance inflows could slow if the conflict disrupts labor markets or forces workers to return home.
Early signs are already visible. Recruitment has declined in some corridors. Flights have been disrupted. Workers report delays in wages and reduced hours.
At a recent seminar reported by The Financial Express, officials described migrant workers as being “caught between war and work,” a phrase that captures the precariousness of their position.
For many, the decision to stay is shaped by debt. Migrating to the Gulf often requires paying recruitment fees that run into thousands of dollars, frequently financed through loans. Returning home too soon would mean financial ruin.
Hossain, like many others, still owes money. Each month, he sends most of his salary back to his family in Narsingdi, who use it to repay loans, fund his children’s schooling, and continue building a brick house that stands half finished in his village.
“I think about going home,” he said. “But then what will happen to them?”
Back in Bangladesh, the stakes are just as high. Whole communities depend on remittances. A sudden return of large numbers of workers could strain an economy already grappling with inflation and unemployment.
“I know how tense my brother is, but if he comes back, then we all will be in serious trouble,” Iqbal Hossain, brother of Tofazzal Hossain, told The Three.
A drawn out conflict in West Asia could force a significant number of migrant workers to return home, squeezing Bangladesh’s foreign currency reserves as remittance inflows weaken.
Officials say they are alert to that possibility but cautious about overreacting. Speaking to The Three, Dr Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir, adviser to Prime Minister Tarique Rahman on economic and planning affairs, said it was important not to jump “immediately to worst case assumptions.”
“Our priority is to protect the welfare, legal status, mobility and earning capacity of Bangladeshi workers abroad through active engagement by our missions and close coordination with host governments,” he said.
He acknowledged that contingency plans are in place. If the conflict begins to disrupt labor markets or triggers large returns, the government’s response would span foreign affairs, expatriates’ welfare, labor, finance, and the banking system.
The focus, he said, would be on “orderly return management, providing temporary support to affected workers, facilitating reintegration into domestic employment and skills programmes, and strengthening labor diplomacy to diversify overseas job opportunities.”
Not everyone sees the crisis purely as a threat. Nurul Haq Nur, state minister for expatriates’ welfare and overseas employment, has offered a different view. He told local media that upheaval in the Gulf could, in a paradox, “create new labor demand.”
Conflicts, he suggested, often lead to reconstruction needs and shifts in labor markets, openings that countries like Bangladesh have historically filled. In that sense, he said, the crisis “could generate new opportunities for migrant workers,” even as it endangers those already there.
But for workers on the ground, such possibilities feel distant.
In labor camps and shared apartments across the Gulf, conversations revolve around more pressing concerns: whether salaries will be paid, and whether flights will be available if things worsen.
There is also the quiet, constant pressure from home. Families call more often now, worried by news of missile strikes and casualties. Workers, in turn, downplay the risks.
“I tell them everything is fine,” construction worker Ali from Kishoreganj said. “If I tell them the truth, they will not sleep.”