Bubiyan owes its existence to the Tigris and Euphrates. The island formed from sediment carried downstream by the Tigris-Euphrates river system and deposited where the Shatt al-Arab meets the Persian Gulf. It is the largest of eight islands clustered just southwest of the river mouth, where Iraq and Iran face each other across the waterway. The island is mostly flat, its surface broken by intermittent wadis and fringed by salt marshes. The Al-Zubayr channel separates it from the Iraqi coast to the northeast; the Al-Sabiyyah channel divides it from the Kuwaiti mainland to the southwest. A bridge built between 1981 and 1983, opened in February 1983, connects the island to Kuwait proper. During southerly gales, seawater pushes across the mud flats, and scientists consider Bubiyan at risk of inundation from rising sea levels -- an entire island that the Gulf could eventually reclaim.

Iraq long considered Bubiyan its own territory, and the dispute over the island fed directly into the tensions that led to the Gulf War. During the 1991 conflict, the area suffered a massive oil spill and four spans of the bridge connecting Bubiyan to the mainland were destroyed. The island was converted to a military base that same year. The bridge was rebuilt in 1999. In November 1994, Iraq formally accepted the UN-demarcated border with Kuwait, codified in Security Council Resolutions 687, 773, and 833, which ended Iraq's territorial claim to the island. What had been a source of war became a line on a map endorsed by international law. But the resolution did not erase the strategic reality: Bubiyan sits at the chokepoint where Iraq's access to the Gulf narrows to almost nothing, and its ownership determines who controls the waterway.

After Kuwait became the 169th signatory of the Ramsar Convention, the Mubarak al-Kabeer reserve on Bubiyan was designated as the country's first Wetland of International Importance. The 50,948-hectare reserve encompasses small lagoons and shallow salt marshes that serve as a critical stopover on two major bird migration routes: Turkey to India and Eurasia to Africa. The surrounding waters function as a nursery for many commercial fish species. But the reserve's most remarkable residents are the crab-plovers. Bubiyan hosts the world's largest breeding colony of Dromas ardeola, a distinctive shorebird found only around the Indian Ocean rim. The birds nest in burrows dug into sandy ground, raising their chicks in one of the least hospitable landscapes on earth -- a flat, salt-crusted expanse where summer temperatures can be ferocious. That this military-base-turned-disputed-territory also shelters globally significant wildlife is one of Bubiyan's quieter ironies.

Bubiyan's next transformation is already underway. The Mubarak Al Kabeer Port, part of China's Belt and Road Initiative, represents the first phase of Kuwait's Silk City project -- an ambitious plan to develop the country's northern coast. In March 2021, Kuwait and Pakistan announced plans to develop linkages between Gwadar Port and Mubarak Al Kabeer Port, connecting two of the region's most strategically positioned harbors. The port construction will bring power plants and substations to the island. On nearby Subiya, a 5,000-megawatt power plant is already built. The island that was once too flat and waterlogged for permanent settlement is being engineered into a node on a 21st-century trade network that consciously echoes the ancient Silk Road. Whether Bubiyan's crab-plovers and migratory birds can coexist with container ships and power substations remains an open question -- one that will play out across the mud flats in the decades ahead.