[23] In 1985, at the height of the Iran–Iraq War and following an assassination attempt on Emir Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah,[24][25] the Bedoon were reclassified as "illegal residents" and denied Kuwaiti citizenship and its accompanying privileges.
[22][23][26] The Iran-Iraq War threatened Kuwait's internal stability and the authorities feared the sectarian background of the stateless Bedoon.
In 1995, Human Rights Watch reported that there were 300,000 stateless Bedoon, and this number was formally repeated by the British government.
[28][29] According to several human rights organizations, the State of Kuwait is committing ethnic cleansing and genocide against the stateless Bedoon.
[19] In 1995, it was reported in the British parliament that the Al Sabah ruling family had deported 150,000 stateless Bedoon to refugee camps in the Kuwaiti desert near the Iraqi border with minimal water, insufficient food and no basic shelter, and that they were threatened with death if they returned to their homes in Kuwait City.
[30][34][35][36][37][38][16] The 1995 Human Rights Watch report stated: "The totality of the treatment of the Bedoons amounts to a policy of denationalization of native residents, relegating them to an apartheid-like existence in their own country.
"[29] British MP George Galloway stated: "Of all the human rights atrocities committed by the ruling family in Kuwait, the worst and the greatest is that against the people known as the Bedoons.
Half of them—150,000—have been driven into refugee camps in the desert across the Iraqi border by the regime and left there to bake and to rot.
[22] The State of Kuwait formally has an official Nationality Law that grants non-nationals a legal pathway to obtaining citizenship.
[44] However, as access to citizenship in Kuwait is autocratically controlled by the Al Sabah ruling family it is not subject to any external regulatory supervision.
[45][47][48][49][50][46][51][52][53] In the three decades after independence in 1961, the Al Sabah ruling family naturalized hundreds of thousands of foreign Bedouin immigrants predominantly from Saudi Arabia.
[55][49] The foreign Bedouin immigrants were mainly naturalized to alter the demographic makeup of the citizen population in a way that made the power of the Al Sabah ruling family more secure.
[46] The Al Sabah ruling family actively encouraged foreign Bedouin immigrants to migrate to Kuwait.
[2][6][3][4][7][8][5] The Kuwaiti authorities permit the forgery of hundreds of thousands of politically motivated naturalizations[46][55] whilst simultaneously denying citizenship to the Bedoon.
According to the Home Office, Kuwait is the eighth largest source of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel on small boats in 2021.
[58][59][60] Immediately after the 1991 Gulf War many stateless Bedoon from Kuwait migrated to Iraq, most with no recognized nationality or official papers.
Stateless people are generally considered descendants of immigrants of Badia Arabs from Balush or Iranian Baloch ancestry.
[66][67] There are also stateless people in different provinces in the Islamic Republic of Iran, known as Bedoon-e Shenasnameh, which means without having a birth certificate or ID.