GUY ADAMS: The inside story of how the hollow Dubai dream has come crashing down... as expats are sent mysterious menacing warnings from the UAE government which hint all might not be as well as it seems
The LuLu Hypermarket in Dubai’s posh Al Barsha neighbourhood bore a passing resemblance to the seventh circle of hell yesterday. Frantic shoppers, exhausted by two sleepless nights of Iranian missile barrages, were indulging in a wave of panic-buying before bracing themselves for a third.
Social media videos suggesting that bottled water, eggs, plus some fresh fruit and vegetables were close to selling out had persuaded members of the expat community out of their homes to clear the shelves.
By teatime, the sprawling car park was gridlocked, while long queues for the till had made several aisles impassable for shopping trolleys.
‘STOP! You are leaving no essentials for others!’ one local on an expat forum complained.
‘My husband was in the queue at the local shop and the person in front of him had 15 baguettes in their trolley, and there was absolutely no meat left,’ said another.
‘During the war there are no rules. Each one for himself,’ added a third.
Whether this was a temporary storm in a teacup, or the first flap of a butterfly’s wing that will eventually trigger some sort of humanitarian tsunami, depends on how much faith one now places in the Emirati authorities.
The official line, of course, is that Dubai has been weathering the Iran crisis with aplomb, protecting residents from several overnight waves of drone and missile attacks, and ensuring that life in the turbo-charged Gulf metropolis is able to carry on as normally as possible.
Socialite Petra Ecclestone described her night as ‘one of the worst’ of her life’. She added: ‘We came to Dubai to feel safe and now this has happened’
Kate Ferdinand, the wife of former England footballer Rio, spent the night in an underground car park. ‘We are hoping for a calmer evening tonight. Last night was very scary'
Half a mile from LuLu’s, the vast Mall of the Emirates shopping centre remains open. As, for now, does its famous indoor ski slope.
Retailers insist that while sales of groceries are up around 50 per cent, causing some shelves to empty, they have sufficient supplies in their warehouse inventory to weather the coming storm.
‘I urge the residents to shop responsibly and there is no reason to panic,’ LuLu’s chairman Yusuff Ali told TV viewers yesterday.
Yet behind the neon-lit facade, the mood is distinctly jumpy.
The five-star Fairmont hotel on the nearby Palm Jumeirah, that vast island shaped like a palm tree, was set ablaze over the weekend, as was the sail-shaped Burj Al Arab hotel, while what the authorities are calling ‘incidents’ have closed the city’s harbour and airport, along with the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.
Schools and golf courses are largely closed, and on expat forums are complaints about supercar drivers taking advantage of the emptier-than-usual streets to give their high-performance motors a thrashing.
‘My heart skips a beat each time I hear a loud car or motorcycle,’ notes one resident. ‘The sounds they make are painfully similar to some kind of missile/plane and is so anxiety-inducing.’
A second adds: ‘Trying to scare or confuse people is one thing, but also know there are elderly people, kids, people suffering heart issues etc, who really don’t even find it funny.’
Another major bugbear is the so-called ‘Ramadan Cannons’ based in the city’s mosques. They fire loud shots at the sunset call to prayer. But in the current environment, such noise is confused with incoming missiles. ‘Pretty sure they have triggered some panic attacks,’ complained one expat.
On a purely statistical basis, it should be stressed that such fears are largely irrational. Of the roughly four million people who live in Dubai, only a handful have been injured by Iran’s attacks and there have so far been no recorded deaths.
The five-star Fairmont hotel on the nearby Palm Jumeirah, that vast island shaped like a palm tree, was set ablaze over the weekend
The iconic sail-shaped Dubai hotel Burj Al Arab on fire after being hit by debris from an Iranian drone that was shot down
Official figures claimed that Emirati anti-missile systems had destroyed 506 of 541 drones fired at the country by last night, with just 35 falling inside its borders. Another 165 Iranian ballistic missiles have also been tracked, 152 of which were intercepted, while 13 fell into the sea.
‘So long as the Emirates own more defensive missiles than Iran has offensive ones, we should be fine,’ says one local.
The country’s ‘media office’ is, therefore, anxious to calm residents. It spent the weekend pumping out pictures of its absolute ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, at Meydan Racecourse for ‘a special evening of thrilling races and strong competition’ in a demonstration of business as usual.
Officials also posted a somewhat menacing message complaining that ‘outdated images of past fire incidents’ in Dubai were being posted to social media by cynics hoping to stoke fear among the city’s residents and thereby garner clicks. ‘Legal action will be taken against those who publish or republish such content in violation of UAE law,’ the post read.
The problem, of course, is that rational behaviour can quickly go out the window when people’s sleep is interrupted by loud noises. Or, as happened early on Sunday morning, the entire country’s mobile phone alarms go off warning people to ‘seek immediate shelter in the nearest secure building’.
Take, for example, the deluge of hysterical social media posts by Dubai’s resident lifestyle influencers. First out of the blocks was Kate Ferdinand, the wife of former England footballer Rio, who, like many residents of the city, had endured a ‘very scary’ night having retreated to their underground car park.
‘We are hoping for a calmer evening tonight. Last night was very scary. Although [her children] Cree and Shae loved it as they couldn’t believe we all got a sleepover in the basement.’
And then came billionaire heiress Petra Ecclestone: ‘It was one of the most scary, worst nights actually of my life. I feel like us and the family have been through a lot recently for personal reasons. We came to Dubai to feel safe, and we finally felt like we were settling in, and now this has happened.’
They were joined by tens of thousands of unfortunate holidaymakers who are now unable to leave until the airport re-opens.
The Emirati government, whose economy is partly built on the 20 million tourists who visit each year, have pledged to pay for hotel accommodation and sustenance on behalf of stranded visitors.
But not everyone is currently able to access it, and there are reports that some fully-booked hotels have been ejecting residents whose holidays are over on paper, but are unable to travel home.
Rumours of mass evictions prompted Dubai’s Department of Economy to contact hotels yesterday warning that ‘guests who were due to check out but are unable to do so’ must be ‘offered the option to extend their stay under the same conditions as their initial booking’, adding ‘it’s important that no guests are evicted under these circumstances’.
Many travellers who were in transit when the conflict broke out, meanwhile, have been unable to access suitcases that were left at the airport. And those stuck in vast mega-hotels, such as the 1,500-room Atlantis, are at present banned from outside areas.
The 240,000-odd Britons who call Dubai home are, of course, blessed with more options.
Scores of stranded passengers wait patiently at Dubai airport as flights were grounded
One I spoke to yesterday was driving out of the city to a luxury hotel in a secluded bit of desert outside neighbouring Abu Dhabi, where she could sit out the coming days in relative safety with her children, whose private schools had already switched to Covid-style remote learning protocols. Another had high-tailed it to Ras Al-Khaimah, a quieter satellite city a couple of hours up the coast.
Expats anxious to leave the country have been driving to Muscat in Oman, but there are reports that the border may soon be closed to foreigners.
Those hoping to return home are meanwhile jumping on chartered coaches to Riyadh and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. One coach leaving last night, run by a firm called Next Holidays, was offering seats on the 11-hour trip for 1,300 dirhams (£264).
Unlike Dubai, these cities are currently keeping their airports open, though commercial flights are heavily overbooked, leading to wealthier refugees using private jets to flee the region.
Charles Robinson, owner of the private jet booking platform EnterJet, said yesterday that he’d seen a 55 per cent increase in requests focused on the Middle East in recent days, adding that flying restrictions have made securing landing slots difficult.
‘There are a lot of concierges and travel agents who have got customers stuck in the region trying to find ways in which they can get them out,’ he said. ‘Right now, supply is very, very limited in terms of the aircraft. The demand is far, far outstripping it.’
Behind this exodus lies a very real fear about how Dubai might survive should the Iran crisis continue for several weeks. The country boasts the world’s busiest airport, handling not just 88 million passengers each year, but also a huge proportion of the food, drink and other staples that residents consume.
Much of the remainder comes through its port. Both are currently closed. A population used to ordering groceries via delivery apps and having restaurant meals delivered to their door will be particularly vulnerable to supply-chain shortages.
And a city built on what is, essentially, a barren sandpit is unable to grow its own. That’s why the desert city imports more than 90 per cent of its food.
To put things another way, the impact that current airport and port closures have on Dubai’s ability to feed residents could end up being far more serious than the effect of Iran’s air campaign.
Should the situation worsen, Britons in the region will, of course, be evacuated. But whether the Government ought to foot the bill to repatriate tens of thousands of high-earners who left the UK to enjoy lower taxes is open to debate.
How Dubai’s ultra-frothy property market – in which billions of pounds of real estate has been bought on credit – will cope with any exodus of overseas workers who make up around 90 per cent of the population is anyone’s guess.
Of even more concern to the Emirati authorities is the fact that their country’s reputation as both a tourist destination and economic powerhouse rests at least partly on its reputation for extreme safety.
When I visited last year, expats weary of London waxed lyrical about the city’s non-existent crime rate. ‘I could leave my Rolex on a park bench, come back 45 minutes later and it would still be there,’ was how one put it.
But now everything has changed. And with every troubled Arabian night, it gets harder to predict Dubai’s future.
