Failaka Island is an island of 43 square kilometres twenty kilometres off Kuwait City in the Gulf of Kuwait, holding two ruins four thousand years apart, a Greek outpost founded under Alexander on its southwest shore and a town emptied by the Iraqi invasion of 1990 and never resettled, and it is reached by ferry from the mainland for the day, walked among mudbrick walls and bullet-scarred houses with camels penned between them. The island was Agarum, the seat of the god Enzak of the Dilmun civilisation of the Bronze Age, then Ikaros, a Greek settlement of the third century BC whose compound sits right on the shore, low mudbrick and stone walls, the footprints of two temples and the corner towers of a fort a few steps from the water, where a stele lifted out of the sand in 1960 carries the letters of the Seleucid governor setting out the colony's rights, its constitution in stone; long after the Greeks left, and well after Islam arrived, Christian monks were still living at the island's centre, and nobody knew until the archaeologists dug there. The island held a few thousand Kuwaitis until August 1990, when the Iraqi army made it a base and expelled them.
The concrete houses of Al-Zawr stand as their owners left them the week of the invasion, walls pitted with shrapnel, window frames blown out and a dead tree filling one doorway, with a wooden fishing boat marooned against a bullet-scarred wall, sand banked over its hull, and the tanks and guns of the war rusting on the shore. Camels are still kept on the open ground between the ruins and the beach, calves among them, and the ghost town's overgrown gardens are the busiest bird ground on the island in spring, when passerines crossing the Arabian desert land exhausted in them, with waders on the flats and skuas off the ferry deck in autumn. Failaka is an island where Alexander's Greeks and Saddam's army both left ruins, and the camels graze between them.