Emma* was at a beach club on the Palm when the explosions began. “At first it was quite distant, and then it got progressively louder,” the 41-year-old Londoner recalls, the booms of intercepted missiles battling with the house music playing over the course of the afternoon. She dismissed them as “nothing”, despite the worried messages that had begun rolling in from family and friends. But “then there was one missile that was intercepted above our heads and we saw the smoke, and we just thought — yeah, we’ll go.”
Upon returning to her high-rise in Jumeirah, Dubai, Emma registered with the UK Foreign Office — one of more than 160,000 Brits in the Middle East to do so in the past week and a half. After the US and Israel began bombing Iran, leading to currently more than 1,800 civilian deaths and killing its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran launched its own offensive on US military targets across the UAE.
