Kuwait document photos online

When Iraqi forces fled Kuwait in 1991, they had looted over a billion dollars in dinar banknotes from the Central Bank's vaults. Kuwait's answer was breathtakingly bold: it simply cancelled its own money. On 24 March 1991 the entire stolen series was declared worthless and an all-new fourth issue rolled out, instantly turning the loot into colored paper. It was one of history's most decisive uses of demonetization as a weapon, and it helped the dinar recover to become the highest-valued currency unit on Earth, today worth more than three US dollars.

• Currency The Kuwaiti dinar is the world's highest-valued currency unit, trading at roughly 3.26 US dollars, and it splits not into 100 but into 1,000 tiny units called fils.
• Money & War After Iraqi troops looted over a billion dollars in banknotes in 1990-91, Kuwait demonetized the entire stolen series on 24 March 1991 and issued a brand-new fourth issue, rendering the loot worthless overnight.
• Passport The Kuwaiti passport ranks 47th on the 2025 Henley Passport Index with visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to about 96 destinations, a relatively modest score for one of the Gulf's wealthiest states.
• Document Design Kuwait's biometric e-passport, rolled out from 2018, won an award for technical sophistication at the 2018 High Security Printing conference in Warsaw, ranking among the most secure travel documents in the Arab world.
• Citizenship Kuwaiti nationality passes only through the male line under the 1959 law, so a Kuwaiti mother cannot grant citizenship to her children, a rule at the heart of the country's long-running statelessness debate.
• Statelessness Kuwait is home to the Bedoon, more than 92,000 stateless residents who hold no nationality at all, one of the largest such populations anywhere in the world.
• National Day Kuwait won independence on 19 June 1961, yet celebrates National Day on 25 February instead, because June's brutal heat made outdoor festivities unbearable and the cooler date also marks an earlier emir's accession.
• Heat Record The desert outpost of Mitribah hit 54.0 degrees Celsius on 21 July 2016, verified by the World Meteorological Organization as the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded in continental Asia.
• Maritime The Fateh Al-Khayr, a wooden dhow built in Kuwait in 1938, is the country's only surviving sailing ship from the pre-oil pearling era and is now preserved as a museum vessel.