Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah
Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah was emir of Kuwait from January 2006 to his death in September 2020, the foreign minister of forty years, from 1963 to 2003, who had been the country's face at every Arab summit and at the United Nations, who had run the government in exile from the Taif hotel in Saudi Arabia during the Iraqi occupation of 1990-91 and assembled the coalition's Arab half. He took the throne at seventy-six when the parliament, for the first time in the Gulf's history, removed a ruling emir, his cousin Saad, who was too ill to take the oath, and chose him instead. The fourteen years were the parliament's, the only elected one in the Gulf with real powers, which he dissolved seven times. It forced out prime ministers and ministers over the Iraq war's aftermath, the Arab spring's echoes of 2011-12, when the protesters stormed the chamber, the stateless Bidoon, the corruption cases, and the budget that a young and growing population and an oil price that fell in 2014 could not carry, so that a country with the world's sixth-largest reserves borrowed on the markets in 2017 and argued about it. He was born in Kuwait City in 1929, the fourth son of the tenth ruler Ahmad al-Jaber, was educated at the Mubarakiya school and by tutors, was the first minister of information in 1962 and the foreign minister from 1963. In that office he also held the oil, finance and interior portfolios at times. He was prime minister from 2003 to 2006, the first prime minister who was not the crown prince. The reign's foreign policy was the mediator's. In the Gulf crisis of 2017, when Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt blockaded Qatar, he shuttled between them for three years until the Al-Ula reconciliation of January 2021, which he did not live to see. There was Yemen, and there were the Iraqi-Kuwaiti reparations that Baghdad finished paying in 2022 and the Syrian aid conferences he hosted, for which the UN named him a humanitarian leader in 2014. The country stayed in the Saudi camp on Iran and out of the Abraham accords on Israel, which was the position of the Kuwaiti street. He died in a Minnesota hospital in September 2020 at ninety-one and was buried in Kuwait the next day in the pandemic's silence. His half-brother Nawaf succeeded him for three years and then his son Mishal, at eighty-three, who suspended the parliament in 2024 that the old emir had put up with.
- Lived: 1929 CE – 2020 CE
- Nationality: Kuwaiti
- Roles: monarch, emir, diplomat
