The Ministry of Interior announced that the Governorate Security Directorate under the Security Directorates Affairs Sector carried out the operation in Fahaheel to address street vendors violating labor and residency laws in addition to locating wanted individuals and other lawbreakers. The campaign forms part of routine enforcement actions across Al-Ahmadi Governorate where multiple forms of noncompliance are often addressed in coordinated sweeps. The ministry stated that all individuals detained during the August 18 action faced standard legal and administrative procedures ahead of referral to competent authorities.
According to the ministry’s breakdown the 79 arrests included 39 people held for lacking identification documents along with 29 wanted on various cases. Five more were detained over expired visas and residency permits while four faced charges for violating street vendor regulations. The final two arrests comprised one individual sought by the anti-narcotics unit and another found in an abnormal state in possession of intoxicating substances.
The ministry reported that the same operation produced 63 traffic violations which were recorded and processed under applicable regulations. Such combined enforcement of residency labor and traffic rules has been a recurring feature of governorate-level security initiatives. The approach allows authorities to tackle overlapping violations within single deployments.
This campaign follows a Ministry of Interior operation on August 5 that resulted in the arrest of 56 residency and labor law violators during a joint inspection drive. The ministry has maintained a steady pace of similar actions throughout the year targeting unregulated commercial activity and irregular residency status across multiple governorates. One earlier sweep netted hundreds of violators in coordinated efforts that also uncovered drug-related offenses according to ministry statements.
A 2024 US State Department country report on human rights practices in Kuwait noted the government’s continued campaigns against visa trading and exploitation linked to the informal labor sector. The ministry has run awareness efforts in several languages to encourage compliance with labor and residency rules among both employers and workers. These steps form part of broader regulatory oversight that seeks to reduce vulnerabilities in commercial and residential environments.
The ministry provided no further details on nationalities of those arrested or the precise substances recovered in the single related case. Operations of this scale typically feed into existing judicial and deportation pipelines once initial processing concludes. The focus on Fahaheel mirrors prior actions in districts with notable street vending concentrations.
