When news of the U.S.-led aerial assault on Iraq broke last Wednesday night, visiting Kuwaiti student Bader El-Jeaan stayed up all night--praying for inner strength, the safety of his family and friends and an end to the suffering of his country.

Since El-Jeaan left Kuwait just two days before Iraqi tanks rolled through the small emirate, every aspect of his life has been consumed by the conflict.

"I'm really glad I started studying early," he says. "There's absolutely no way I could concentrate on my [Justice] exam now," he says.

El-Jeaan a wiry, quiety intense man with a haggard look to him, is quick to apologize for the state of his room although it is next to immaculate by most students' standards.

The television, he says, is on every waking hour--he merely turns down the volume when he needs to concentrate on something else. Several open newspapers, a copy of the Koran and his Muslim prayer rug sit on top of his Kuwaiti flag: "I lent it to someone for the protest."

Since coming to Harvard El-Jeaan says he has devoted almost all of his time to the Mideast crisis. He is the founder and co-president of Students for a Free Kuwait (SFK), and associates say that he spends enormous amounts of time keeping in touch with Kuwaitis and activists all over New England, dealing with the media and pressing Kuwait's case in the United States.

As he speaks his own image, from a Channel 4 interview taped that afternoon, flashes across the television screen.

But the devout Muslim openly admits that the Gulf Crisis has tuned his college experience so far into a lonely one. He has difficulty staying in tune with the papers, lectures and parties that fill many first-year students' lives. His only close friend, he says, is Stephen W. Gauster '92, the other co-president of Students for a Free Kuwait.

"That's one of the things I hate about this," he says. "I can't appreciate being at Harvard because of the whims of one person--Saddam Hussein. I hate the fact that I've been isolated here in my room and haven't been given the chance to meet the freshman class. And it's all one person's fault--Saddam Hussein."

"[Saddam] is a megalomaniac madman dictator," he says. "He should be exterminated."

"I still regard Iraqis as my fellow brothers. But I've lost some respect for the Iraqi people for not showing the moral fortitude for not standing up against injustice," he says. "I really don't think that they've been taken in by Saddam's rhetoric."

El-Jeaan says he also feels betrayed by the Arab community at Harvard. He says he is angry at Harvard's society of Arab Students because of the relative speed with which they condemned U.S. intervention in the Gulf, and the slowness of their condemnation of the Iraqi invasion of his homeland.

"We [SFK] lost touch with them a long time ago. We've taken divergent paths," he says. "I'm really saddened by the fact that the Arabs at Harvard couldn't unite."

"They keep calling for an Arab solution. If they couldn't find a solution to unite the Arabs here there's no way that could happen in the larger world. There's no such thing as Arab brotherly love."

And El-Jeaan says his isolation from the rest of Harvard's Arab community has also led to his estrangement from the Islamic Society.