In the UAE, the species is common on gravel plains and wadi terraces of the western slopes of the Hajar Mountains (Feulner 2016). There are records of this species in Abu Dhabi Emirate (Brown and Sakkir 2004), and from the buffer zone of Wadi Wurayah National Park (park HQ area, and from disused wadi fields at low elevations in the Ru'us al-Jibal; Feulner 2016), although it is uncertain if the Ru'us al-Jibal localities mentioned by Feulner (2011) are within the UAE. Although it is a weed of cultivated crops and is likely to be more widespread than the available records suggest, the UAE native plant working group considered it to be native to the country. The native range of this species is the tropical and subtropical Old World, across almost all of Africa, east through the Arabian Peninsula to southeast Asia; very widely introduced to the Americas and to parts of Europe (Board of Trustees, RBG Kew 2018).