Behind multiple conflicts across the Middle East and Africa sits a powerful but often overlooked actor – the UAE’s network of finance, logistics and proxy forces shaping outcomes on the ground.

Without understanding the astonishing network of power exercised by the United Arab Emirates you would have no idea why the UAE was hit particularly hard by Iran in recent weeks. Nor would you know what fuels chaos from Libya to Sudan to Somalia to Yemen. If you understand the UAE’s business-geostrategic model and how it mobilises warlords, gold, oil, regional logistics and finance – you get much closer to seeing the pattern in the seeming madness.

Tiny UAE, 1.4 million citizens, wields so much power that Saudi Arabia sees it as a serious threat. In December, Saudi Arabia bombed UAE surrogates in Yemen and told the emirates to exit the country. They didn’t. If the US and Israel hadn’t attacked Iran, more fireworks were in the offing.

Israel is the UAE’s close ally. They collaborate not just on the War on Iran but in many of these various ‘civil wars’ that are both money-making ventures and a series of heartless state-destruction campaigns that give them greater geopolitical weight in the region.

We first need to understand what UAE really is. Comprising seven emirates – Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al-Quwain, Ras Al-Khaimah, and Fujairah – it is now the hub of an empire that both Iran and Saudi Arabia would like to knee-cap.

The powerhouse is actually Abu Dhabi, the oil giant which is the effective boss of the rest, including Dubai. Abu Dhabi is a family business, run by The Bani Fatima, the sons of Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak Al Ketbi who is the most influential of the wives of the late Sheikh. Today, ultimate power resides with MBZ (Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan), the eldest of her six sons.

MBZ was a long-time buddy of MBS (Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman) but those days are well behind us. In the words of a senior Saudi figure, Ahmed Altuwaijri, Abu Dhabi is Israel’s Trojan horse in the region. Along with Bahrain, UAE is a signatory to the Abraham Accords which is a US vehicle to bring Israel in from the cold. The other Gulf States oppose this ‘Israel First’ policy and are clear that a resolution of the rights of the Palestinians must come first, although they do little about it.

The Bani Fatimid system works like this: identify a country that is experiencing instability, pick a side (preferably anti-political Islam) and offer not only to finance that militia or warlord of choice but provide the immense logistical support the UAE has, including air freighting weapons, supplies and soldiers, and the complex systems needed to convert, for example, stolen gold into arms or other assets.

Time and again this has resulted in the creation of shadow economies that end up controlling significant resources (gold, oil, agriculture, ports) and creating parallel states. Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen have all been played in this way.

It is textbook divide and rule: weakening a state from within to then exert ongoing influence and resource extraction.

Libya’s terrible 15-year civil war has been immensely worsened by outside states, including UAE which turned general Khalifa Belqasim Haftar from a YouTube revolutionary into the head of the massively resourced LNA militia that now controls about a third of the country.

With UAE commanding the centre of a hub-and-spoke system, it can move fighters around the region at will, for example from Libya to Yemen where it sent thousands of LNA fighters to support local client militias. By backing the Southern Transition Council (STC) in Yemen, UAE got control over the vital Port of Aden. Similarly, by partnering with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, tons of stolen gold flows into Dubai. You get the picture.

Gold is the prime currency of the Bani Fatima empire (MBZ and his brothers). Dubai is known in the region as The City of Gold, the place where the bulk of Africa’s yellow metal, much of it smuggled, finds its way.

Imagine this: at the very time tens of millions of Sudanese are suffering famine or near-famine conditions, the UAE is facilitating the export to Dubai of tons of gold to fuel the war. This represents billions of dollars that should be held for the benefit of the people but instead is being used for empire building.

UAE “aid” changed the military balance and ensured the RSF took control of Sudan’s Darfur province, securing both gold and valuable farmland (once millions had been driven off their land). Starving, impoverished Sudan is now supplying tons of vegetables, oilseeds and grains to the tables of Dubai.

Without the resources of the Bani Fatimid empire the terrible war in Sudan would likely have ended long ago. The Sudanese government has accused UAE of being a party to the genocide the country is suffering.

The _Wall Street Journal_, New York Times and the UN Panel of Experts on Sudan have all documented this but both the Biden and Trump administrations showed little interest in curtailing it.

John Menadue detailed Australia’s complicity in the UAE recently on P&I. My own country, New Zealand, whose ministry of foreign affairs is fully aware of this depraved business, moved with speed last year to deepen its relationships with the UAE. As the RSF forces were closing in on the city of El Fasher, they were finalising a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement – the fastest trade deal in New Zealand’s history. When El Fasher fell 60,000 Sudanese civilians were killed, and thousands of women were raped and trafficked by this tentacle of the Bani Fatima empire. Yet the UAE is our close friend and ally which, with the immense help of our media, is portrayed as some kind of noble victim.

In Somalia the UAE has switched sides when economic or strategic advantage could be made. Along with Israel, UAE is backing militias who have declared a break-away state ‘Somaliland’ that borders the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The UAE has military bases in ‘Somaliland’ and has poured millions of dollars into the port of Berbera. With hundreds of kilometres of coastline adjacent to vital Red Sea shipping lanes, UAE and Israel will be important players in a contest with Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other powers.

In December last year Israel became the first to recognise Somaliland as a state. UAE is understood to be working on the Trump administration to do the same – further trashing the idea of territorial integrity for the sake of advantage. As an aside, Israel hopes to ethnically cleanse Palestinians to Somaliland one day.

All this dovetails with Israel’s strategy of smashing states to control them. For them, an alternative to regime change in Iran is Balkanisation to create several weak statelets thereby enhancing Israeli security and influence.

For those reasons and more, I hope the sovereign state of Iran survives the onslaught. I hope UAE and Israel’s genuinely evil business of fragmenting state after state is defeated. I hope the western countries look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves: what kind of moral monsters would be allies of Israel and the UAE?