THE LANDLORD OF THE WAR
How the United Arab Emirates became the forward base, intelligence node, and operational infrastructure for the American-Israeli war on Iran ...
… while standing before cameras to demand peace.
His name has not been released. The UAE government described him only as an Asian national, killed when interceptor debris from an Iranian ballistic missile fell on a residential area near Zayed International Airport in Abu Dhabi on the morning of February 28, 2026. He was, in the language of official communiques, collateral. A Pakistani passport. A labour visa. A shift somewhere in the logistics infrastructure that keeps Abu Dhabi moving. He died in a war that the government above him had no formal part in, inside a country whose airspace was simultaneously serving as a corridor for the strikes that produced the retaliation that killed him.
That is where the story of the United Arab Emirates in this war begins. Not in the press conferences. Not in the language of Reem bint Ebrahim Al Hashimy, the UAE Minister of State for International Cooperation, who stood before cameras on March 4, 2026, and called for all parties to return to the negotiating table. It begins in the gap between what the UAE says and what the UAE is: the most structurally essential Arab partner in the American-Israeli military and intelligence campaign against Iran, built across three decades of covert cooperation that the Abraham Accords of 2020 merely brought above the waterline.
What follows is an account of that infrastructure: the military installations, the intelligence pipelines, the surveillance technologies, the sovereign wealth investments, and the institutional arrangements that made the UAE, on February 28, 2026, not a bystander caught in crossfire but the operational landlord of the war.
I. THE BASE
Al Dhafra Air Base sits approximately 32 kilometres south of Abu Dhabi, in the flat desert of the emirate, operated jointly by the UAE Air Force and the United States Air Force. American military units have been present there since the 1990s. The US Air Force only formally acknowledged that presence in August 2017, after years of maintaining a classified garrison inside a partner state’s sovereign territory.
What Al Dhafra houses is not a conventional forward operating base. It is a surveillance and strike complex. According to US Air Force Central Command, the base hosts the 380th Air Expeditionary Wing, whose aircraft inventory includes the RQ-4 Global Hawk high-altitude surveillance drone, the U-2 Dragon Lady spy plane, E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft, F-22 Raptor stealth fighters, F-15E Strike Eagles, and F-35 Lightning IIs. The U-2 and the Global Hawk are dedicated intelligence collection platforms. The E-3 Sentry is the aerial nervous system of American air operations across the region, processing and relaying real-time battlefield data. These are not defensive tools. They are the sensing organs of an offensive military architecture that has watched Iran for decades from Emirati soil.
When Operation Epic Fury began on February 28, 2026, Al Dhafra was among the primary staging and surveillance hubs for the campaign. Iran understood this. Its first wave of ballistic missiles targeted Al Dhafra specifically. The UAE intercepted most of them. Debris fell on a residential area. A Pakistani worker died. The UAE government condemned the attack as a flagrant violation of national sovereignty. It said nothing about what the base had just been used for.
Adjacent to Al Dhafra, Jebel Ali Port in Dubai is the US Navy’s largest port of call in the Middle East. American aircraft carriers dock there. Destroyers equipped with AEGIS missile defence systems transit through it. The logistical pipeline of American naval power in the Gulf flows through Emirati commercial infrastructure. Al Minhad Air Base, also in the UAE, houses British Royal Air Force units and the Australian Defence Force Headquarters Middle East. The UAE is not hosting one foreign military. It is hosting a coalition.
Iran has known this for years. The strikes on February 28 were not acts of confusion. They were targeting a geography that is, by documented function, a forward base for the powers that struck Iran that morning.
II. THE ARCHITECTURE BEFORE THE ACCORDS
The relationship between Israeli intelligence and the UAE did not begin with the Abraham Accords. The Washington Post has reported that every head of Israel’s Mossad since the 1970s has maintained a relationship with his counterpart in the UAE. The institutional channel predates any public acknowledgment, any diplomatic formality, any declared shared interest. It was built on a single shared premise: Iran.
Within Mossad, a department called Tevel is specifically tasked with cultivating relationships with states that Israel does not maintain official relations with. The Gulf was Tevel’s primary operational zone. Emirati intelligence, concentrated in the hands of a small number of senior figures from the ruling families, provided the kind of centralised decision-making that Israeli intelligence found operationally ideal. Relationships could be built with a handful of men. Decisions could be made and kept.
The security relationship deepened after 1993 and accelerated through the 2000s. An Israeli source cited by Israel Hayom described the dynamic directly: Pegasus and the defence industries caused intimate relations to tighten between the Israeli security system and the Emirati one. That tightening created a direct line between leaders, and the technology that sustained it is the foundation on which everything that followed was built.
III. PEGASUS AS THE CURRENCY OF ALLIANCE
In January 2010, 27 operatives subsequently linked to Mossad entered the UAE without informing Emirati authorities and killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas weapons negotiator, in his room at the Al Bustan Rotana hotel in Dubai. The killing enraged Emirati officials. The covert relationship cooled for several years. What restored it was not diplomacy. It was technology.
Leaked emails published in 2018 revealed that the UAE signed a contract with NSO Group, the Israeli cyber-intelligence firm, in August 2013 to license Pegasus spyware. According to Gulf State Analytics research published in December 2025, Israeli leadership offered Pegasus to Mohammed bin Zayed in 2013 specifically to overcome the impasse created by the al-Mabhouh killing. NSO Group was founded in 2010, staffed primarily by veterans of Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate units. Its export required Israeli Defence Ministry approval. The sale to the UAE was a state-sanctioned intelligence transaction, approved at the highest levels of the Israeli government.
NSO Group played an active diplomatic role in building the Abraham Accords. The New York Times reported that Pegasus functioned as a diplomatic sweetener, with Israeli officials offering or reactivating Gulf state access to the spyware as part of normalisation negotiations. When Mohammed bin Salman needed to approve the opening of Saudi airspace to Israeli flights, a precondition for any UAE-Israel air connection, Israeli officials reportedly offered reactivated Saudi access to Pegasus. The line between intelligence transaction and diplomatic agreement had ceased to exist.
Research published in the Journal of Palestine Studies documented Mubadala, the UAE sovereign wealth fund, investing in NSO Group through SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate whose Tel Aviv operations were then headed by Yossi Cohen, the former director of Mossad. Emirati sovereign capital was financing the Israeli spyware that Emirati security services were simultaneously deploying. The financial and operational architecture were the same structure.
IV. DARKMATTER, G42, AND THE OPERATIONAL APPARATUS
DarkMatter Group was the operational intelligence arm. Founded in Abu Dhabi, it recruited from the US National Security Agency, from CIA contractor networks, and directly from the technology units of the Israel Defence Forces. Times of Israel reporting confirmed that Israeli Defence Forces intelligence veterans were recruited into DarkMatter at salaries approaching one million dollars annually. A separate TheMarker investigation found that DarkMatter maintained a Cyprus office specifically staffed by Israeli software developers, which one unnamed Israeli defence official described as the de facto smuggling of Israeli intellectual property without any supervision of the Defence Ministry.
DarkMatter ran Project Raven, a covert operation that hacked targets across the Middle East, including journalists, human rights activists, and foreign government officials. Its target list, as documented by Reuters and The Intercept, included individuals in Qatar, Yemen, Iran, Turkey, and Lebanon. The FBI opened an investigation into DarkMatter for suspected cybercrimes. Three former American intelligence and military officers who worked for DarkMatter were charged by the US Department of Justice in 2021 for violations of export control laws and computer fraud statutes.
DarkMatter was reorganised and absorbed into Group 42, known as G42, the Abu Dhabi artificial intelligence and cloud computing company controlled by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the UAE’s National Security Adviser and brother of President Mohammed bin Zayed. G42’s CEO, Peng Xiao, had previously led Pegasus LLC, the DarkMatter subsidiary running big-data surveillance operations. G42 signed deals with Rafael Advanced Defence Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, two of Israel’s principal arms manufacturers. It also built Pax AI to process surveillance data. The institutional continuity from DarkMatter to G42 was not a corporate transformation. It was a rebranding exercise for the same structure under more presentable ownership.
The MERIP journal documented that in 2023, Israeli cybersecurity firm Cyberint Technologies signed an agreement with Etisalat, the UAE’s largest telecommunications company, serving over eleven million customers and three hundred thousand enterprises. The agreement was framed as protecting Emirati telecom architecture from cyberattacks. What it also created was an Israeli cybersecurity firm with access to the signal intelligence architecture of the UAE’s primary telecommunications network. Cyberint’s CEO, Yochai Chorem, previously led intelligence operations inside Israeli state structures.
In parallel, the UAE and Israel announced in 2023 the Cyber Dome initiative, described publicly as an effort to integrate the cyber defence architectures of the Abraham Accords signatories, with AI-driven threat identification. The Israeli National Cyber Security Directorate announced the programme at the Cybertech Global conference in Tel Aviv. The partners include Microsoft and Israel’s Rafael. The UAE’s cyber defence layer is being built with Israeli architecture.
V. THE PUBLIC POSITION AND THE OPERATIONAL REALITY
On March 4, 2026, UAE Minister of State Reem bint Ebrahim Al Hashimy told a press conference that the UAE has repeatedly confirmed it does not allow the use of its land in any military operation against Iran. She condemned Iranian attacks as a flagrant violation of national sovereignty. She called for a return to the negotiating table.
The statement requires examination against the documented record. Al Dhafra Air Base, on Emirati soil, houses the American surveillance infrastructure that has monitored Iran continuously for decades and that was operationally active in the days and hours before Operation Epic Fury began on February 28. The US Navy’s largest Middle Eastern port of call is in Dubai. British and Australian military headquarters for Middle East operations are at Al Minhad. Israeli cyber firms are embedded in Emirati telecommunications. The UAE sovereign wealth fund has invested in Israeli defence technology companies. The head of the UAE’s national security apparatus controls the corporate vehicle that is the direct successor to the UAE’s primary intelligence operation, built with Israeli personnel and Israeli tools.
Al-Zaytouna Centre research published in January 2026 documented that Mossad operates in the UAE to gather maximum possible information on Iran, including by monitoring Iranian political, military, and economic cooperation with Gulf states, and by tracking Iranian support for regional armed movements. The strategic objective, the research found, is to keep Gulf states closer to Israel than to its adversaries, through a calibrated combination of genuine intelligence sharing and the dissemination of intelligence designed to sustain threat perceptions.
The UAE is simultaneously the country calling for peace and the country whose territory, cyber infrastructure, financial capital, and intelligence apparatus constitute the forward operating platform of the war being waged against Iran. These are not contradictory positions in Emirati strategic logic. They are the same position. The UAE benefits from Iranian military degradation. It requires American protection to secure that outcome. It requires distance from the visible conduct of the war to maintain the commercial and diplomatic functions that make Dubai and Abu Dhabi viable. The press conference is the price of the infrastructure.
VI. WHAT IRAN UNDERSTANDS
Iran’s targeting decisions on February 28 and the days that followed were not undiscriminating. They were geographically precise in their logic. Al Dhafra. Al Minhad. Jebel Ali Port. The US Consulate in Dubai. Dubai International Airport. The Fujairah Oil Industry Zone. These are nodes of the infrastructure that hosts the forces conducting the campaign against Iran. They were selected because they are what they are.
Iran fired, according to UAE Defence Ministry figures reported through March 3, a total of 174 ballistic missiles at the UAE, with 161 intercepted. It launched 689 drones, with 645 intercepted. The scale of Iranian targeting of the UAE far exceeded what any country with no involvement in the campaign would logically absorb. Iran’s military planners read the geography the same way the documented record does.
Three people died in the UAE from the Iranian strikes: a Pakistani national, a Nepali national, and a Bangladeshi national. All three were South Asian labour migrants, the underclass that builds and operates the infrastructure of the Emirati state. They died because the Emirati state committed the territory they lived on to a military campaign conducted by powers that hold no obligation to their lives.
VII. THE LONGER ARCHITECTURE
What has been built in the UAE over three decades is not an alliance in the diplomatic sense. An alliance requires declared mutual obligation. What exists between the UAE, the United States, and Israel is an operational integration that has never required declaration because it has never been subjected to democratic scrutiny in any of the three states. The Emirati public did not vote on the Abraham Accords. The Emirati labour force did not consent to living inside a forward military base. The South Asian workers whose remittances sustain families in Karachi, Colombo, Kathmandu, and Manila were not consulted when the UAE government signed the agreements that made their places of work into legitimate military targets.
The academic literature on UAE-Israel security cooperation describes the relationship in the language of dynamic security regimes and tacit bilateral frameworks. Stripped of that register, the deal was made by a small number of men, for the benefit of a small number of men, in conditions of deliberate opacity, and the consequences of the deal are paid by people who had no voice in it.
The Abraham Accords were never about peace. The documentary record shows they were about locking in an operational security relationship that had been built covertly over decades. The intelligence cooperation, the surveillance technology transfers, the sovereign wealth investments in Israeli defence firms, the integration of Israeli cybersecurity into Emirati telecommunications: all of this preceded August 2020. The Accords put a signature on what was already operational.
Since February 28, that operational reality has been exposed by the missiles falling on it. The UAE is calling for negotiations. It has intercepted over a thousand incoming attacks. It is also hosting the U-2 spy planes, the AWACS aircraft, the carrier strike group logistics, and the Israeli-integrated cyber architecture that defines the operational infrastructure of the campaign.
The landlord is asking the tenants to keep it down.