The Occupied Islands Will Not Free Themselves

Halima Younis – Exclusive to Dubai Diplomacy

For more than half a century, the United Arab Emirates has pursued every peaceful avenue available to reclaim Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs, three islands seized by Iran in 1971, on the eve of British withdrawal from the Gulf.

For more than half a century, Tehran has responded with nothing but contempt, propaganda, and stonewalling. The conclusion is now inescapable: diplomacy has failed, and the UAE must be prepared to use military force to recover what is rightfully its own.

Let us be clear about what is happening in the Gulf today. The Islamic Republic of Iran does not occupy these islands because it has any legitimate historical or legal claim to them. It occupies them because it could, and because no one stopped it.

The Shah moved in troops under cover of British departure. The regime that followed him inherited the occupation and doubled down on it, constructing military facilities, relocating civilian populations, and treating the islands as sovereign Iranian territory.

Every appeal to the United Nations, every bilateral negotiation, every call for international arbitration has been met with the same Iranian answer: there is nothing to discuss. The islands are Iranian. End of conversation.

The UAE has been extraordinarily patient. Too patient.

Now, however, the regional order is shifting in ways that may not come again. If the United States were to strike Iranian military infrastructure, including the strategic oil terminal at Kharg Island, the Islamic Republic would face the most serious existential crisis in its forty-year history.

A regime under that kind of pressure is not a regime projecting power outward. It is a regime fighting for survival inward. In that window, an Iranian collapse, political, military, or both, would create a vacuum over those occupied islands that Abu Dhabi has every right, and every reason, to fill.

Critics will argue that military action would destabilize the region. This argument deserves to be dismissed with the contempt it merits. The region is already destabilized, by Iran. By its proxy militias in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. By its nuclear program. By its decade-long occupation of Arab territory.

The UAE reclaiming its islands would not be an act of aggression. It would be the correction of one. There is a difference, yet the world has rewarded Iran’s occupation with nothing more than polite concern and forgotten resolutions.

Critics will also argue that the timing would be opportunistic. Good. That is precisely the point. Nations that wait for perfect moral conditions before defending their sovereignty wait forever. The UAE has already waited long enough.

The moment Iran loses its grip, militarily or politically, the strategic equation in the Gulf shifts in Abu Dhabi’s favor. The cost of action drops. The cost of continued inaction, another generation of occupation, another generation of humiliation, remains exactly what it has always been.

When the U.S.-Israel on Iran war escalated, the UAE made the restrained decision not to allow the United States to use its bases or airspace to strike Iran.

Tehran’s answer to this goodwill was thousands of missiles and drones fired at UAE soil, hammering its economy, destroying Dubai’s reputation as a safe tourist destination, and closing the Strait of Hormuz to strangle UAE oil exports.

Iran repaid Emirati restraint with an act of war. That fact alone gives the UAE every right to take back its islands by force and demand full reparations for the damage Iran has deliberately inflicted.

Abu Dhabi has built one of the most capable military forces in the Arab world. It has combat experience. It has the political will, when the leadership chooses to exercise it. What it has lacked, until now, is a realistic strategic opening. That opening may be arriving.

The UAE must not squander it.

The islands are Emirati. They have always been Emirati. The people of the UAE deserve to see their nation’s flag fly over those shores again, not someday, not in some distant diplomatic fantasy, but in this generation.

The time for letters and resolutions has passed. The time for action has come.

Halima Younis, political analyst.

All views expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions or policies of DubaiDiplomacy or its editors.

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