By: Imam Mohammad Tawhidi*
For more than four decades, the Regime in Iran pursued a single idea beyond its borders. It believed that Shia Muslims everywhere owed their first loyalty to Tehran, not to their own countries.
This year, that idea finally collapsed. It collapsed in Damascus, in Beirut, in Baghdad and on the streets of our own cities.
The doctrine has a name: Wilayat Al Faqih, the guardianship of the jurist. In Iran it is a system of government. Exported, it became something else: a recruitment tool.
It told a Lebanese farmer, an Iraqi student and an Afghan refugee that their faith made them soldiers of a foreign state. The Revolutionary Guard built militias on that claim, from Hezbollah in the 1980s to the brigades it later raised in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
It is important to say what this project was not. It was never the voice of Shia Islam. It was a political programme that used faith as cover. Its first victims were Shia communities themselves, whose sons were sent to die in wars that served Tehran's ambitions and nobody else's.
Syria was the proof. Tehran poured an estimated $30 billion into the country after 2011 to keep Bashar Al Assad in power. It flew in Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon and militiamen from Iraq.
It recruited poor Afghan and Pakistani Shia into the Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun brigades, many of them refugees promised wages and residency papers. Thousands never came home.
In December 2024 the Assad government fell in a matter of days. The foreign fighters melted away. The land corridor from Tehran to the Mediterranean, the prize of the entire enterprise, closed overnight. Syrians did not mourn the departure of the men who had been sent to fight them in the name of religion.
The pattern repeated across the region. Iranian officials once boasted of controlling four Arab capitals: Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sanaa. Today Hezbollah is badly weakened and its popularity inside Lebanon has fallen. Lebanese Shia families have paid for Tehran's decisions with their homes and their villages. In Iraq, the government has ordered the militias to disarm. Iraqi Shia have marched for years under a simple slogan: they want a country, not a client state.
Analysts now describe the so-called axis of resistance as fragmenting, its members weaker and going their own way. The central claim is finished.
Tehran said it spoke for the Shia of the Arab world. The Shia of the Arab world answered that they are Lebanese, Iraqi, Syrian, Bahraini, Kuwaiti and Emirati first.
The last place the project was tried was here. When war broke out on February 28, Iran turned its missiles on its neighbours. No country absorbed more of that fire than the UAE. By the end of March our air defences had engaged more than 2,400 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones. Dubai International Airport, Jebel Ali Port and the Burj Al Arab were all targets of the regime.
The missiles were only half of the plan. In March, State Security arrested a network accused of working with Iran and Hezbollah. In April it announced the arrest of 27 men accused of forming a secret organisation tied to the IRGC. Authorities say the group held clandestine meetings, moved money abroad and tried to recruit young Emiratis and place members in sensitive positions.
The bet behind that effort was the same one that failed in Syria. It assumed that under pressure, a society of many faiths and more than 200 nationalities would split along sectarian lines. It did not.
Dubai went back to work. Thousands ran through Abu Dhabi under the banner Hassantak Ya Watan. Shia citizens and residents stood exactly where they have always stood, alongside everyone else.
This did not happen by luck. The UAE was among the first to see where Tehran's project was heading. As early as 2014 it placed Iran-backed militias on its list of designated terrorist organisations, when much of the world still treated them as local actors. It invested for years in layered air defence. It built a state in which citizenship and law, not sect, decide a person's standing. When the test came, the country was ready.
Firmness has not meant closing the door. The UAE suspended trade with Iran in August after further missile fire, yet its leaders have also met their Iranian counterparts to seek a way forward. That is strength with a steady hand.
We all owe the leadership of the UAE, under His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, our full support and gratitude. The UAE read the danger early, prepared quietly and protected everyone who calls the UAE home without asking what they believe or where they were born.
Iran's sectarian project asked people to choose a sect over a homeland. The UAE offered a homeland where no one has to choose. That is why one failed and the other stands.
*Parliamentary Adviser and Research Partner with TRENDS Research & Advisory