How the UAE Is Cracking Down on Illicit Iranian Finance

Excerpt

After Iran unleashed more than 3,000 missiles and drones against the United Arab Emirates (UAE), over five weeks of the Iran War, the Gulf state’s patience snapped. The “bullying neighbor,” as Anwar Gargash, the diplomatic advisor to the UAE’s president, called Iran, had crossed a line. In response, the UAE doubled its efforts against illicit Iranian money networks. 

By early April, Emirati authorities had detained dozens of Tehran-linked money changers, shuttered their exchange houses, and closed their offices, targeting especially the Sarraf networks that once funneled billions to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which Washington designates a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO).

The Emirati crackdown was more than a local security measure. It was a strategic pivot that now offers the United States a decisive new advantage in its maximum-pressure campaign against Iran’s shadow banking system. If Washington was looking for a bigger counterterrorism role among its partners, this is it.

The October 2025 report by the US Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) documented roughly $9 billion in suspicious transactions in 2024 routed through US correspondent accounts, much of it via more informal hawala exchange houses. These flows let Iran sell sanctioned oil and petrochemicals, procure military technology, and bankroll the IRGC and its proxies like Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The UAE’s new aggression against those same networks changes the game.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD).