Iran launched 3,300 missiles, drones at UAE; most targeted civilian sites: Gargash

Iran launched 3,300 missiles and drones at the UAE over the course of several weeks, with the vast majority of the attacks targeting civilian infrastructure, Dr Anwar Gargash, Diplomatic Adviser to the UAE President, said in a Special Address at Hili forum. Most of the projectiles were intercepted by the country’s air defences, he added.

Gargash said the sustained attacks had demonstrated not only the capabilities of the UAE Armed Forces but also the country’s broader national resilience.

Even while missiles were still in the air, the UAE’s non-oil foreign trade grew by 13 per cent in the first half of the year, he said, stressing that the nation’s development ambitions had not been curtailed and its goals remained firmly on course.

“Naturally, some sectors were affected, but our economy did not falter,” he said. “It continued to grow and, importantly, to expand in the sectors on which our future depends.”

“Six months into a crisis that, in my view, will reshape the region’s geostrategic landscape and alter its politics, what has emerged is a more complex and far more uncertain region than the one we knew before,” he said. 

He added “But I have little doubt that we are moving towards a more complicated Gulf and a more challenging wider region.”

In this environment, strategic autonomy was not a slogan but a policy choice that allowed the UAE to keep its economy growing, its people safe and its decisions independent, he said.

Despite the attacks, engagement with Tehran would ultimately be unavoidable. “Geography leaves us no alternative to engagement,” Gargash said, distinguishing between restoring a necessary working relationship and rebuilding trust.

He described the attacks on Gulf countries, which had not attacked Iran, as a “premeditated war of choice” and “a profound failure of strategy and statecraft”. Iran had destroyed, in weeks, bridges with its neighbours that took decades to build, he said.

A functional relationship could eventually be restored, but the presumption of good faith underpinning Gulf engagement with Tehran had been demolished and “may take many years, perhaps decades, to rebuild”, he added.

Gargash described Arab, regional and international responses to the crisis as “ineffective and underwhelming” in preventing the war, protecting energy and maritime trade, and containing a confrontation that began with the war in Gaza before expanding.

Gulf countries demonstrated strength individually, but their national responses did not translate into an equally effective collective strategy, he said.

“I do not believe that collectively we rose strategically to the magnitude of the threat,” Gargash said. The problem was not a lack of understanding about the challenge posed by Iran, but a failure to turn that shared assessment into a sufficiently united response.

Source Khaleej Times