While Yemen is a stick in the craw for Saudi and other Gulf Arab policy makers, Abu Dhabi has more immediate concerns in its own immediate backyard.

A key anxiety for the UAE has been Bahrain. Fearful of Iranian inroads, in 2011, the Peninsula Shield Force was deployed to Bahrain. This force was largely tasked with assisting Bahrain’s Sunni royal government curb mass protests by the state’s Shia majority. Peninsula Shield forces included a Saudi contingent numbering over 1000, Kuwait deployed naval assets, and the UAE sent 500 police officers.

Besides generally peaceful protests, troubles for the forces belonging to Gulf states in Bahrain have also involved bombings and other improvised attacks. A particularly deadly bombing incident occurred in March 2014. This bombing, pulled off by Bahraini Shia radicals killed three police officers—two from Bahrain and one officer from the UAE. Interestingly, none of the many Bahraini militant groups were named on the UAE’s new list, despite some of the groups being listed by the government of Bahrain.

Nonetheless, listing “Hizballah in GCC countries” makes more sense when viewed in the context of the UAE’s involvement in Bahrain and through the UAE’s domestic actions since 2009.

Following the March bombing, the Deputy Chairman of the Dubai’s police took to Twitter claiming the bomber, “used to travel to Lebanon to get training from the Hezbollah in triggering blasts…The fifth arm of Iran should be filtered and wiped out of the GCC region, no matter the cost.” This may indicate that the UAE does not consider the Bahraini groups to be anything more than Hizballah fronts in the Gulf.

Combined with hundreds of deportations of Lebanese Shia expats living in the UAE (which the UAE claimed were connected to Hizballah), the UAE appears to be increasingly worried about potential Hizballah penetrations.

However, the manufactured differentiation between Lebanese Hizballah and their Gulf assets still begs the question: why the Emirates did not just list the entire Lebanese-based organization? Lebanese Hizballah is present in both Lebanon and Syria; they even formed an integral role in LAFA. There is also no reported split between Hizballah’s units in the Gulf and those in Lebanon. At the very least, the detail that Hizballah is active in the Gulf adds a level of emphasis to feelings in Abu Dhabi that it feels increasingly threatened by the group’s potential inroads in the area.

Pitfalls with the list aside, the UAE is sending a very clear message to regional powers and to the United States. With Iraq and the possible U.S. courting of Iran’s proxies, the UAE, as with other Gulf allies, likely feels isolated by its longtime ally. What appears to be cognitive dissonance on behalf of Washington—where Iran’s proxies are possibly being secretly engaged in Iraq, all while they actively threaten and target Gulf states—could have been the spur for the list’s publication. The most likely hastily arranged list of groups indicates that the Emirates wanted to publish a list of relatively well-known Iranian proxies. Thus, Iran’s activities were put in the spotlight, along with a not-so-secret nudge to Washington.

Phillip Smyth is a researcher who studies extremist groups at the University of Maryland's Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics. He particularly focuses on Shia militarism in the Middle East and writes about the topic on the blog Hizballah Cavalcade.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Brian nairB/CC by 2.0