Since the 1980s, the UAE has been a major transit hub for gems, minerals, metals, and contraband from around the world. During that decade, the once-sleepy emirate, known for its fishing and pearl diving industries, transformed into a center for transnational capital—including arms trafficking, diamond smuggling, and money laundering.

Central to this transformation was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a bank created by seed capital from Abu Dhabi ruler Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan. BCCI earned a reputation as the preferred financial conduit for intelligence agencies and organized crime during the Iran-Contra scandal—a clandestine weapons and cocaine smuggling pipeline to which Epstein and several of his associates were connected.

During the Iran-Contra operation, the CIA’s covert arms deals were financed using accounts at BCCI and its vast network of shell entities, allowing illicit cross-border transactions, like multimillion-dollar weapons and drug shipments, to be shielded from regulators and the public. Planes from Southern Air Transport, a “proprietary” front airline used by the CIA, shipped weapons and cocaine through a complex logistical network linking the United States, Nicaragua, Israel, and Iran.

After the Iran-Contra operation was exposed by journalists, BCCI’s global operations were raided and the bank collapsed in 1991. An investigation by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, one year later, noted the close relationship between Agha Hasan Abedi, the Pakistani head of the bank, and Sheikh Zayed, the ruler of Abu Dhabi. According to the report, Abedi lavished the sheikh with attention and flattered his ego, while coordinating everything, “from the building of the Sheikh’s palaces in Pakistan, the furnishing of his villas in Morocco and Spain, his medical appointments, to the digging of wells for his homes in the desert.”

BCCI officials later told Senate investigators that Abedi effectively “created the UAE” through his relationship with Sheikh Zayed, even suggesting the BCCI chief had originally conceived the idea of structuring the country as a federation of semi-autonomous monarchies (called “emirates”) that gave it its name. Lawyers for the Al-Nahyan family denied that Sheikh Zayed had any role in BCCI’s illicit operations, and claimed that bank officials had kept their criminal activities hidden from him.

During the BCCI boom, amid rapid global investment in the UAE, Sulayem helped lead the development of Dubai’s shipping and logistics infrastructure. In 1985, he was named chairman of the Jebel Ali Free Zone Association (JAFZA), the industrial enclave bolted to Dubai’s major sea-air port, where firms could import, store, and re-export goods quickly, by boat or by plane, without going through customs.

Because the UAE free zones did not report cargo data to the United Nations, they became popular transit points for illicit goods traveling to and from Africa. Tobacco was smuggled from the Dubai free zone into the Port of Djibouti to be distributed across Africa. Likewise, weapons were frequently routed from the UAE to Djibouti, where fraudulent certificates concealed guns, grenades, and ammunition in transit to Somalia.

The UAE was also a vital logistics hub during Angola’s civil war at the turn of the century. In the 1980s, Southern Air Transport planes flew hundreds of trips in Angola, carrying loads to and from diamond mines, while allegedly air-dropping weapons to the UNITA rebel army, an armed group waging an insurgency against the Angolan government. The cities of Dubai and Sharjah became essential to the logistics of guns and diamonds that fueled the war. In the 1990s, the war’s final decade, Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death,” used the free zones as aviation hubs for weapons destined for UNITA soldiers.

The UN Security Council imposed a diamond embargo in 1998, aimed at restricting diamonds sourced from the conflict in Angola. In early 2000, as global scrutiny intensified on “blood diamonds” from war zones, the Angolan government consolidated the legal rough diamond industry into a single entity dominated by Israeli diamond trader Lev Leviev, in a move to cut UNITA out of the market. In February 2002, UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi was assassinated by the Angolan army, who were supported at the time by ex-Mossad director Danny Yatom and other retired senior Israeli military officials.

Three months after Savimbi’s death, Sulayem founded the Dubai Multi Commodities Center (DMCC). Based in DMCC’s Almas Tower, the Dubai Diamond Exchange houses a Kimberley Process office, where rough diamonds are inspected and certified for export. With the creation of a regulated export pipeline, UNITA’s illicit diamond-trading structures were rapidly dismantled, and the Angola war drew to a close. By 2007, Sulayem’s son was named executive chairman of the DMCC, as it became the key bureaucratic chokepoint for routing rough stones and precious metals from Africa to the rest of the world.

According to Rolling Stone journalist Vicky Ward, Epstein later bragged that he had made his fortune from “arms, drugs, and diamonds.” When federal authorities raided Epstein’s New York mansion in July 2019, they discovered forty-eight loose diamond stones, and a large diamond ring in a locked safe. Documents released in December 2025 under the Epstein Files Transparency Act suggest that the diamonds had been evaluated by a diamond grading laboratory between 1998 and 2004. The original source of Epstein’s diamonds is unknown.

READ MORE:

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/jeffrey-epstein-united-arab-emirates-sultan-sulayem-dubai-dp-world

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MEANWHILE: WOOOOOHOOOOooooooo.... 

The diamonds arrive in secret. Plucked out of one of the deepest holes ever cut into the earth, beneath the permafrost of Siberia, and then shipped across the world on shadowy fleets to be cut and polished in places such as India and Dubai.

By the time they glitter in the light of Australian shop windows and on engagement ring bands, Russian diamonds look like all the other gems – and so does their paperwork. You’d never know that that beautiful rock beneath the glass, already many millions of years old, came from a Kremlin-owned mine.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/australia-s-diamond-back-door-blood-jewels-slipping-past-borders-to-fund-russia-s-war-20260218-p5o3hs.html

ACTUALLY, THE RUSSIAN DIAMONDS ARE GENERALLY "BIGGER AND BETTER"....

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BEFORE BLASTING PUTIN [AND HIS "CRONIES"] TAKE ON BOARD THE CONCEPT THAT "AMERICA HAS WISHED TO DESTROYED RUSSIA SINCE 1917 AND THAT THE NATO EXPANSION TO THE RUSSIAN BORDER IS PART OF THIS PLAN...

SO PUTIN IS RIGHTFULLY FIGHTING BACK AGAINST THIS CRAP, THAT INCLUDES THE KIEV REGIME BULLSHIT... BUT OUR WESTERN MEEEEEDIOCRE-MEEEEDIA STILL BLAMES PUTIN FOR ALL THE ILLS OF THE WORLD, INCLUDING SPEWING THE SHORT-LIVED NEWS THAT "EPSTEIN WAS A RUSSIAN SPY"... NO, HE WAS NOT. HE WAS WORKING [IF ONE CAN CALL DEBAUCHERY, WORK] FOR ISRAEL...

MEANWHILE ZELENSKY IS AN MI6 ASSET WHO IS PUSHED TO CARRY ON FIGHTING NO MATTER WHAT, WHILE HE IS TAKING A ROYAL BEATING... OF COURSE MI6 HAS BEEN UNCOVERED BY THE RUSSIANS SERVICES AS THE SOURCE OF A FEW SHENANIGANS — AND SOME UNSAVOURY RETALIATIONS MAY BE [ARE] COMING SOON....

IN REGARD TO THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT WE CAN SAY IT HAS ZERO [OFFICIAL] UNDERSTANDING OF THE YUCKRAINE/RUSSIA CONFLICT AND HAS CHOSEN TO STAND WITH THE KIEV-SHIT...

OH AND PLEASE DO NOT HOPE FOR A CHANGE ON THIS LUNACY... ASIO, MI6 AND THE CIA WORK TO THE SAME TUNE [IF YOU CAN CALL THIS DISINFORMATION, TUNE] — AS WITKOFF IS TRYING TO POLISH A TURDY PEACE DEAL WITH THE RUSSIANS, WHILE PUSHING THEIR BUTTONS WITH SANCTIONS AND FLATTERY [WHICH IS MORE LIKE FLATULENCE]...

SO, IT IS INTERESTING TO SEE THAT SANCTIONS HAVE FORCED RUSSIA TO BECOME MORE INVENTIVE AND SELF-RELIABLE, WHILE THE WEST HAS LOST A LOT OF TRADE AND CASH, FAR MORE THAN THE RUSSIAN "FROZEN" ASSETS, WHICH HAVE LOST THEIR VALUE AS THE PRICE OF GOLD HITS BEYOND THE ETHER...

DIAMONDS? NO RUSSIAN DIAMONDS? DE BEERS' JEWISH CUTTERS IN ANTWERP ARE CRYING IN THEIR PORRIDGE....

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.