The Greater and Lesser Tunb Islands are two small, largely uninhabited islands in the Persian Gulf, off the coast of Sharjah, one of the seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates. Per John Kiriakou, they belonged to Sharjah and were, in one description, the size of a city block, holding nothing but sand; Iran occupied them in a 1990s incident, planting flags with a handful of soldiers on each.[1] Elsewhere he gives the dimensions as “like you know a mile by two miles”, and the population as “a couple of goats.”[2][3]
He dates the seizure to 1996 and puts the force at about fifteen men: “For 100 years, they belonged to the Emirate of Sharjah. Right? And then in 1996, the Iranians sent like 15 troops and they just took them. And the Emirates didn’t do anything.”[4] In a later account he corrects himself on the decade mid-sentence — “in the middle 1980s, I’m sorry, 1990s” — and adds that Iran had long claimed the islands too, and has held them ever since.[5]
The analysis
Kiriakou’s own involvement was as a mentor rather than as the analyst of record. He had just returned from the Middle East — “this was like 1996” — and was assigned to mentor a brand-new junior analyst, a “really really smart young woman” fresh out of the University of Virginia who had been given the United Arab Emirates precisely because it was quiet: “nothing ever happens in the UAE, we’re close friends with the UAE, it was just someplace where she could learn, you know, the writing style.” Then Iran took the islands.[6]
His prediction, offered offhandedly in conversation, was that the UAE government would never do anything to get the island back and would simply concede it to the Iranians. Asked why, he gave the structural answer: the islands are owned by Sharjah, a minor emirate nobody in the capital cares about; “foreign policy is run by Abu Dhabi and business policy is run by Dubai”, and in Dubai much of what they trade is with Iran. “So why upset the apple cart over a little tiny island that only has a couple of goats on it?”[7][3] He gives the same reasoning in stronger financial terms three decades later: Dubai does “billions and billions of dollars of business with Iran”, the Tunbs were owned by Sharjah, and “it’s not worth screwing up that financial relationship for these two uninhabited islands.”[4][8]
The assessment he wrote at the time rested on the same trade dependence, which he has put at roughly 70% for Sharjah.[9]
The junior analyst
The story does not end with the prediction. The young analyst took the question into her boss’s office, came back out, sat down, and told Kiriakou she had just resigned. Asked why, she said she had realised that no matter how much she liked the job, she would never know — the sentence Kiriakou leaves hanging at that point in the telling.[3]
‘Make the Tunbs Sharjah again’
The islands returned as a live question in 2026. Emirati media, Kiriakou reported, were speculating that Donald Trump was going to seize the Tunbs and give them back to Sharjah — “Liberate the Tunbs. Give it back to Sharjah. Make the Tunbs Sharjah again.”[8]
Against that conventional wisdom he made an argument from geography rather than from law. “Number one, no human beings live there. They’re just empty. You’re going to liberate them. Okay, great. And then what? Then what are you going to do? Has it changed anything at all? Of course not. Nothing.” And the position such a force would find itself in: “if you’re on the tombs and you’re looking at a country that’s the size of Western Europe, then what do you do? What comes next?”[10]