A long and turbulent road: arrests of an IRGC cell in Qatar strain relations with Iran | Conflict

Doha, Qatar – As Iranian missiles rained down on Gulf capitals, Qatar’s security services approached a different kind of threat.

On Tuesday, Qatar announced the arrest of 10 suspects accused of having links to two cells operating on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). According to the accusations, seven had been assigned to spy on military and vital installations within the country, while the remaining three had a more sinister mission: sabotage.

Qatar was already reeling from an unprecedented bombing: its Defense Ministry detected dozens of drones and missiles being launched into its airspace since Iran began retaliating against a joint US-Israeli attack on Saturday.

What the arrests revealed, however, went beyond the immediate conflict, analysts said: that even Qatar, one of Iran’s closest interlocutors in the Gulf and a country that had spent weeks trying to avoid this very war, had been infiltrated.

“What’s really interesting is the fact that it’s happening with Qatar, a country that has had special relations with Iran for years, mediating between them and the Americans to resolve the nuclear issue,” Mahjoob Zweiri, director of the Center for Gulf Studies at Qatar University, told Al Jazeera.

“This will raise many questions about the nature of Iran’s understanding of its relations with other countries.”

Relations between Tehran and Doha have already proven frosty. In a phone call on Wednesday night between Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, the Qatari leader rejected Iranian claims that the missile strikes have not been aimed at Qatar, saying evidence on the ground suggests otherwise.

Who are the IRGC suspects and what were they doing?

According to the Qatar News Agency, authorities found coordinates of sensitive facilities, communication devices and specialized technological equipment in the possession of the suspects. During interrogation, the suspects were said to have admitted their affiliation with the IRGC and the missions they had been assigned.

Muhanad Seloom, assistant professor of critical security studies at the Doha Institute of Graduate Studies, said the specificity of Qatar’s announcement was itself significant.

Iran has two main intelligence arms: the Ministry of Intelligence, linked to the civilian government, and the IRGC’s own intelligence apparatus. By specifically naming the IRGC, Seloom said, Qatar was making a deliberate distinction.

“This also tells us that Qatar has already investigated this, they have already questioned these people, and the investigation has reached a level of certainty that Qatar could (announce it) publicly,” he told Al Jazeera.

The seven accused of espionage, Seloom explained, were almost certainly gathering intelligence on critical infrastructure.

“People are not physically sent to other countries to collect general information or information related to the public mood,” he said. “You don’t do that.”

Meanwhile, the three allegedly tasked with sabotage were likely special forces agents trained to fly drones, possibly in an attempt to mirror tactics used by Israel and the United States in their attack on Iran, where swarms of drones were deployed to overwhelm air defenses, Seloom said.

Zweiri noted that details about the nationalities of the suspects and their precise targets remain scarce as investigations are still underway. But the pattern, he said, looked familiar.

“Since the 1980s, as far as we know, there have been perhaps more than 10 incidents like this in the Gulf,” he said.

The long shadow of the IRGC in the Gulf

Founded after the 1979 Islamic revolution, the IRGC was created to protect the regime itself, answering directly to Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini and later to his successor, Ali Khamenei.

“The Iranian government, frankly, did not trust the Iranian army. It saw it as too full of remnants of the Shah’s era, so it wanted to create its own force as a loyal counterweight to the traditional army,” Rob Geist Pinfold, a professor at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera.

“During the Iran-Iraq war (in the 1980s), the IRGC really took on a life of its own, pioneering different forms of warfare, less conventional forms of warfare… using human wave tactics and also clandestine special forces.”

But its reach has always extended far beyond Iran’s borders, analysts explained, through a secret branch known as the Quds Force.

“The Quds Force was basically the force tasked with liberating Al-Quds – Jerusalem,” Seloom said.

“They (do) traditional secret service work: espionage, data collection, recruiting spies, sabotage in countries they consider enemies, helping… to create and manage Iran’s proxies in strategic spaces.”

The face of that operation for nearly two decades was General Qassem Soleimani, who was killed by the United States in January 2020. His successor, Esmail Qaani, by most accounts, has struggled to fill that role, Seloom said, particularly after Israel and the United States systematically dismantled much of the IRGC’s senior leadership in recent months.

Specifically in the Gulf, the IRGC has left a long and problematic trail. Seloom pointed to the Abdali cell discovered in Kuwait, where IRGC agents were found with weapons caches.

In Bahrain, he noted, the IRGC was repeatedly accused of meddling, including allegedly orchestrating unrest against the ruling family, prompting Saudi Arabia to send in forces.

“Most GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries fear the IRGC, and there are good reasons for this,” the analyst said.

Pinfold agreed, noting that the IRGC’s clandestine operations generate particular fear in the Gulf and other Arab states. He described the process of “state capture,” in which a small group manages to exert enormous influence on a state and tilt its policies away from broader national interests toward the interests of the smaller group.

“That’s exactly where the IRGC really excels,” Pinfold said. “It doesn’t necessarily start conflicts, but it finds fertile ground to entrench itself and therefore project Iran’s interests.”

He continued: “So whenever the Gulf states see instability, particularly in areas with Shia populations, they perceive it to be the evil hand of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who are basically causing chaos to further Iran’s ends, and there is a broader fear of state capture.”

According to a 2023 report by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, Iran has long been a major security threat in the Gulf due to its irregular and proxy missile warfare and air defense capabilities.

However, even given that assessment at the time, the report still questioned whether Iran would “attack all Arab states in a given contingency,” a fact that has been refuted by events of recent days, and even months.

Beyond the Gulf, the IRGC has meddled in the internal affairs of other Arab countries over the years, arming and training large numbers of Shiite militias across the Middle East.

In Iraq, after the US occupation, Shiite militias became a powerful force that Iran relied on to impose its will and influence, while in Yemen, Houthi rebels gradually grew until they were able to take the capital, Saana, in 2014, forcing a sitting president to flee and then killing the former president. And Hezbollah in Lebanon became the country’s most powerful group before being weakened when Israel killed its top leaders during its 2024 war with the group.

In all of these cases and more, Iranian officials have publicly boasted about how their government controlled and influenced Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon.

“It is the IRGC who is setting the tone for this (current) war and who is making the decisions,” Pinfold said.

A relationship under strain

Despite the perceived threat from Iran, Qatar has long maintained one of the most carefully balanced relations with Iran in the Gulf. They share the world’s largest natural gas field, and Doha has long served as a critical backchannel between Iran and the West.

It was Qatari diplomacy, along with mediation from Oman, that had been working to prevent the conflict that now engulfs the region.

For Zweiri, that context is precisely what makes this week’s arrests so consequential. He also pointed out the moment.

The cell arrests are what he describes as a third attack on Qatar’s sovereignty: the first dates back to June, when Iran also launched a retaliatory wave of ballistic missiles against the Al Udeid air base in Qatar, where US troops are stationed; and the second, the Iranian drone and missiles that have been targeting the country since Saturday.

The question now is what the arrests mean for Qatar-Iran relations going forward. Analysts are direct about the likely trajectory.

Zweiri drew on an Arabic proverb to describe the dynamic: If the wind keeps coming through a door, you eventually close it.

“If you have a friend who always gives you a headache, you close the door,” he explained.

He warned that Iran runs the risk of finding itself diplomatically isolated, not only from its adversaries but also from the countries that, until now, have been its most important interlocutors.

“Iran will find itself diplomatically isolated because no country will adopt this type of behavior,” he said.

The relationship between the Gulf States and Iran, Zweiri argued, has never really been a strategic alliance; has always been, at its core, a security challenge.

“And that in itself says a lot: about trust, coordination and collaboration,” he said.

Seloom, meanwhile, pointed to a calculated dimension to Qatar’s decision to go public. Intelligence services rarely announce arrests like these, as agents are often quietly transformed into double agents or used to monitor other cells. Going public eliminates those options.

“It appears that Qatar has calculated this and has judged that making it public is in the best interest of the country and its foreign policy,” he said.

What happens next — to the suspects, to the relationship and to the broader regional order — remains to be seen, analysts said.

Seloom hopes Qatar will eventually put the 10 suspects on trial, as it did with Indian nationals arrested on espionage charges in an earlier case in which more details emerged during the court process.

For now, the arrests have drawn a sharp public line, overcoming Iran’s reliance on the gray space between ally and adversary with its neighbors.