A long and troubled trail: Qatar’s IRGC cell arrests strain Iran relations

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Doha, Qatar – As Iranian missiles rained down on Gulf capitals, Qatar’s security services closed in on 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 allegations, seven had been assigned to spy on military and vital facilities inside the country while the remaining three had a more sinister brief: sabotage.

Who are the IRGC suspects, and what were they doing?

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

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

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

“This also tells us that Qatar has already investigated this, they have already interrogated 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.

“You don’t send people to other countries physically to collect general information or information related to public mood,” he said. “You don’t do that.”

The three allegedly tasked with sabotage, meanwhile, were likely special forces operatives trained to pilot drones – possibly in an attempt to mirror the tactics used by Israel and the US in their assault on Iran, where drone swarms were deployed to overwhelm air defences, Seloom said.

Zweiri noted that details about the suspects’ nationalities and precise targets remain scarce as investigations are still being conducted. But the pattern, he said, was familiar.

“Since the 1980s, there have been maybe more than 10 incidents like this in the Gulf that we know about,” he said.

The IRGC’s long shadow 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 his successor, Ali Khamenei.

“The Iranian government frankly didn’t trust the Iranian army. It saw it as too full of remnants from the shah era, so it wanted to create its own force as a loyal counterweight to the traditional army,” Rob Geist Pinfold, a lecturer 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 in, pioneering different forms of warfare, more unconventional forms of warfare, … using human wave tactics to also using clandestine special forces.”

But its reach has always extended far beyond Iran’s borders, the analysts explained, through a secretive 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, collecting data, recruiting spies, doing sabotage in countries they deem as enemies, helping … create and manage proxies for Iran in strategic spaces.”

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

In the Gulf specifically, the IRGC has left a long and troubled trail. Seloom pointed to the Abdali cell uncovered in Kuwait, where IRGC operatives 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 forces in.

“Most GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries are apprehensive of the IRGC, and there is good reason for that,” the analyst said.

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

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

He continued: “So whenever the Gulf states see instability, particularly in areas with Shia populations, they perceive that this is the malign hand of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, basically causing chaos to further Iran’s ends, and there’s that 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 primary security threat in the Gulf due to its missile, irregular and proxy warfare, and its air defence capabilities.

Even given that assessment at the time, however, the report still questioned whether Iran “would attack all Arab states in a given contingency” – a fact that has been disproven with events in 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 a large number of Shia militias throughout the Middle East.

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

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

“It is the IRGC who are setting the tone of this [current] war and very much calling the shots,” Pinfold said.

A relationship under strain

Despite the perceived threat from Iran, Qatar has long maintained one of the most carefully balanced relationships with Iran in the Gulf. The pair share the world’s largest natural gasfield, and Doha has long served as a critical back channel between Iran and the West.

It was Qatari diplomacy alongside Oman’s mediation that had been working to prevent the very conflict now embroiling the region.

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

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

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

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

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

He warned that Iran risks finding itself diplomatically isolated – not just from its adversaries but also from the countries that have, until now, served as its most important interlocutors.

“Iran will find itself isolated diplomatically because no country will engage with this kind of behaviour,” he said.

The relationship between Gulf states and Iran, Zweiri argued, has never truly been a strategic alliance – it has always been, at its core, a security challenge.

“And that itself tells a lot – about trust, about coordination, about collaboration,” he said.

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

“It seems that Qatar has calculated this and judged that it is in the best interests of the country and its foreign policy to make this public,” he said.

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

Seloom expects Qatar will eventually bring the 10 suspects to trial, as it did with Indian nationals arrested on espionage charges in a prior case in which more details emerged through the judicial process.

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

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