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

The arrests will cause a deep rift in Iran’s relationship with Qatar, one of its closest interlocutors in the Gulf, analysts say.Published On 5 Mar 2026Doha, 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.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemslist 1 of 4Qatar announces arrest of Iran’s IRGC sleeper cellslist 2 of 4Iranian missile hits base housing US troops in Qatarlist 3 of 4Iran targets Kurdish groups in Iraq, begins wave of attacks on Israellist 4 of 4Iran war: What is happening on day six of US-Israel attacks?end of listQatar had already been reeling from an unprecedented barrage, its Ministry of Defence detecting the launch of dozens of drones and missiles towards its airspace since Iran began retaliating against a joint United States-Israeli assault 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 prevent this very war, had been infiltrated.“What’s really interesting is the fact that it happens with Qatar – a country with special relations with Iran for years, that mediates between them and the Americans to solve the nuclear issue,” Mahjoob Zweiri, director of the Gulf Studies Center at Qatar-university" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="39757" data-entity-type="organization">Qatar University, told Al Jazeera.“This will raise a lot of questions about the nature of Iran’s understanding of its relations with other countries.”Relations between Tehran and Doha have already proven icy. 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 missile attacks 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 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 GulfFounded 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.