Iran’s strike on Qatar’s Ras Laffan gas facility will cut an estimated 17% of the country’s Liquefied Natural Gas export capacity for up to five years, officials say. The damage is a major blow to the global energy market, which could disrupt supplies to Europe, Asia and beyond.
Qatar’s prime minister has said Iran’s claims that it is targeting US bases is “unacceptable and unjustified”, after it attacked Ras Laffan gas plant yesterday and called on Iran to stop expanding the conflict in the region.
After the assassination of Ali Larijani, the powerful secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, questions have emerged over who will lead the country.
Larijani was one of the government’s most prominent faces, who had stepped into the spotlight after the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top military and political figures by Israel and the US, which began attacking Iran on February 28.
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Mojtaba Khamenei has been announced as his father’s successor as supreme leader. But US officials claim that he is wounded, and analysts say he has never held an executive role. That has left observers wondering what the chain of command looks like in Tehran, and who the most powerful figures in the country are.
For now, analysts said it wasn’t completely clear who would succeed Larijani. Historian Reza H Akbari, who is also an analyst on Iran at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, said that while there are mechanisms and constitutional processes in place, specific names might be harder to guess.
The number of assassinations also could lead to lesser-known entities assuming powerful positions, or even less transparency, analysts said.
“It might be in Iran’s interest not to name a successor to Larijani, since that would just be putting a target on his back,” Barbara Slavin, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center, told Al Jazeera.
However, she said there were a number of figures who “remain influential in both the political and military realms”.
Among the names Slavin said could play important roles are Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the parliament; Saeed Jalili, a former national security adviser who was also involved in nuclear negotiations; Ali Akbar Salehi, a former foreign minister who is also a nuclear expert; Hassan Rouhani, the former president and national security adviser; and Mohsen Rezaie, the former head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). who has been named a senior adviser to Mojtaba Khamenei.
“Other IRGC figures will be important, including Ahmad Vahidi, members of its intelligence branch, and leaders in the Basij,” Slavin said.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was Iran’s leader for 36 years. He guided the country’s decision-making domestically and internationally and expanded the influence of the IRGC. But despite having a single leader for nearly four decades, the Iranian system is somewhat decentralised, according to analysts.
“The Iranian system is durable and built to take hits like this,” Akbari told Al Jazeera.
“One of the ways they do that is what has been nicknamed the mosaic defence, essentially the process through which regional and provincial commanders of the country’s military apparatus are empowered to act autonomously,” Akbari said.
Still, the killing of Khamenei and a number of other figures, including commander of the internal Basij militia Gholamreza Soleimani, has had an impact on Iran’s chain of command, analysts said.
And yet, it is unlikely to uproot the regime, even as both US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have said, at times, that regime change is the goal for Iran.
“This morning we eliminated Ali Larijani, the boss of the Revolutionary Guards, which is the gang of gangsters that actually runs Iran,” Netanyahu said on Tuesday.
“If we persist in this – we will give [Iranians] a chance to take their fate into their own hands,” he said.
Analysts, however, said the decapitation efforts were unlikely to cripple the regime.
“There’s always another leader,” Mohamad Elmasry, professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, told Al Jazeera. “I don’t think this is going to suggest any kind of collapse of the Iranian regime.”
What it has done, according to Akbari, is remove “potential off-ramps” that would lead to de-escalation of the war. Larijani was one of the officials who had been involved in negotiations with the West over the nuclear file, and had the influence and authority to calm tensions.
Larijani was the highest-ranking political official assassinated since Khamenei was killed on the first day of the war.
Akbari said that even with Larijani assassinated, the Supreme National Security Council that he headed is still operational, and the country’s constitution has mechanisms aimed at keeping the system ticking.
Like many of the top officials of his generation, Larijani fought in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). That generation is giving way now to a younger generation, analysts said, who instead cut their teeth fighting in Iran’s proxy wars in Syria and Iraq. And analysts fear that the US decision to undermine negotiations, as well as the killing of many Iranian officials with the authority to de-escalate tensions, may lead to the emboldening of a new generation of younger hardliners.
United States President Donald Trump has told Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi that he expects her country to “step up” to assist with securing the Strait of Hormuz amid the US- and Israeli-led war against Iran.
But at a news conference in the Oval Office on Thursday, a reporter pressed Trump about why he did not tell US allies like Japan in advance about his administration’s plans to attack Iran.
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Trump responded with a quip about the Japanese sneak attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor during World War II.
“We wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan, OK? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?” Trump asked Takaichi, who appeared uncomfortable.
“You believe in surprise, I think, much more so than us,” Trump added.
It was a remarkable moment in an otherwise short Oval Office media appearance for the two leaders, who are expected to discuss trade and global security.
Takaichi is among only a handful of leaders to visit the White House since the war against Iran began on February 28, and she is one of the first to meet with Trump after he pushed over the weekend for a coalition of allies to defend the Strait of Hormuz.
The strait is a vital artery for the oil trade, with nearly a fifth of the world’s supply passing through the narrow waterway. Iran, however, has largely shut down traffic through the strait, causing oil prices worldwide to spike.
In opening remarks, Takaichi condemned ”Iran’s actions such as attacking the neighbouring region and also the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz”.
But she also hinted at her concerns about the war overall, pointing to the “ severe security environment” it has created and its anticipated economic effects.
“The global economy is about to experience a huge hit because of this development,” Takaichi told reporters in the Oval Office, referring to the war. “But even against such a backdrop, I firmly believe that it is only you, Donald, that can achieve peace across the world.”
The meeting between the two leaders comes as Trump continues to assert that Iran is on the verge of defeat, even as the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian strikes on energy infrastructure across the Middle East region throttle global energy markets.
“You could end this thing in two seconds if you wanted to,” Trump said of the war effort. “But we are being very judicious.”
Before the meeting with Trump, Japan and five European nations stated that they would consider “appropriate efforts” to help reopen the strait. It is unclear what such an effort might look like in practice.
Japan is further limited by its 1947 constitution, which the US imposed after World War II.
It establishes Japan as a pacifist country and includes a pledge that Japan will “renounce war” as well as the “threat or use of force”.
Still, Trump offered praise for Takaichi and signalled that he had promising conversations behind closed doors with Japan’s leadership.
“We’ve had tremendous support and relationship with Japan on everything,” Trump said. “And I believe that based on statements that were given to us yesterday, the day before yesterday, having to do with Japan, they are really stepping up to the plate.”
Trump then quipped that Japan was offering help, “unlike NATO”.
Trump has given contradictory statements about the strait. In different public appearances, he has said that it is safe for ships to pass through and that the US could retake the strait alone.
“We don’t need much. We don’t need anything,” Trump said on Thursday. “We don’t need anything from Japan or from anyone else. But I think it’s appropriate that people step up.”
But Trump appeared to undermine his own statements over the weekend, when he told reporters he had reached out for assistance.
It “would be nice to have other countries police” the strait, Trump said aboard Air Force One. “We are demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory. Because it is their territory. It’s a place from which they get their energy.”
In Thursday’s news conference, he emphasised that other countries, including Japan, received more of their oil and natural gas supplies by way of the strait than the US does.
He argued that it is therefore the responsibility of other countries to secure the strait.
“That country is close to demolished,” Trump said of Iran on Thursday. “The only thing is the straight. It’s very hard. You could take two people, and they could drop little bombs in the water, and they’re holding things up.”
Asian nations are expected to be among those hardest hit by surging energy prices, and Trump reasserted during the meeting that he had told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to carry out more strikes on Iranian energy facilities.
An Israeli attack on Iran’s South Pars gasfield on Wednesday prompted retaliatory Iranian attacks against the Ras Laffan natural gas facility in Qatar, which accounts for about 20 percent of global liquid natural gas supply.
A missile struck metres away from a Russia Today reporter as he was covering Israeli attacks on southern Lebanon, injuring the journalist and his camera operator. Israel has heavily bombed the area over the past few weeks, displacing hundreds of thousands of people.
Iran has warned it will show “zero restraint” if the country’s energy facilities are targeted again, a day after Israel struck Iran’s critical South Pars gasfield and Tehran hit energy facilities across the Gulf region in retaliation.
“Our response to Israel’s attack on our infrastructure employed FRACTION of our power. The ONLY reason for restraint was respect for requested de-escalation,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi had written in a post on X on Thursday.
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“ZERO restraint if our infrastructures are struck again.”
South Pars is Iran’s biggest source of domestic gas supply, providing 80 percent of the country’s natural gas needs.
The warning comes as Qatar continues to assess damages at its Ras Laffan Industrial City site, which processes approximately 20 percent of the global supplies of liquefied natural gas (LNG), after an Iranian attack.
The strike wiped out about 17 percent of Qatar’s LNG export capacity, causing an estimated $20bn in lost annual revenue and threatening supplies to Europe and Asia, according to QatarEnergy’s CEO.
Saad al-Kaabi told the Reuters news agency that two of Qatar’s 14 LNG trains, the equipment used to liquefy natural gas, and one of its two gas-to-liquids facilities were damaged in Iranian strikes this week.
The repairs will sideline 12.8 million tonnes of LNG production per year for three to five years, he said.
“I never in my wildest dreams would have thought that Qatar would be – Qatar and the region – in such an attack, especially from a brotherly Muslim country in the month of Ramadan, attacking us in this way,” al-Kaabi said in an interview.
Tehran has been firing missiles and drones across the Middle East in response to the United States-Israeli war on Iran, which began on February 28.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated in a news conference that the aim of the war on Iran was to remove the nuclear and ballistic missile threats “before they’re buried deep underground and become immune from aerial attack”.
The prime minister said Israel and the US were “destroying the factories that produce the components to make missiles, wiping out their industrial base in a way we didn’t before”, claiming that Iran’s “command and control structure is in utter chaos”.
Netanyahu also stressed that Israel “acted alone” in striking Iran’s South Pars gasfield and added that it would hold off on any further attacks on energy infrastructure at the request of US President Donald Trump.
Earlier on Thursday, Trump said he had told Israel not to repeat its attacks on Iranian natural gas infrastructure, after tit-for-tat strikes on energy plants sent energy prices spiralling.
Iran’s attacks on energy infrastructure have heightened tensions with its Arab Gulf neighbours, who have condemned the strikes as a violation of international law.
Iran has also effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz, a critical Gulf waterway through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil and LNG supplies transit, driving soaring petrol prices and global concerns about rising inflation.
During Thursday’s interview with Reuters, al-Kaabi said QatarEnergy may have to declare force majeure on long-term contracts for up to five years for LNG supplies bound for Italy, Belgium, South Korea and China due to the two damaged trains.
“I mean, these are long-term contracts that we have to declare force majeure. We already declared, but that was a shorter term. Now it’s whatever the period is,” he said.
QatarEnergy had declared force majeure on its entire output of LNG after earlier attacks on its Ras Laffan production hub, which came under fire again on Wednesday. “For production to restart, first we need hostilities to cease,” al-Kaabi said.
The damaged units cost about $26bn to build, al-Kaabi said. He also told Reuters that the scale of the damage from the attacks has set the region back 10 to 20 years.
“If Israel attacked Iran, it’s between Iran and Israel. It has nothing to do with us and the region,” he said.
“And so now, in addition to that, I’m saying that everybody in the world, whether it’s Israel, whether it’s the US, whether it’s any other country, everybody should stay away from oil and gas facilities.”