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CEO Saad al-Kaabi says QatarEnergy may have to declare force majeure on long-term contracts for up to five years.

Iranian ⁠attacks on Qatar have wiped out ⁠17 percent of its liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity, causing an estimated $20bn in lost annual revenue and threatening supplies to Europe and ⁠Asia, QatarEnergy’s CEO says.

Saad al-Kaabi told the Reuters news agency on Thursday 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.

His comments came hours after Iran on Wednesday launched a series of attacks on oil and gas facilities across the Gulf region after the Israeli military bombed its South Pars offshore gasfield.

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.

It also has essentially blocked the Strait of Hormuz, a critical Gulf waterway through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil and LNG supplies transit, fuelling soaring petrol prices and global concerns about rising inflation.

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.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Thursday that his country would show “ZERO restraint” if its infrastructure is struck again as the Israeli attack on the South Pars gasfield continued to spur condemnation.

“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,” Araghchi wrote on X.

“Any end to this war must address damage to our civilian sites.”

‘Stay away from oil and gas facilities’

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.”

Joint attacks by the United States and Israel have severely reduced Iran’s capacity to fire missiles and drones, experts say, but Iran retains enough capabilities to inflict significant damage.

“Iran’s ballistic missile capacity is functionally destroyed. Their navy assessed combat ineffective. Complete and total aerial dominance over Iran,” the White House said on Saturday. “Operation Epic Fury is yielding massive results,” it said in reference to the war launched by Israel and the US on February 28.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump said US forces had decimated Iran’s drone manufacturing capacity.

Still, on Monday afternoon, Qatar announced it had intercepted the latest in a series of missiles fired from Iran towards the country. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain also issued alerts. A missile landed on a car in Abu Dhabi, killing a person.

So are Iran’s missile capabilities severely reduced? And how is it still firing projectiles at its neighbours and Israel?

Is Iran firing fewer missiles now?

Indeed, the number of retaliatory missiles and drones that Iran has fired towards Gulf countries, Israel and other nations in the region has seen a steep decline since the start of the war.

In the first 24 hours of the conflict, Iran had fired 167 missiles (ballistic and cruise) and 541 drones at the United Arab Emirates, for instance. By contrast, on day 15 of the conflict, it had shot four missiles and six drones, according to a tally compiled by Al Jazeera based on the emirate’s Defence Ministry statements.

The barrage against Israel has also decreased, from nearly 100 projectiles over the first two days to a single-digit number in the past few days, according to Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies.

Last week, the Pentagon said missile launches were down 90 percent from the first day of fighting and drone attacks were down by 86 percent.

How big is Iran’s missile arsenal – and how much has it been hit?

Iran has the largest inventory of ballistic missiles in the region, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence assessed in 2022. While there are no official accounts on how many missiles it has, Israeli intelligence reports suggest it counted around 3,000 missiles, a figure that dropped to 2,500 following the 12-day war last June.

Key to the US-Israel strategy has been hunting down Iran’s launchers. Each missile launch generates a signature, such as a large explosion, that can be picked up by a satellite and radar systems.

According to a senior Israeli military official cited by the Institute for the Study of the War, Israel has put up to 290 launchers out of service, out of an estimated 410 to 440 launchers.

But Iran is a vast country, and without boots on the ground, it will be hard to completely eliminate Iran’s capacity to shoot despite the US and Israel having nearly full control of the country’s airspace, said David Des Roches, an associate professor at the National Defense University in Washington, DC.

“It is not obvious to identify launchers,” Des Roches told Al Jazeera. “What we see are missiles that were put in hidden places or places not associated with the military before the war, when there was less observation”.

According to Des Roches, the slowdown in launches is due to Iranian forces having lost the capacity to launch volleys. As a result, Iran has been firing one or two missiles at a time towards civilian and commercial infrastructure, especially in Gulf countries, instead of aiming volleys at military targets. Iran insists that it is targeting only US interests in the region.

“Militarily speaking [Iran’s action] is not significant – this is what is called harassment fire to exhaust alert systems in nearby countries and scare people off,” Des Roches said.

What’s Iran’s strategy?

According to Hamidreza Azizi, an expert on Iran and visiting fellow with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWB), Tehran’s central calculation is that the Gulf and Israel may run out of their defensive capabilities before Iran runs out of missiles.

“There might be some interest in making this a war of attrition,” he said, pointing at the lower, yet constant, number of weapons launched from Iran each day.

“Although the US and Israel have been successful in taking out some of the launchers and major missile bases, the Iranians have decentralised the missile bases and missile command and they have been increasingly relying on mobile launchers which makes it more difficult for the other side to detect and target,” Azizi said. “This is a race about time.”

And in that race, Iran believes it has a chance, say experts.

“It does not matter how many you launch as long as you maintain a credible threat,” Muhanad Seloom, an assistant professor in critical security studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, told Al Jazeera. “It takes one successful drone to shatter a sense of security.”

Iran has long experience in producing cheap yet effective drones. The Shahed 136 can be made quickly and in large numbers in relatively simple factories, and several of them can be fired at once, overwhelming defences. It also doesn’t need complex launchers that can be targeted in air strikes. With a speed of just 185km/h (115mph), Shaheds can be shot down by helicopters. Still, many have managed to get through US and Gulf air defence systems.

Just on Monday, a fire broke out near the UAE’s Dubai International Airport in a drone-related incident that temporarily disrupted flights; another drone attack caused a fire at the Fujairah industrial area, also in the UAE; air sirens sounded in central Israel due to a missile fired from Iran; and in the Strait of Hormuz – a key waterway through which 20 percent of global energy supplies are shipped – hundreds of vessels remain paralysed over fear of being struck despite few attacks on ships. Since the start of the war, a maritime tracker has reported 20 incidents related to vessels.

This, say experts, is part of Iran’s defensive doctrine of asymmetric warfare against militarily superior powers, such as the US and Israel. The weaker party, Iran in this case, turns to unconventional methods of warfare, wearing down the enemy by targeting key infrastructure to inflict economic pain.

Tehran has already pushed oil prices to higher than $100 a barrel and sent global markets into panic mode. The second-biggest exporter of natural gas, Qatar, continues to keep shut its production; Bahrain’s state oil company has declared force majeure on its shipments, and oil production from Iraq’s main southern ⁠oilfields has plunged 70 percent.

If Iran can keep raising global oil prices, “it will inflict equal or more damage to the US than American bombs in Iran,” said Vali Nasr, a professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University.