(Bloomberg) -- The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been at the center of Iran’s regional and defense policy for almost half a century. Founded shortly after the 1979 Islamic revolution with the main purpose of protecting the nascent Islamic regime and especially its clerical leadership, it’s grown into the most powerful branch of Iran’s military and has both vast economic holdings and substantial influence on Iranian politics.
The Guard, considered a terrorist organization by the US, has also been the driving force behind Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s foreign ambitions. It seeks to exert Iranian influence and to challenge US and Israeli interests in the region surrounding Iran, in part by backing allied militant groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah. That support has brought Iran and Israel perilously close to all-out war.
What is the Revolutionary Guard?
With 125,000 personnel, the corps has its own ground, air and naval divisions. It manages Iran’s ballistic missile program and has a chain of command separate from the rest of the armed forces that leads directly to Khamenei. Its elite Quds Force is primarily responsible for overseas operations, including the funding, arming and training of allied militant groups abroad.
The Guard incorporates a sizable volunteer paramilitary organization, the Basij, which has a strong role in maintaining internal security in Iran. It is deployed to disperse protests and other public gatherings, often using violence and intimidation.
The Guard also has a powerful intelligence service that operates independently of the government-run Ministry of Intelligence. After 2009, when the reelection of hardliner President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad triggered widespread popular protests, the Guard’s intelligence wing grew significantly and focused on internal dissent. It is deeply suspicious of Iranians with links to Western countries and it has targeted government officials, accusing them of spying for foreign countries.
What role has the Revolutionary Guard played overseas?
It helped build and train Hezbollah after it emerged to defend Lebanon against Israel’s 1982 invasion of the country. Since then, across the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula, the Guard has inserted itself at times of conflict and instability to bolster militant groups fighting Israeli and US interests. They include Hamas, the Palestinian group that provoked the current war with Israel with a major attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and the Houthi rebels who control northwestern Yemen.
The Guard has also held considerable sway over Iraqi politics and security since the 2003 US-led invasion, and it played a key role in propping up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after the civil war that broke out in 2011. It also fought Islamic State and helped defeat the group after it seized territory in Iraq and Syria.
In an audiotape leaked in 2021, then-Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that he was often in the dark about plans by the Guard that had a direct impact on foreign relations. He said that unilateral decisions by Qassem Soleimani, the Quds Force commander who was assassinated by the US in 2020, had sometimes made it difficult to manage important diplomatic matters, such as when Iran was negotiating its 2015 deal with world powers to limit its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of related sanctions.
Why does the US list the Guard as a terror organization?
The US has listed Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism since 1984. In 2019, under then-President Donald Trump, it specifically named the Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, for the first time applying that designation to a state institution. According to the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Quds Force “uses its intelligence and military capabilities to support its own terrorist operations and those of its partners and proxies.”
Trump’s presidency marked the start of a much more hostile US policy toward Iran and the Guard in particular. As part of Trump’s so-called “maximum pressure strategy,” the US withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal and reimposed a much stronger sanctions regime on Iran that heavily targeted the Guard and culminated in the killing of Soleimani in a drone strike in Baghdad.
What’s the Guard’s role in the escalation between Israel and Iran?
Iran is a staunch opponent of the Israeli state and its occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Israel regards Iran’s potential to build nuclear weapons as a threat to its existence and is thought to be behind a campaign of sabotage against the country’s atomic program.
For years, the two have attacked each other — mostly quietly and in Iran’s case often using the militias supported by the Guard — while avoiding an escalation into direct war. But the Israel-Hamas war has tested the bounds of that shadow war.
As Guard-supported groups have stepped up attacks on Israel in solidarity with Hamas, Israel has struck back, sometimes hitting the Guard itself. An airstrike in April that Iran blamed on Israel killed a Guard commander and triggered the first direct missile strike by Iran from its own territory on Israel. This prompted a counterstrike and marked a significant escalation. Iran launched a second barrage of missiles on Israel Oct. 1 after Israeli forces assassinated the leader of Hezbollah, Iran’s most prized regional ally, and moved into southern Lebanon as part of a campaign against the militia.
What’s the Guard’s role in Iran’s economy?
Scholars estimate that the Guard controls 20% to 40% of Iran’s economy. As the owner of one of Iran’s largest engineering conglomerates, the Guard directly and indirectly employs some 200,000 people in construction jobs. It’s been involved in major infrastructure projects including Iran’s newest refinery, which is a major source of gasoline for the country.
How is the Guard perceived domestically?
At times, the Guard has stirred national solidarity and support for the regime — for instance when it defended Iran during its eight-year war with Iraq and fought Islamic State. But it has drawn significant anger for the brutal way it treats protesters and political dissent, particularly in 2009 and during a popular uprising in 2022. Its Basij militia is disliked and feared especially among middle class Iranians in urban centers and by those in remote, impoverished borderlands where religious and ethnic minorities complain of being oppressed and disenfranchised.
Antipathy for the Guard was galvanized in 2020 when, in a case of what it called mistaken identity, its forces shot down a Ukrainian airliner, killing all 176 people on board, most of them Iranian nationals. That incident triggered protests that were directed at both the Guard and Khamenei. The Guard is also commonly criticized for having outsize business interests, which aren’t subject to state regulation.
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