Who are Iran’s Revolutionary Guards?

Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was founded in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution to defend the regime against internal and external threats, but has since expanded far beyond its original mandate. Today the guard has evolved into a socio-military-political-economic force with influence reaching deep into Iran's power structure.

During the first term of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, current and former fighters carved out their place in government: they have been appointed ambassadors, mayors, undersecretaries, provincial governors, and fourteen of the country's twenty-one cabinet ministers are veterans of the force. Analysts say the organization, with its control of strategic industries, commercial services, and black-market enterprises, has evolved into one of the country's most influential domestic institutions.

Crackdowns on protestors in the wake of the disputed June 2009 presidential elections have brought new scrutiny of the guard's role. Some analysts believe IRGC influence in the political arena amounts to the irreversible militarization of Iran's government. Others, like Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University, suggest the guard's power has grown to exceed that of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who legally has final say on all state matters. But Frederic Wehrey, an adjunct senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation and the co-author of a recent study on the IRGC, notes that the Revolutionary Guard is far from a cohesive unit of likeminded conservatives. Instead, he says, it's a heavily factionalized institution with a mix of political aspirants unlikely to turn on their masters.

'Guardians' of the revolution
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or Pasdaran in Persian, was formed by former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It was originally created as a "people's army" similar to the U.S. National Guard; commanders report directly to the supreme leader, Iran's top decision-maker. Iran's president appoints military leaders of the guard but has little influence on day-to-day operations.

Current forces consist of naval, air, and ground components, and total roughly 125,000 fighters. The corps' primary role is internal security, but experts say the force can assist Iran's regular army, which has about 350,000 soldiers, with external defenses. Border skirmishes during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s helped transform the guard into a conventional fighting force organized in a command authority similar to Western armies; some analysts compare it to the "old Bolshevik Red Army."

The guard also controls Iran's Basij Resistance Force, an all-volunteer paramilitary wing which, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies' annual assessment of the world's militaries, consists of as many as one million conscripts.

Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former CIA analyst, says the Revolutionary Guard was created as a "counterweight to the regular military, and to protect the revolution against a possible coup." Khomeini's revolutionary government, which toppled the U.S.-backed regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was seeking to avoid a repeat of a successful 1953 coup that ousted another revolutionary government. But the guards' activities in recent years have been aimed at protecting Iranian interests far beyond Tehran.

International adventurism
Military analysts say the guard began deploying fighters abroad during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 1988, "export[ing] the ideals of the revolution throughout the Middle East." The Quds Force, a paramilitary arm of the Revolutionary Guards with less than a thousand people, emerged as the de facto external-affairs branch during the expansion.

Its mandate was to conduct foreign-policy missions — beginning with Iraq's Kurdish region — and forge relationships with Shiite and Kurdish groups. A Quds unit was deployed to Lebanon in 1982, where it helped in the genesis of Hezbollah. Another unit was sent to Bosnia to back Bosnian Muslims in their civil war in the early- and mid-1990s. More recently, some experts say, the Quds Force has shipped weapons to the Lebanon-based Hezbollah, Gaza-based Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and is also supplying munitions to the Taliban in Afghanistan and Shiite militias in Iraq.

The guard's alleged involvement in Iraq has been a particular point of contention between Washington and Tehran. Former President Bush accused Iran in February 2007 of providing roadside bombs to "networks inside Iraq."

A month later coalition forces captured Ali Musa Daqduq, a Lebanese-born member of Hezbollah operating in Iraq, and Pentagon officials said Daqduq was working with the Quds Force to train Iraqi extremists in logistics, firearms, and explosives. Gen. David Petraeus, then the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told lawmakers in September 2007 that the Quds Force was aiding militias in Iraq to "serve its interests and fight a proxy war" with coalition forces, and in a September 2007 interview with military reporters, former Multi-National Force-Iraq spokesman Maj. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner said six operatives with Quds Force links had been arrested in 2007. Despite repeated Iranian denials, U.S. congressional leaders in late 2007 designated the guard as a foreign terrorist organization, cutting off Iranian companies and individuals from the U.S. financial system.

Yet, not everyone is convinced Iran's role in Iraq is as direct as U.S. officials suggest, or its pursuit of nuclear technology is as clear-cut, as this Backgrounder explains. Likewise, some experts see the Guard's role in Afghanistan as exaggerated. While U.S. military officials have accused Iran of supplying the Afghan Taliban with weapons, CFR International Affairs Fellow George Gavrilis says there is a lack of evidence to support the charges. "Iran has a vested interest in a stable, well-governed Afghanistan," Gavrilis writes, "an interest that it has protected since the fall of the Taliban."

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