The Revolutionary Guard is a "State within the State"
By Hamid Mohseni, Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung
The security apparatus of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) is complex and interwoven. At the epicenter of power are the Revolutionary Guards, which control all domestic and foreign policy operations and are becoming increasingly powerful in the process.
Revolutionary Guards units at a military parade in Tehran, CC BY 4.0, Mohammad Sedagh Heydari via Wikimedia Commons
The "Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution" (IRGC) protects the system of "rule by the Supreme Jurist" introduced by Khomeini and thus the foundation of the mullahs. As a central actor, they have far-reaching military, political and economic influence at all levels that can hardly be underestimated. On May 5, 1979, Khomeini founded the IRGC to bring together a wide variety of paramilitary Islamist groups into an ideologically reliable organization. He did not trust the regular Iranian army, which he perceived as close to the Shah and therefore feared a coup.
The IRGC has a complex network of infrastructure spread throughout the country for all of its departments active in foreign policy and domestic affairs. In terms of foreign policy, these include the elite Quds Unit, a dedicated air force, navy, ground forces, nuclear units, and responsibility for Iran's missile program. The IRGC is the executive arm and not infrequent string-puller for the Islamic Republic of Iran's (IRI) numerous entanglements in the region. Domestically, the IRGC has its own intelligence service and controls the Basij People's Militia. No action of the IRI at home or abroad takes place without the intervention of the IRGC.
IRGC: Political and economic power
The IRGC's military hegemony is accompanied by extensive political influence. The fundamentalist teachings of the mullahs are the ideological superstructure of the IRI. The mullahs also occupy the most important offices. But the IRGC also wields growing power, which now and then leads to disunity among the state elite, which otherwise strives for harmony. The most prominent example is the presidency of Ahmadinejad (2005 to 2013), a former IRGC member. The majority of his first cabinet consisted of IRGC veterans, and one-third of all parliamentarians were also Pasdaran. Today, too, many cabinet members are from the IRGC; in parliament, as many as two-thirds of all members are.
Ahmadinejad's time also included the "Green Movement," which originally formed to oppose his reelection in 2009 and posed an existential threat to the IRI. Only the IRGC and the Basij militia used massive force to stop this movement and save the IRI. Observers* see this as a kind of "soft coup" within the state that further strengthened the IRGC's position. For a long time, Soleimani, the head of the Quds unit who was killed by the United States, was considered to be the successor to the post of revolutionary leader.
The IRGC has not only occupied politically important posts, but has gradually built an economic empire. It has conglomerates of companies, financial institutions and infrastructure in almost all sectors, especially in the oil, gas and petrochemical industries, which are central to the Iranian economy, but also in telecommunications and the construction and logistics sectors. The IRGC has expanded its holdings in the powerful Boniads, corrupt NGO-like foundations with charity overtones that account for about 20 percent of Iran's GDP.
Counterinsurgency: police, Basij militia, and civilian units.
The Basij ("mobilization") militia is the IRGC's main unit for domestic affairs. It emerged in the early days of the IRI, when Khomeini longed for a rapidly mobilizable army of "20 million Iranians." Article 151 of the IRI Constitution was presumably written for this popular militia; it states that the government must provide Islamic military training for all citizens.
Together with the police, they are primarily responsible for counterinsurgency operations. Accordingly, they are hated by the population; the Basij, in particular, are seen as the regime's ideological chain dogs, since a large number of them join voluntarily. They are used very flexibly; when the bus drivers' strike was crushed in 2005-2006, Basijis drove buses to prevent local traffic from collapsing.
Another counterinsurgency grouping is the informal unit of "Lebas Shakhsi," the "civilian-clad." They are supposed to do the "dirty work," and they act accordingly: often organized as a mob of bearded men with unbuttoned shirts, vulgar rhetoric and armed with iron bars, knives and pistols, which they also make use of.
Recruitment from poor neighborhoods
Police and Basij militias are decentralized to different stations and barracks. The Iranian authorities themselves estimate the full mobilization capacity of the Basij alone to be in the tens of millions; it is probably more like several hundred thousand, who also take on other, civilian tasks such as disaster control. During particularly large waves of protest, such as the current revoluti
Second publication (Original) with kind permission of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung