Iran’s Revolutionary Guards

Introduction

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is one of the most powerful and feared organizations in Iran, playing central roles in the country’s projection of power, internal security, and economy. 

Following the 1979 revolution, Iran’s clerical leaders created the IRGC outside—and as a counterweight to—the country’s traditional armed services, which they distrusted. Today, it reports directly to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and its size and powers have expanded immensely. Among its many prominent military duties, the corps operates Iran’s formidable ballistic missile arsenal and oversees the Quds Force, an expeditionary arm that partners with Iran’s various regional affiliates, including Hamas and Hezbollah. As of late 2024, Israel was waging major conflicts with both of these militant groups, in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, respectively, and had conducted direct retaliatory strikes on Iran.   

The IRGC is also highly influential in Iran’s national politics. Many corps veterans have moved on to senior government roles, including in the cabinet, parliament, and provinces. The corps has meanwhile enriched itself with billions of dollars by running illicit commercial and financial networks around international sanctions. Many regional experts expect the IRGC to play a pivotal role in selecting a successor to the aging Khamenei, which could further consolidate the group’s power and increase barriers to political reform.

Why was the IRGC established?

The IRGC was founded in the immediate aftermath of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s fall in 1979, as leftists, nationalists, and Islamists jockeyed to set the course of the revolutionary republic. While the interim prime minister controlled the government and state institutions such as the army, many clerics and disciples of Iran’s founding supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, organized counterweights to those inherited institutions. Among them was the IRGC, which operated beyond the bounds of the law and the judiciary. Answering to the supreme leader, its command structure bypasses the elected president.

The guards were conceived as a “people’s army,” helping consolidate the revolution as Khomeini instituted a state based on the concept of velayat-e faqih, or guardianship of the jurist. The aim was to set up Iran as a constitutional republic, enveloped in a theocratic structure. Khomeini intended for the IRGC to protect the new regime from a coup d’état, such as the one in 1953 that ousted the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadeq and restored the shah to power.

How is the IRGC organized?

The Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) transformed the IRGC into more of a conventional fighting force, with a command structure similar to that of Western militaries. Now highly institutionalized, it remains a force parallel to that of Iran’s regular armed forces, with upward of 190,000 troops under its command, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). Around half of these personnel are conscripts. The IRGC’s branches include:

• ground forces based across Iran’s 31 provinces and Tehran, which number more than 150,000 troops;
• the Basij paramilitary force, which claims it can mobilize some six hundred thousand volunteers;
• naval forces, separate from the naval branch of Iran’s regular military, which have some twenty thousand sailors and are charged with patrolling Iran’s maritime borders, including the Strait of Hormuz, through which about one-third of the world’s seaborne crude oil passes each year;
• an air force of fifteen thousand personnel, also separate from a parallel branch of the regular military, which runs Iran’s ballistic missile program; and
• a cyber command, which works with IRGC-affiliated businesses on military and commercial espionage, as well as propaganda distribution, according to IISS (its precise relationship with state-affiliated hackers is unclear).

What is the IRGC’s foreign policy role?

The IRGC began sponsoring nonstate armed groups in the region in 1980s, first deploying in the Iran-Iraq War. The Quds Force emerged as the IRGC’s de facto external affairs branch, and it has developed ties with armed groups from Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Yemen, and elsewhere, providing them with training, weapons, money, and military advice to project Iran’s power abroad. Some of these groups frequently operate independently of Iran and each other, but Tehran views them as part of an anti-West “axis of resistance” under its sway. Experts say Iran has attempted to strengthen cooperation within this alliance in recent years.

By fostering these groups, Tehran has sought to export its revolution and deter aggression from Western countries and its perennial enemy Israel. The Lebanese movement Hezbollah, for example, shares Iran’s hostility toward the United States and Israel, which occupied southern Lebanon when the group was founded. The 1983 bombings of the U.S. embassy and the U.S. Marine Corps and French paratrooper barracks in Beirut, as well as the assassinations of various regime opponents, have been attributed to Iran and its proxies, namely, Hezbollah. Additionally, Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials have tied the IRGC to the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, though Tehran says it wasn’t involved.

The IRGC’s involvement in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 became a particular source of contention between Tehran and Washington. In 2007, U.S. President George W. Bush accused the Quds Force of providing Shiite Muslim militants with roadside bombs to kill American forces, though experts inside and outside the U.S. government questioned whether such orders came from Tehran directly. The Donald Trump administration blamed the IRGC for the killings of 608 U.S. troops in Iraq between 2003 and 2011.

Following the 2011 regionwide uprisings commonly known as the Arab Spring, the Quds Force deployed to Syria. Iran initially claimed the operatives were carrying out a limited mission defending Shiite shrines but later acknowledged that the force was helping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad suppress unrest among the Sunni majority population. As the discontent turned to civil war, the Quds Force served not just as military advisors, but also on the front lines, fighting alongside Syrian regime forces, Lebanese Hezbollah militants, and Afghan refugees serving in IRGC proxy militias. Meanwhile, after the Arab uprisings similarly sparked a civil war in Yemen, the IRGC channeled intelligence support, training, and weapons to Yemen’s Houthis to help the rebel movement against the combined forces of the country’s government and Iran’s rival Saudi Arabia.

Iranian officials expanded the Quds Force’s presence in both Iraq and Syria in response to the rise of the Islamic State group. They warned that if the Sunni Muslim militant organization wasn’t defeated there, it would march on Tehran. In Iraq, popular mobilizations of tens of thousands of Shiite militiamen soon eclipsed the national army. Many of these militias pledged loyalty to Iran’s supreme leader and were led by commanders who worked with the Quds Force against the U.S. occupation in the prior decade. The official who led the mobilization, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, held both Iraqi and Iranian citizenship and had served as a Quds Force officer. The mobilization provided the ground forces that rolled back the Islamic State; the United States provided air power, effectively making the guards and U.S. forces tacit partners.

That alliance proved short lived—with the Islamic State largely defeated by 2019, U.S.-Iran hostilities resumed. The following January, a U.S. drone strike killed Muhandis and powerful Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, who had cultivated Iran’s many partnerships with regional armed groups. Washington sought to stifle the guards’ influence in Iraq, which had come to rely on Iran for security, energy, and trade. Iran and its allies vowed revenge, and Tehran-backed groups ramped up attacks on U.S. coalition forces in Iraq and Syria, with one rocket attack wounding dozens of personnel in 2021.

The ties between the IRGC and its regional network have been increasingly apparent since October 2023, when Hamas perpetrated the deadliest attack on Israel in its history. The incursion immediately raised questions about whether Iran was involved, some of which remain unresolved. Supreme Leader Khamenei said publicly that Iran had no role in the October 7 attack, but some experts say that Tehran was likely aware of an impending offensive, and that it had helped facilitate it through its decades of support for the Palestinian fighters.

In the ensuing Israel-Hamas conflict, the IRGC has provided arms and other assistance to help its partners in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen attack Israeli targets in solidarity with Hamas. And, in April 2024, the IRGC fired hundreds of drones and missiles into Israel, marking Tehran’s first direct attack on Israeli territory. Although no one was killed, because Israel and its allies intercepted most of the projectiles, the attack nevertheless fed global fears of escalating conflict in the Middle East. Iranian leaders said the strike was retaliation for the alleged Israeli bombing of Iran’s embassy in Syria, where seven IRGC commanders had been killed earlier that month.

In October, the IRGC launched another wave of air strikes on Israel, consisting mostly of ballistic missiles, which marked a retaliation for a suspected Israeli assassination of a senior Hamas official in Tehran in July, and confirmed bombing of Hezbollah’s leader in Beirut in September. Israel and its allies once again largely neutralized the Iranian attacks. A retaliatory Israeli strike on Iran in late October hit the country’s air defenses and missile production facilities.

In early November, the Biden administration charged three men as part of an alleged IRGC plot to kill a U.S. journalist and critic of the Khamenei regime in New York. One of the defendants is also believed to have been tasked by the corps to assassinate former President Donald Trump.

What is the IRGC’s domestic role?

The IRGC has also become a central player in Iran’s domestic politics, evolving into what CFR’s Ray Takeyh has called the most important organization in the country. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—who led the IRGC during the Iran-Iraq War—has appointed former IRGC commanders to top political posts, and former guards in parliament tend to advocate a hard-line foreign policy, as well as support for developing a civilian nuclear program.

Because the IRGC marches in lockstep with the supreme leader’s policy positions, its powers at times seem to outshine that of Iran’s president, who does not control any of the armed forces and has relatively few powers of his own. (Only men have been president, and whether Iranian law requires this is unclear.) Although the president has sway over domestic policy—he controls the national budget, for example—his influence over foreign policy is limited. 

The organization’s influence is still superseded by that of Khamenei, with whom the IRGC shares a mutually beneficial relationship, experts say. “Since Khamenei became supreme leader in 1989, five Iranian presidents (Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mohammad Khatami, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hassan Rouhani and Ebrahim Raisi) have come and gone, but none has brought meaningful or lasting change to Iran’s power structure—or its internal or external conduct,” wrote Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,  in July 2024. “Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard—which he commands—have grown more powerful over the decades and dominate the country’s byzantine political institutions, as well as the judiciary, media and surveillance state. Social repression and endemic governmental corruption, mismanagement and incompetence have remained constant, regardless of who is president."

In 2007, the Basij was brought under the direct command of the IRGC, a reorganization some analysts attributed to a renewed focus on perceived internal threats to the regime. In June 2009, the IRGC allegedly helped fix the presidential election in Ahmadinejad’s favor. Amid subsequent mass demonstrations alleging fraud, human rights groups documented the Basij attacking protesters. Thousands were detained, and many reformist politicians and activists imprisoned.

The 2013 presidential election was also marred by IRGC intervention. While Hassan Rouhani ultimately prevailed over hard-liners favored by many guards, reports indicated that the IRGC created an atmosphere of intimidation ahead of the vote and pressured the Guardian Council, which vets candidates for their ideological suitability, to cull candidates they deemed unacceptable. The corps saw its political support grow with Iran’s 2020 general elections and the 2021 election of Rouhani’s successor, Ebrahim Raisi.

But experts say the IRGC’s heavy hand in politics and its continued willingness to harm Iranians make it unpopular among the public. The organization took a hit to its reputation after it mistakenly shot down a passenger plane flying over Iran’s air space in January 2020, killing all 176 people on board. Most of them were Iranians. In addition, the Basij and broader IRGC have been accused of beating, shooting, sexually assaulting, and torturing Iranians participating in the “Women, Life, Freedom” antigovernment protest movement that erupted in Iran in late 2022.

The surprise election of Masoud Pezeshkian as president in August 2024, following Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash, seemed to offer Iran’s reformists a glimmer of hope. But many Mideast experts see the IRGC gaining clout amid the conflict with Israel, and say they stand to wield a great deal of sway in the eventual succession process following Khamenei’s death.

How deeply is the IRGC involved in Iran’s economy?

Among the political interests the guards defend is an economic empire: according to a 2020 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “the IRGC has become the most powerful controller of all important economic sectors across Iran.” The IRGC first became an economic player [PDF] when it was charged with rebuilding infrastructure destroyed in the Iran-Iraq War, and the corps has since expanded into many other industries, including banking, shipping, manufacturing, and consumer imports. Political clout secures IRGC-affiliated companies no-bid contracts from the state to service the oil sector and develop infrastructure.

These economic activities enrich IRGC officials and fund its activities, such as weapons acquisition, covert operations abroad, and Iran’s nuclear program. They also support veterans and the families of killed IRGC members. Public works projects developing Iran’s rural regions build the IRGC goodwill it lacks in urban areas and provide work for Basij volunteers. When floods devastated rural areas in western Iran in April 2019, volunteer guards took a leading role in relief efforts. In Syria, the IRGC has spearheaded Iranian reconstruction projects.

The IRGC also participates in massive black markets. Some analysts say that the spate of U.S. sanctions has benefited the IRGC at the expense of Iran’s public and broader economy; as Iranian businesses have been cut off from licit finance and trade, the IRGC has had greater black-market opportunities. With the U.S. reimposition of oil sanctions lifted under the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, the IRGC has smuggled oil, mostly to China, and generated millions of dollars for the Quds Force and Hezbollah.