Iran’s Revolutionary Guards
Updated: October 25, 2007
Introduction
Policymakers in Washington and military leaders in Baghdad accuse the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guards of smuggling arms and fighters into neighboring Iraq. In September 2007, U.S. congressional leaders urged designation of the guard as a foreign terrorist organization. The move was aimed at tightening economic sanctions against the force. A month later, the Bush administration announced “sweeping new sanctions” against the guard, cutting off Iranian companies and individuals from the U.S. financial system. Iran denies sending weapons and fighters across the border, and U.S. military officials have so far provided scant evidence linking weaponry with captured Iranian-backed fighters. But allegations of meddling in Iraq have been frequent, raising new questions about the guard’s structure, its influence in Iran and Iraq, and how effective efforts to curb its finances might be.
Guardians of the Revolution
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or Pasdaran in Farsi, 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 Revolutionary Guards’ primary role is internal security, but experts say the force assists 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.” According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, which publishes an annual assessment of the world’s militaries, the guards also control Iran’s Basij Resistance Force, an all-volunteer paramilitary wing of roughly one million conscripts.
Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former CIA analyst during the Islamic uprisings, says the Revolutionary Guards were 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 today, Riedel says, the guards’ activities are aimed at protecting Iranian interests far beyond Tehran.
The Guards’ Influence Grows
Military analysts say the guard began deploying fighters (NPR) 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. Riedel says 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 Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and is also supplying munitions to the Taliban in Afghanistan and Shiite militias in Iraq.
The suspected spread of the Revolutionary Guards’ international reach coincided with a growing influence at home. Mehdi Khalaji, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, writes that “the Revolutionary Guards are the spine of the current political structure [in Iran] and a major player in the Iranian economy.” Despite Iranian law forbidding autocratic rule, Khalaji says Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has used his control of the guard to expand his own influence—both politically and economically. Khamenei appointed former Revolutionary Guards commanders to top political posts, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. The Revolutionary Guards also control the country’s strategic missile forces, mounts foreign and domestic intelligence operations, and have sole jurisdiction of patrolling the Iranian capital.
Embedded in Iraq, But How Deep?
Washington has long accused the Revolutionary Guards of seeking to destabilize Iraq by supporting Shiite extremists. President Bush in February 2007 said the Quds Force was “instrumental in providing” roadside bombs to “networks inside Iraq." Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told lawmakers in September 2007 the Quds Force was aiding militias in Iraq to “serve its interests and fight a proxy war” with coalition forces. The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, says “Iran has actively undermined” a democratic transition in Iraq with the training, arming, and funding of militants.
Similar accusations are made by U.S. commanders in Baghdad. In March 2007, coalition forces captured Ali Musa Daqduq, a Lebanese-born member of Hezbollah operating in Iraq. Pentagon officials say Daqduq was working with the Quds Force to train Iraqi extremists in logistics, firearms, and explosives. Daqduq was captured with documents detailing the groups’ training tactics, officials say. Then in September 2007, coalition soldiers announced the arrest of an Iranian in northern Iraq suspected of smuggling armor-piercing explosives to Shiite militias, a charge Iran and some Iraqi officials deny. In a September 2007 interview, Maj. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, a spokesman for Multi-National Force-Iraq, said six operatives with Quds Force links have been arrested in 2007.
Iranian connections to Iraq bleed across political lines as well. Leaders in Iraq’s main Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, spent years in exile in Iran before Saddam Hussein’s ouster in 2003. CFR Adjunct Senior Fellow Vali R. Nasr writes in Foreign Affairs that the council’s militia, the Badr Brigade, was “trained and equipped by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards” during their exile. Peter W. Galbraith, writing in the New York Review of Books, says the Badr organization—now deeply rooted in Iraqi politics—was a prime beneficiary of Saddam’s ouster.
A Budding Iranian Mafia
The Revolutionary Guards have also grown into a major financial machine, economists and analysts say. The Los Angeles Times estimates the group, tasked with rebuilding the country after the war with Iraq, now has ties to over one hundred companies that control roughly $12 billion in construction and engineering capital. CFR Senior Fellow Ray Takeyh has linked the guards to university laboratories, weapons manufacturers—including Defense Industries Organization—and companies connected to nuclear technology. Khalaji, of the Washington Institute, lists the Bahman Group, which manufactures cars for Mazda, among guard-owned companies.
The Bush administration has signaled its desire to target the guards’ assets by designating it (WashPost) a foreign terrorist organization. Such a move would penalize foreign companies with U.S. subsidiaries, particularly in Iran’s oil and gas sectors, and allow the United States to block funds of companies that support guard-owned enterprises.
Mohsen Sazegara, a founding member of the Revolutionary Guards and U.S.-based Iranian dissident, says though the original charter of the elite force was to create a “people’s army,” years of political and military changes have transformed the unit into a massive money machine. Sazegara says the guards’ business dealings range from construction and manufacturing to illegal importation of alcohol. “I don’t know of any other organization in any country like the Revolutionary Guards,” Sazegara says. “It’s something like the Communist Party, the KGB, a business complex, and the mafia.”
U.S. Allegations and Tactics Questioned
Speaking in Washington on October 25, 2007, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said while the United States remains “fully committed to a diplomatic solution,” Iran’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons and support for militants in Iraq has left Washington with no choice but impose sanctions “to increase the costs to Iran [for] its irresponsible behavior.” Rice added that the United States has designated three Iranian state-owned banks as terrorist financiers.
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. Mahan Abedin, director of research for the London-based Center for the Study of Terrorism, told RFE/RL that allegations of a direct link between the Quds Force and dead American soldiers are “essentially political.” “If they have evidence,” Abedin says of the U.S. military, “they've certainly not made it public.” Gen. Bergner, speaking with reporters in September 2007 to announce the capture of suspected weapons smuggler Mahmudi Farhadi, declined to discuss evidence.
Others question what sanctions against the Revolutionary Guards or its foreign counterparts would accomplish. The U.S. State Department has included Iran on its list of state sponsors of terrorism since 1984. But efforts to slap sanctions on the country’s military forces could prove problematic, some analysts predict. Writing in the Financial Times, CFR’s Takeyh says proposed sanctions illustrate the Bush administration’s misunderstanding of Iranian politics. “At a time when the administration professes a desire for a negotiated settlement with Tehran,” Takeyh concludes, “coercing a pillar of the theocratic regime erodes the possibility of a diplomatic resolution.” Riedel is equally skeptical. “We’re not going to put them out of business.” Yet others say the move is long overdue. Because the unit’s financial holdings bleed so far into the Iranian economy, Sazegara predicts sanctions on the Revolutionary Guards “would be fairly effective on Iran as well.”
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