--- title: The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) --- The **Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps** (Sepah-e Pasdaran) was created in May 1979, in the first months after Iran's revolution, and its founding charge was telling: it existed not chiefly to fight foreign wars but to protect the new Islamic Republic from enemies *inside* the country. Where most states build an army to face the world, the Iranian regime built a second, parallel military to face its own people. That original purpose still explains most of what the IRGC is and does. ## A praetorian guard, not a national army Iran's conventional armed forces — the **Artesh** — were inherited from the monarchy and never fully trusted by the new clerical leadership. The IRGC was the answer: a force loyal less to the state than to the revolution and to its supreme leader, the armed guarantor of **velayat-e faqih**, the doctrine of clerical rule. Over four decades it grew into a sprawling institution with its own ground, naval, and aerospace branches, its own intelligence arm, and command of the **Basij**, the volunteer militia used to police protests and enforce ideological discipline in the streets. Human-rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented the central role of these forces in suppressing the 2009 Green Movement, the November 2019 protests, and the 2022 **Woman, Life, Freedom** uprising. ## An economic empire The Guard's power is not only military. Through entities such as its **Khatam al-Anbiya** construction conglomerate, the IRGC controls large stretches of Iran's economy — infrastructure, energy, telecoms — and, according to reporting by Reuters and analysis cited by the U.S. Treasury and State Department, profits from smuggling networks and sanctioned oil sales. This entanglement of guns, faith, and business makes the Guard a power center in its own right, with commanders whose interests do not always align with ordinary Iranians or even the formal government. In April 2019 the United States designated the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, the first time Washington had so labeled part of another state's military. ## The Quds Force and the "Axis of Resistance" External operations fall to the **Quds Force**, the IRGC's expeditionary and covert-action arm. Over decades it built a network of allied non-state forces that Tehran calls the **Axis of Resistance**: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shia militias in Iraq and Syria. The strategy was to project power and deter Israel and the United States without direct conventional war. Its most prominent architect, **Qassem Soleimani**, was killed in a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad in January 2020. Following the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the war that followed, this network suffered severe reversals widely reported through 2024–2026 — the killing of senior Hezbollah and Hamas leaders, the loss of the Syrian land corridor with the fall of the Assad government, and direct strikes on Iranian soil. Analysts have described the cumulative effect as the most significant degradation of Iranian regional power in decades. Yet the IRGC's first instinct, as ever, was to tighten its grip at home rather than recalibrate abroad — a reminder that for this institution, internal control was never the means to power. It was the point. ## Related concepts ## Appears in [The Regime That Devours Its Own: Iran's Mullahs, the IRGC, and the Architecture of Atrocity](https://mystrangemind.com/p/the-regime-that-devours-its-own)