Widely described as a “state within a state”, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) stands as one of the most influential and heavily scrutinized military-political organizations in the Middle East, anchoring Iran’s Islamic establishment for more than four decades while emerging as a central target of pressure from the United States, Israel and Western allies. This deep dive examines the corps’ foundational origins, sprawling institutional structure, pervasive domestic influence, regional geopolitical role, and its current position amid ongoing external targeting and international sanctions.
Founded in March 1979, just one month after conservative militias toppled the Western-backed monarchy of Shah Reza Pahlavi, the IRGC was created with two core missions: to safeguard the newly established Islamic revolutionary order and to act as a check on Iran’s traditional national army, the Artesh, which retained deep ties to the deposed shah and was widely suspected of plotting a counter-revolutionary coup. Known locally as the Pasdaran, or “guardians”, the organization was structured as a parallel military force separate from the official Artesh, which today counts roughly 600,000 active troops. From its earliest days, the IRGC moved to sideline leftist factions that had joined the anti-shah uprising, viewing these groups as ideologically incompatible and too closely aligned with the Soviet Union.
Today, the IRGC operates five distinct branches: a ground force, an air division, a navy, the elite overseas Quds Force (translated as “Jerusalem Force”), and the Basij, a large volunteer paramilitary network. Current estimates place the corps’ active-duty personnel at more than 150,000, while Basij part-time reserve volunteers number anywhere between 100,000 and one million. Beyond conventional military duties, the IRGC holds exclusive control over Iran’s ballistic missile program—weapons it has deployed against Israeli targets—and is tasked with protecting the country’s border infrastructure and nuclear facilities.
Unlike Iran’s elected government institutions, the IRGC is an unelected body that operates directly under the authority of Iran’s supreme leader, currently Mojtaba Khamenei. Its influence extends far beyond the military sphere, penetrating nearly every aspect of Iranian domestic life, from commerce and governance to education and sports. Thousands of IRGC veterans occupy senior positions in the cabinet, parliament, and state agencies, giving the corps effective veto power over political appointments and private business ventures. Through the Basij network, plainclothes volunteers are embedded in neighborhoods, schools and universities to enforce conservative religious social norms, leading critics to label the Basij a state-sanctioned “morality police”. The network has also played a central role in cracking down on political dissent, crushing major public protest movements including the 1999 student protests, the 2009 Green Movement, and ongoing 2024–2025 demonstrations, which human rights groups say have left thousands of civilian protesters dead. Despite this repressive role, the IRGC maintains some domestic support through its provision of social services, including disaster response and job creation in impoverished rural regions.
As a major economic actor, the IRGC controls hundreds of state-owned contracts, a portfolio that expanded dramatically during the 2005–2013 presidency of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The organization has built near-monopolies across key Iranian industries, and analysts estimate it captures roughly 50% of all revenue from Iran’s critical oil sector. Thomas Juneau, a professor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, notes that these vast business holdings allow the IRGC to cement its hold on power. “The corps’ business interests allow the IRGC and its sympathisers to themselves profit, to have access to pots of cash with which they can buy off the loyalty of others, and to marginalise competing business interests,” Juneau explained to Middle East Eye. “In that sense, the IRGC has both a vested interest in the survival of the Islamic Republic and its web of cronyism, as well as the means to protect its survival.”
The IRGC’s most consequential international role is its leadership of what Tehran calls the “Axis of Resistance”, a regional network of armed and political groups opposed to Israeli, U.S. and Saudi influence in the Middle East. Through its Quds Force overseas wing, the IRGC provides funding, training and weapons to a coalition that includes Hamas in occupied Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, factions of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, and the Houthi movement (Ansar Allah) in Yemen. Support for the Palestinian cause has long been a core ideological pillar of the IRGC, and each member of the network has launched sustained military action against Israeli and Western targets: Hamas carried out the October 7, 2023 attacks that sparked the ongoing Gaza war, Hezbollah has maintained a low-intensity conflict with Israel along the Lebanon border since the 1980s, and the Houthis have launched drone strikes on Israeli territory and blockaded commercial shipping in the Red Sea. It is important to note that each group retains a degree of operational independence from Tehran; Iran publicly denied any advance knowledge of the October 7 attacks, a conclusion that U.S. intelligence agencies have corroborated.
The IRGC also provided critical military and political support to Bashar al-Assad’s government throughout Syria’s 13-year civil war, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions more. For decades, Assad-controlled Syria served as a key supply route for IRGC weapons bound for Hezbollah in Lebanon, a link that was broken when Assad’s government fell in December 2024.
The IRGC’s institutional identity and modern worldview were deeply shaped by the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War, one of the deadliest conflicts of the late 20th century. Just months after the revolution, the IRGC led Iran’s response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion, with tens of thousands of young, minimally trained volunteers deployed to frontline battles where chemical weapons and widespread minefields left massive casualties. Sina Azodi, an assistant professor of Middle East politics at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, calls the conflict a turning point in the corps’ development. “The current Iranian political leadership were the volunteers of the Iran-Iraq war who with very basic training went to the front lines with nothing more than assault rifles,” Azodi notes. He adds that the widespread international support for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the conflict left a lasting collective trauma that defines the IRGC’s outlook today: “Their mindset is shaped by those traumas and the need for Iran to be able to stand on its own feet to defend the country.”
After the war ended in 1988, the IRGC took the lead on national reconstruction, growing steadily in power and influence under the long tenure of former supreme leader Ali Khamenei. It expanded its independent intelligence branch, which now operates as a rival to Iran’s official Ministry of Intelligence. Much of the IRGC’s transregional network was built by Qassem Soleimani, the charismatic Quds Force commander who led the wing from 1998 until his assassination in a U.S. drone strike in 2020. At the time of his death, Soleimani was widely regarded as the second most powerful figure in Iran, behind only the supreme leader. His killing triggered massive outrage across Iran, and just five days later, the IRGC accidentally shot down a Ukrainian commercial passenger plane departing Tehran’s main airport, killing all 176 people on board. The organization later issued a public apology, admitting it had misidentified the civilian aircraft as an enemy military plane.
For decades, the IRGC has been labeled an adversary by most Western governments and many Arab states in the region, and it has been subject to sweeping international sanctions. In recent years, more than two dozen countries have gone beyond sanctions to formally designate the entire IRGC as a terrorist organization, a designation that criminalizes any form of trade, communication or public support for the corps and its affiliates. The U.S. first proscribed the Quds Force as a terrorist entity in 2007, and extended the designation to the entire IRGC in 2019 under then-President Donald Trump. That move faced private pushback from some Pentagon and CIA officials, who noted that designating an official arm of another sovereign government as a terrorist group is unprecedented in diplomatic practice. The Biden administration reportedly considered reversing the designation, though it ultimately did not act. Following the U.S. lead, Canada proscribed the IRGC in 2024, and the European Union added the corps to its terrorist list in January 2026 after documented mass killings of anti-government protesters in Iran. The United Kingdom followed with its own designation in July 2026, pressured by years of lobbying from pro-Israel groups and Iranian diaspora activists, and after a series of attacks on Jewish communities in London that the UK government linked to the IRGC. In total, 23 countries outside the EU’s 27 member states have designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization, including Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine.
Even for countries that have not imposed formal sanctions or designations, U.S. secondary sanctions—which penalize any foreign company that does business with IRGC affiliates—have effectively isolated the organization from most of the global economy. In response, the IRGC has deepened economic and military ties with other states that are also cut off from the U.S.-dominated international financial system or powerful enough to resist U.S. retaliatory pressure. The IRGC has supplied large quantities of drones and missiles to Russia for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, sold jet fuel to Myanmar’s military junta during that country’s ongoing civil war, and ships most of Iran’s crude oil exports to China via a shadow fleet of unregistered tankers designed to evade U.S. sanctions controls.
In recent years, the IRGC has suffered heavy losses from repeated assassinations of top commanders by U.S. and Israeli forces. However, analysts note that the organization has maintained its operational capacity due to longstanding contingency succession planning. All senior IRGC positions, including the commander-in-chief role, are directly appointed by the supreme leader. After Israel killed former commander-in-chief Mohammed Pakpour in March 2025, and his predecessor Hossein Salami in an Israeli airstrike during the June 2025 cross-border war, former Iranian defense minister Ahmad Vahidi was appointed to fill the role. Esmail Qaani has led the Quds Force since Soleimani’s 2020 assassination, while Hossein Taeb, a former IRGC intelligence chief, now heads the Basij after Israel killed Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani in March 2025. Other senior IRGC figures killed by Israel in 2025 include IRGC Navy commander Alireza Tangsiri and intelligence wing head Majid Khademi. Israeli airstrikes have even targeted moderate Iranian political figures with ties to the IRGC, including former Security Council head Ali Larijani, who was assassinated in March 2025. The role is now held by Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a longstanding IRGC hardliner.
Juneau argues that while the IRGC has sustained significant damage from repeated U.S. and Israeli strikes, it remains far from defeated. “On the one hand, the IRGC has been badly hit by the US and Israel during the war, as have other pillars of the Islamic Republic,” he says. “If we simply count strikes, military installations damaged or destroyed, ships or aircraft damaged or destroyed, then we can conclude that the IRGC has been significantly weakened.” But he adds that the organization spent decades preparing for this kind of coordinated pressure: “The US and Israel have destroyed an important proportion of the IRGC’s missiles and drones, but the force still has more than enough to continue threatening shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.”
For that reason, Juneau notes that hardline factions within the IRGC see no need for political compromise or a negotiated end to ongoing regional tensions, and remain committed to expanding their influence. “The way out of the war to the IRGC is to consolidate and institutionalise its geopolitical gains,” he says. “It wants, in particular, to see a new arrangement in the Persian Gulf whereby it can de facto veto maritime traffic.”
