a key ideological army to consolidate the Ayatollah regime and repress dissent

Parallel to the conventional Armed Forces, the Revolutionary Guard is the most powerful military body in Iran and control the ballistic missile program.

Founded after the triumph of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, this military body responds directly to Supreme Leader Ali Khameneithe highest political and spiritual authority of Iran.

“If the supreme leader represents the power of the pen, the Revolutionary Guard is his sword”stated analyst Afshon Ostovar in his book The vanguard of the Magnet about what this military body means for the Islamic Republic. “It is the mechanism that transforms the authority of the leader into an armed and coercive force,” added the Middle East expert.

Its main function is military, with about 125,000 troops divided between ground, naval, air and espionage forces and the task of monitor Iran’s strategic weapons as are their ballistic missiles.

But it is also a cultural institution and an economic conglomerate with interests in oil, gas, telecommunications, transportation, construction and media, according to Ostovar.

The tentacles of the Revolutionary Guard

Also controls the Basiji, a paramilitary militia of Islamic volunteers with great influence in Iranian society that has four million members distributed in schools, universities, factories, government offices or mosques.

“The basiji are the front line of the Revolutionary Guard against political and social change,” Ostovar wrote.

Through the Quds Force (Jerusalem), outer arm of the Guard, Tehran leads the so-called Axis of Resistancean informal alliance formed by organizations such as the Lebanese Hezbollahlos Houthis of Yemen, the movement Hamasthe Islamic Jihad and the militias in Iraq, among others.

This alliance, deeply anti-Israel and anti-American, was one of the pillars of Iran’s foreign policy, now in low hours after the blows suffered by Hezbollah and Hamas, and the fall from power of the former Syrian president Bashar al-Asad.

Hard blows

The elite military corps also suffered severe blows during the war of the 12 days of june initiated by Israel against Iran, with the death of its commander in chief, General Hosein Salami, or the person in charge of its ballistic program, General Ammiamong others.

Now, General Mohammad Pakpur leads the organization, while Brigadier General Majid Mousavi is in charge of its aerospace arm.

It was not the first time that senior members of the Guard were assassinated by foreign powers. In 2020, Washington assassinated the then commander in chief of the Quds Force, General The Somali in an attack in Baghdad.

The United States designated the Quds Force, a division of the Revolutionary Guard, as a terrorist group in 2007, and in 2019, under Donald Trump’s first administration, the Guard was properly included in the blacklist of terrorist groups

Repression of protests

Now, the foreign ministers of the European Union reached an informal political agreement this Thursday to include the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in the list of EU terrorist organizations for repression in recent protests in the countrya decision that requires unanimity.

The protests began on December 28, driven by merchants in Tehran, but They soon spread throughout the country calling for the end of the Islamic Republic and reached their peak on January 8 and 9 with an explosion of demonstrations in practically all of Iran and strong repression.

Tehran accuses the United States and Israel of provoking an explosion of violence by sending weapons and mercenaries to the protests in which 3,117 people have diedaccording to the official Iranian version, while opposition NGOs such as HRANA, based in the US, report 6,373 deaths, thousands of reports of homicides not yet confirmed and more than 40,000 arrests.