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Backgrounder: Iran's Revolutionary Guards

Council on Foreign Relations

Prepared by: Greg Bruno, Staff Writer
September 28, 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. 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.”

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.