Sizing Up Iran’s Elite Guards

The war in Iran has become a high-stakes test of who will blink first.

Last week I wrote about how the Iranian government seems to be hoping the chaos and market turmoil resulting from a wider war in the Middle East will grind down President Trump’s willingness to continue the fighting.

Trump, in turn, is reportedly banking on at least some members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps — the main force protecting what remains of the regime — turning into pragmatic deal makers in the face of enough U.S. and Israeli airstrikes. (Neither option promises the kind of change many Iranians might be hoping for.)

Today, my colleague Neil MacFarquhar, who spent decades reporting on the Middle East, has a primer on the Guards Corps, or I.R.G.C., that helps explain why Trump’s gamble seems so risky.

The military pillar of Iran

By Neil MacFarquhar

Within hours of the first Israeli and American airstrikes on Iran last weekend, militiamen from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps deployed to neighborhoods across Tehran and other urban centers.

Witnesses and the occasional furtive video posted online depicted men in plain clothes, often armed with assault rifles, stationed at checkpoints where they searched cars and cellphones, alert for signs of support for the war. At night, buildings whose residents shouted antigovernment slogans were sometimes targeted with gunfire. Militiamen roared through the streets in motorcades, using megaphones to bellow chants like “This army has come, for the love of the supreme leader!”

The Revolutionary Guards are the military spine of the Islamic republic. The Guards control the development and deployment of ballistic missiles and drones. They protect the country’s nuclear development facilities. They supervise proxy militias across the Middle East and also control a sizable portion of the economy.

“The I.R.G.C. is the regime,” said Afshon Ostovar, author of “Wars of Ambition: The United States, Iran and the Struggle for the Middle East.” The government has two main parts, he added. “It is the supreme leader, who is the figurehead and the final decision maker, and the I.R.G.C. is basically everything else.”

Trump has suggested that the Guards might drop their weapons to buttress popular support for regime change. Alternatively, reports have indicated, the Trump administration envisions the Guards as a potential partner in its efforts to forge a more compliant Iran. A practical-minded faction of the Guards, the thinking goes, might drop Iran’s nuclear program to retain their interest in the oil industry, for example.

We can’t predict how events will play out. But many analysts I’ve spoken to suggest the very opposite: They view the Guards as the main barrier to regime change, or even any change, in Iran.

Safeguarding the revolution

In the early days of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, did not trust the armed forces, known as Artesh, a Persian word for army. He was said to have muttered, “Artesh has the shah in its blood.”

So he organized a parallel armed force, the Guards, charged specifically with preserving the revolution. The core consisted of neighborhood committees, often organized around a mosque, that had been established to protect their areas and to liquidate perceived enemies.

The eight-year war that started when Iraq invaded in 1980 molded the Guards into a more cohesive force that, given Iran’s international isolation, took on tasks like building a missile development program virtually from scratch.

After the death of Khomeini in 1989, the new supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, lacking popular support, turned the Guards into an elite force, marrying his office to the I.R.G.C.’s power, while allowing it to expand into politics and the economy.

The Guards established a separate wing to manage reconstruction after the Iraq war, parlaying that into a wider, more permanent stake in the economy. They still build roads, dams and other infrastructure. They also became adept at smuggling goods in and out of Iran, including oil, in response to Western economic sanctions imposed after 2002, when the country’s then secretive nuclear development program was exposed.

Today, the Guards control at least 25 percent of the economy and perhaps twice that, one analyst told me.

By toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003, the U.S. created an opening for the Guards to expand across the Middle East, using the group’s Quds Force to build an axis of mostly Shiite Muslim militias in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Gaza. With these militias under their control, the Guards became a foreign policy player, too.

A hard core

Today the Guards number between 125,000 and 180,000 members. They control various allied organizations including their own intelligence agency and the Basij neighborhood militias.

The Guards are not monolithic. Their militiamen were among those who mowed down protesters by the thousands in January, but they are also a conscript force, so their foot soldiers mirror Iranian society. Indeed, some disdain the Islamic republic.

But the core group consists of around 2,000 to 3,000 officers who are considered revolutionary hard-liners whose rank and wealth are tied to the I.R.G.C. Most analysts think they will fight to the bitter end. Within the overall blueprint for pursuing the war, the Guards have adopted a so-called mosaic strategy that gives local commanders in the 31 provinces autonomy to make decisions such as when to fire off drones.

In addition, analysts note that while the current Guards leadership is drawn from the aging ranks of Iraq war veterans, the next generation of commanders in their 40s and 50s is an unknown quantity. Some might consider bargaining with the U.S. as a pragmatic survival step. It’s equally possible that the current war will only cement hostility toward the U.S. and Israel, long a pillar of the regime’s ideology.

How long the U.S.-Israeli assault will endure is also unclear.

Should the U.S. and Israel keep at it long enough, the war could decimate enough layers in the Guards’ top ranks to prompt their disintegration and make whoever is left amenable to change. But the Guards strategy, first forged in the Iran-Iraq war, has always been to force the other side into an exhausting war of attrition. That seems to be the plan now.

The latest on the Iran war:

Israel’s military struck several fuel sites, including oil storage depots, in what appeared to be the first attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure in the war. The strikes sent huge balls of fire and smoke into the air over Tehran.
Iran named Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the recently killed supreme leader, as his father’s successor.
The U.S. military warned civilians across Iran to “stay at home” as the U.S. and Israel continued their airstrikes.
Israel hit a hotel in central Beirut and carried out heavy bombardment across Lebanon over the weekend.
See photos from across the Middle East as the war enters its second week.
Follow our live updates here.

Other developments:

An explosion damaged the U.S. Embassy in Oslo. The local police said it appeared to be a “targeted attack.”
Our business reporter, Peter Eavis, explains how Iran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz is affecting the price of oil. Watch the video below.

The first week of attacks by the U.S. and Israel battered Iran and killed top leaders. It also showed that Trump has no clear idea about how the war should end.

From Opinion: Six writers weigh in on what’s next for the country and its citizens.

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