The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is Iran's political militia. It was formed immediately after the Islamic Revolution in 1979; Mohsen Sazegara, a leader of the student movement against the Shah, was among its founders. The Guards were originally intended to be a people's army with no more than 5,000 professional personnel and perhaps ten times as many semi-professional members, modelled on forces such as America's National Guard or the citizen-based defence forces of Switzerland and Israel.
The organisation drifted from its original mission in three stages. First, after the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, it moved into construction and other economic activities. Second, during the reform movement of the late 1990s, Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, brought the IRGC into the political arena to suppress dissent. Third, from the mid-2000s, it moved into terrorism and organised crime.
In its military branches the IRGC now employs more than 180,000 people. The Quds Force, also run by the IRGC, has thousands of permanent cadres—a credible estimate puts the figure at around 14,000—and functions in practice as a terrorist and organised-crime outfit operating throughout the Middle East and beyond. Its activities have been responsible for many international conflicts and are disliked by some other parts of the IRGC within Iran. The IRGC controls significant economic assets and oversees Iran's network of proxy forces across the Middle East. Its commanders have been systematically targeted by Israel in the June 2025 war.
The IRGC plays a crucial role in the development of Iran's nuclear programme, funded not primarily through the government budget but through its own secretive commercial empire. A Western official estimated that half of Iran's registered firms are owned, at least in part, by the security service. Each of the IRGC's five branches controls an array of banks, factories and startups, including Persian Gulf Petrochemicals, Iran's biggest refiner of petrochemicals; Hara, a tunnelling business; and Bahman, once the manufacturer of Mazda cars in Iran.
Many fall under Khatam al-Anbiya, a conglomerate formed in 1990 to pool the IRGC's resources. It is now Iran's biggest construction contractor, estimated by a Western official at roughly $50bn in value, though the figure is uncertain because of its sprawling stakes in smaller firms.
The IRGC's largest revenue source is the oil trade. In recent years the treasury, short of cash, has offered crude in lieu of budget allocations. Before the Israel-Iran war of June 2025, about 500,000 barrels a day of crude—equivalent to a quarter of Iran's exports—went to the IRGC. By 2025 the Guards processed roughly half of Iran's oil exports, worth at least $30bn. During the third Gulf war the central government handed over even more barrels than usual. The security service sells its oil via a network of exchanges and shell companies, mostly to Chinese buyers, using a system that American officials say is both cheaper and more adroit than the one Iran's government employs. As sanctions have tightened, other recipients of government oil payments have asked the IRGC to sell on their behalf.
The Quds Force, the IRGC's international arm, controls 25% of Iran's crude output. Nominally private companies owned by the IRGC or affiliated with Khatam al-Anbiya co-ordinate most freight logistics with the National Iranian Oil Company. They include Sahand (an industrial firm), Sahara Thunder (a trading business), Pasargad (a financial group), Admiral (a shipping firm linked to the family of Ali Shamkhani, a former head of the Supreme National Security Council) and Persian Gulf Petrochemical Company, which operates oil-processing plants. All are under American sanctions for acting as front companies. The son and son-in-law of Mohsen Rezaee, a former IRGC commander-in-chief, are said to move a large volume of barrels. During the third Gulf war the IRGC has been behind most of the growth in petroleum exports.
Since the June 2025 war, the IRGC has used the continued threat from Israel to justify its hold on power. When Khamenei retreated into his bunker as Israel struck, he handed decision-making to the generals. The IRGC and its paramilitary brownshirts, the Basij, carried out the January 2026 crackdown on protesters. Everything from oil to medicine and manufacturing passes through a vast network of IRGC-run firms. Conglomerates controlled by clerics and commanders routinely secure loans without collateral or oversight.
By late March 2026 the IRGC appeared to have consolidated its grip on the state, shifting Iran from theocracy to something resembling a military junta, akin to Egypt or Pakistan. Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader, has not been seen since his father's death; if he resurfaces, it will probably be as a figurehead. The National Security Council, dominated by military figures, sets overall strategy; on March 24th it replaced the assassinated Ali Larijani with Muhammad Zulghadr, an IRGC apparatchik. Operational control rests with Khatam al-Anbiya, the corps' battlefield headquarters. The IRGC retains firm control over Iran's most advanced and longest-range missiles.
American and Israeli air strikes have severely damaged the IRGC's military capabilities and business empire. All of Iran's solid-fuel propellant factories have been hit. Israeli jets have struck IRGC-linked energy firms, Mehrabad airport in Tehran (headquarters of Mahan Air, used to smuggle weapons to proxies) and a Bank Sepah data centre. More than 50 Iranian naval ships have been sunk. The IRGC has had two leaders killed in nine months; surviving commanders are probably hiding. The success of Israel's decapitation strikes suggests the IRGC is shot through with informers.
Dubai, the UAE's commercial hub, has long served as Iran's economic lung—a hub for both legal trade and money-laundering by IRGC-linked firms. Emirati officials have been talking about clamping down on Iranian business.
To guard against decapitation strikes, the IRGC was divided into 31 sub-districts, each with its own weapons stockpile (including missiles and drones) and the autonomy to use them should central command fail. The Basij has been broken into tens of thousands of small, mobile cells. These decentralised cells could go rogue and form the nucleus of a guerrilla force capable of blocking the Strait of Hormuz indefinitely. Some 30,000 special cells have been organised throughout Iran to operate independently if the governmental structure were severely damaged. The IRGC has also built redundancy into its upper tiers, designating up to three successors for each commander.
An internal assessment by the Ministry of Intelligence, reportedly conducted around late 2025, found that about half of rank-and-file members viewed their membership simply as a job; of the other half, a large majority were dissatisfied because of the corruption of commanders. When Iran accepted a ceasefire around April 8th 2026, some field commanders may have been unaware of the truce or chose to ignore it; subsequent Iranian strikes on Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE underscored the splintering of central command.
The IRGC runs ports, airports and border crossings, giving it a near-monopoly over illicit trade. America has long accused the Guards of funnelling drugs destined for Europe from Afghanistan to the Middle East. The IRGC is also responsible for most of Iran's imported weapons, charging a premium for those it passes on to the armed forces. Within these shipments it smuggles cigarettes, consumer electronics and food, which fetch high prices among Iran's increasingly treat-starved population. The weakening of Iran's regional proxies such as Hamas and Hizbullah, which once helped run smuggling networks, has disrupted supplies, but wartime shipping disruptions have added a premium to smuggled goods.
The IRGC is also linked to Sina Food Industries Development, a big producer of processed food. During the third Gulf war, IRGC-linked manufacturers of cosmetics and processed food saw profits double in a month, benefiting from wartime price rises and the sudden absence of foreign competition.
In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of the scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.