Revolutionary Guards (IRGC)
Iran's ideological military, founded in 1979 to guard the revolution, now a state within the state controlling missiles, proxies, and much of the economy.
When Iran's revolution triumphed in 1979, its new clerical rulers did not trust the army they had inherited from the shah. So within months they built their own. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was created in the spring of 1979 to defend the revolution against coups and enemies within, and it never stopped growing. Nearly half a century later it is not merely a military but a state within the state, running Iran's foreign wars, its missiles, and a sprawling share of its economy.
A parallel army, loyal to the revolution
The Guards, known in Persian as the Sepah or Pasdaran, exist alongside the regular armed forces, the Artesh, but answer directly to the Supreme Leader rather than to elected officials. Their founding purpose was ideological: to protect the Islamic Republic itself. Over time the corps swelled into five branches with well over 100,000 personnel, including its own ground forces, navy, and aerospace arm. The Basij, a volunteer paramilitary force folded into the IRGC, provides the manpower that has policed elections and crushed street protests. In practice the Guards became the regime's most trusted instrument, more political and often more powerful than the conventional army they were meant to complement. Veterans of the corps have since moved into parliament, the presidency, and the commanding heights of business, extending its reach far beyond the barracks.
Missiles, proxies, and a business empire
Three pillars give the IRGC its outsized weight. Its Aerospace Force controls Iran's ballistic-missile arsenal, the largest in the Middle East. Its Quds Force, made famous by commander Qassem Soleimani, arms and directs allied militias abroad, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Iraqi Shia factions and Yemen's Houthis. And its business arm, anchored by the vast engineering conglomerate Khatam al-Anbiya, reaches into construction, oil and gas, telecommunications, and smuggling, giving the corps a financial base independent of the state budget. Analysts estimate its holdings amount to a substantial share of Iran's economy, spread across hundreds of firms and front companies. That economic reach makes the Guards nearly impossible to sideline: they are woven into how Iran fights, earns, and governs.
A force under sanction
The United States had long treated the IRGC as an adversary, but in April 2019 it went further, designating the entire corps a foreign terrorist organization, the first time Washington had ever branded an official arm of another government's military that way. The European Union, Canada, and others have since debated or adopted similar measures, and sanctions have targeted its commanders and companies for years, yet the corps has only grown.
Decapitated and indispensable
The real test came from the air. The American and Israeli strikes that opened the 2026 war on February 28 killed Ali Khamenei along with several of the corps's most senior commanders, the sharpest blow the Guards had taken since Soleimani. It did not loosen their grip, it tightened it. With the Supreme Leader dead and his son Mojtaba installed by the Assembly of Experts in March, the IRGC became the part of the Iranian state that was still visibly functioning, and the instrument through which Iran fought back: mining the Strait of Hormuz, designating a single route through Iranian waters as the only safe passage and firing on ships that took any other, and setting the terms on which the waterway might reopen.
To Iran's leadership the Guards are the guarantors of the revolution, the force that keeps the clerical system standing. That is exactly what they were founded to be in 1979, and it is why, whatever pressure comes from abroad, no ruler in Tehran can afford to weaken them. A war that killed their commanders and their patron ended by making them more central, not less.