Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Is Clinging To Life — And The Regime May Not Stand Without It

-Analysis-

Since its surprise attack against Iran on Friday, Israel has targeted and killed several senior military leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as well as the Quds Force, the corps’ elite military and intelligence arm. On Monday, Israel said that it had struck the command center of the Quds Force, though details are still scant. These precise attacks are a clear sign that Israel’s long-term strategy focused on weakening the IRGC, Iran’s military-ideological pillar, may be arriving at a crucial turning point.

In Israel’s security analysis, the IRGC is not just a domestic force for Iran but a transnational actor and structural threat to the regional order — debilitating the Revolutionary Guard, in other words, would be an existential threat to the regime in Tehran.

So what are the origins of the IRGC? How did it become a major player in the region? How did it become a proxy for Russia? And what will happen now that Moscow can no longer play its supporting role?

To answer this, we must return to the geopolitical context of the formation of anti-Israeli movements from 1948 to 1979 and to Iran’s own revolution in 1979, a period when the Soviet Union exploited the Palestine-Israel conflict to create a leftist, anti-Western axis in the Middle East. By training and arming guerrilla groups in those years, it sowed the seeds of structures that later bore fruit in Iran, after its revolution, in the form of the Revolutionary guards.

Exporting the revolution

Following Israel’s formal creation in 1948, the Middle East became an arena of competition between the United States, the West and the Soviet Union. While the Soviets initially supported the formation of Israel, they began backing the anti-Israeli Arab-Islamic axis as early as the 1950s. Their strategy was carried out through provision of arms, intelligence and even ideology to the forces of hostile states like Egypt, Syria and Iraq, and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Groups like Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Palestine Democratic Front were trained directly in the military centers of the Eastern Bloc.

In this environment, Iranian and Arab leftist activists, and later leftist-Islamist forces, were attracted to these camps. These included groups like the Marxist Mujahedin-e Khalq (MKO) and Fedayeen-e Khalq, and branches of the “Islamic Left” that later won key positions in the Islamic Republic. The Soviet Union used these networks to pressure the Iranian monarchy. The Revolutionary guards, while not ostensibly communist but Islamic, were born of such structures and inherited the guerrilla-minded, anti-Israeli and leftist doctrines of the Cold War era.

The Islamic Republic that emerged in Iran in 1979 decided to set up its own, ideological and parallel force rather than relying on the remains of the imperial army, which it considered a symbol of Westernization.

From the start, the IRGC was a transnational institution.

From the start, this institution was not only tasked with keeping the peace at home but was a tool to export revolution, fight Israel and spread the militant discourse of the Velayat-e-Faqih (the Shia theocracy concocted by Iran’s revolutionary leader Ruhollah Khomeini) in the region. These evidently were not among the imperial army’s duties.

The initial core of the Guard was formed from Iranian Islamist groups, mostly trained in Syria, Lebanon and Libya, which coalesced in 1979 under the name of the Organization of the Mujahedin of the Islamic Revolution (Sazman-e mujahedin-e inqilab-e islami), consisting of seven groups. Figures like Mohsen Rezaei, (the recently killed Ali) Shamkhani, (the legislator Alaeddin) Boroujerdi, Gholamali Rashid (also recently killed) and (Muhammad Baqer) Zolqadr, among others, had learned a combination of military and Islamic-leftist doctrines in Palestinian camps. Alongside them, the cleric Mohammad Montazeri, whose father was for a while tipped to succeed Khomeini as supreme leader, played a key role in shaping the Guards’ foreign and regional mission. Relying on his relations with the PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Libya’s ruler Muammar Gaddafi, he created a plan to export revolution by sending troops to Lebanon and Palestine via the Guards’ Liberation Movements Unit.

With slogans such as “Islamic Nation” and “Destruction of Zionism”, the IRGC institutionalized the same anti-Western leftist doctrines under an Islamic guise. From the start, it was a transnational institution, not a force for national defense; its mission was to export the revolution and confront the West through proxy networks. The word Iran is not even mentioned in its name.

Russia’s Middle East arm

In recent decades, the Revolutionary Guard, especially through the Quds Force, evolved from military institution into a geo-political actor. This expansion was not only the result of the Islamic Republic’s planning but also in line with Russia’s regional interests. As heir to Soviet geopolitical power and following the Syrian uprising and Arab Spring in 2011, Russia needed an arm in the Middle East to consolidate its influence in the Mediterranean and on Israel’s borders. The Quds Force, with its experience, financial resources, proxy network and anti-Western discourse, fulfilled this role.

Taking advantage of the power vacuum in Iraq and Syria and with authority over groups like Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Revolutionary Guard created a logistical and operational structure around Israel’s borders in Gaza, Lebanon, the Golan Heights, Iraq and Yemen. By building underground depots, missile transmission lines and deep tunnels, it created a network of infiltration that was encircling Israel in operational terms.

The real threat is not in Israel’s response but in the IRGC’s belligerent, transnational project.

In this context, Israel views the IRGC not just as a threat abroad, but a risk in terms of internal security. Thus its strikes on Iranian targets ranging from the assassination of nuclear scientists including Mohsen Fakhrizadeh to blowing up missile depots are part of its national security doctrine and not just a political response.

Yet its actions are, broadly, reactive in nature. They constitute a limited, balanced and controlled response to the penetrative, ideological and persistently harmful actions the Revolutionary guards have engaged in for decades. We should make a fundamental difference here between the action and the response, and see the real threat not in Israel’s response, but in the IRGC’s belligerent, transnational project.

The Israeli military’s analysis sees the Quds Force as a threat in three dimensions: missile, nuclear and proxy. Israel’s attacks, aimed at destroying these capabilities and raising the cost to the Islamic Republic, have consequently increased in scale and scope.

A domino effect

Since 1979, the Islamic Republic, relying on oil money and ideological guidance, has made the Revolutionary Guard the centerpiece of a project to besiege Israel in the region, even if the Axis of Resistance created to that end effectively turned the Guard into Moscow’s own proxy force.

With the proxy militias it trained and equipped across the region, the Guards created a transnational network to operationally encircle Israel. But the network gradually declined with the collapse of Russian power in two waves: first in the 1990s, with the fall of the Soviet Union and then from 2022, with the war in Ukraine.

The first wave led to the fall of the pro-Russian rulers of Iraq and Libya, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. The Islamic Republic exploited such developments to rebuild the IRGC as the center of its Axis. In the second wave, war in Ukraine has exhausted Russia in economic and military terms, severely weakening its supporting role.

After decades of anti-Israeli actions by the Revolutionary Guard that spanned the globe — from Beirut to Buenos Aires — Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel was an attempt to restore the Axis’ power. Yet it had a domino effect: Hamas infrastructures were destroyed, Hezbollah was decimated, the Guards’ Syrian networks were exposed, its sympathetic regime collapsed, and the focus of attacks has now shifted onto the heart of this axis: the Tehran regime and its Revolutionary guards.

Russia’s structural weakness has created a vacuum.

What made this chain reaction possible, more than anything, was Russia’s inability to play a supporting role. Its structural weakness created a vacuum that has left its political and military chain of allies unsupported, paving the way for broader Israeli strikes on its regional command center, the IRGC.

Because the Revolutionary guards had effectively become Russia’s regional arm and a tool of international disruption that has nothing to do with Iran’s national security. They are also closer to collapse than ever before.

Today the IRGC no longer has a credible mission to perform as the regime and revolution that gave it birth have lost legitimacy among Iranians, and the Axis of Resistance is all but gone. The institution that once claimed to defend the “oppressed” of the world could not even safeguard the lives of its senior commanders. All it has achieved after four decades of boastful activity has been to spread poverty, provoke the destruction of Iranian infrastructures, and fuel regional insecurity and internal instability. 

The Revolutionary Guard is not, as it has claimed, Iran’s protector. It is instead a structural flaw, if not a curse, and the greatest of burdens on the shoulders of the Iranian nation.