After fighting an eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard returned from the battlefields demanding greater power in the system it defended. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered.
Today the guards are in another existential fight, this time against the US and Israel. Supreme leader Khamenei is dead, the guards’ top ranks have been shattered, and the force’s headquarters has been obliterated.
Yet if the corps is still standing after the bombardment, the war may simply accelerate a defining feature of revolutionary Iran: the guard’s 40-year rise as the Islamic republic’s pre-eminent military institution, with broad economic and political power.
The guards, also known as the IRGC, were almost a state within a state before the war. Once it ends, some close to Iran’s regime believe little will restrain the corps in shaping the republic’s next phase.
“The guards will become more powerful — but not only them,” said a regime insider. “Iran itself will become stronger, with a different approach and behaviour.” While insisting there would be no “adventurism”, the regime insider said the direction would be clear: “Iran will become more hawkish”.
The guards are the republic’s elite military force, with a vast intelligence apparatus, a sprawling business network and hundreds of thousands of personnel. As a result, the force and its leaders are prime targets of US and Israeli bombs. And their ability to withstand the onslaught will be the key determinant of whether the regime survives.
Since Khamenei’s assassination, a three-man leadership council — comprising President Masoud Pezeshkian, a senior cleric and the head of the judiciary — is attempting to steer the country through the transition.
It co-ordinates with the armed forces, but experts say it is the Revolutionary Guard and army that are spearheading the war effort. Pezeshkian, a reformist, apologised to Gulf states for attacks on Saturday and said Iranian forces would stop striking them as long as strikes on Iran did not originate from their territory. The strikes against its Arab neighbours, however, continued apace.
Even under fire, the guards are expected to play a decisive role in selecting the next supreme leader. Some Iranian analysts, before the outbreak of war, speculated that Khamenei’s death could trigger constitutional changes under which a senior Revolutionary Guard figure might emerge as the republic’s effective ruler.
But with the regime in a battle for its survival their focus is on defending the republic. One of the leading candidates — Khamenei’s son Mojtaba — has long cultivated close ties to senior officers in the corps.
The overlap between the military and political elite is significant. Many senior figures are veterans of the IRGC, including Ali Larijani and parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who has taken on an increasingly prominent role.
Vali Nasr, a former US official now at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said the guards differed from militaries in Egypt and Pakistan, which have shown disdain for civilian leaders and seized control during political upheaval.
“That’s where the US reads them wrong, continuously saying ‘they are going to fracture, they are going to defect’,” Nasr said. “They see themselves as defenders of this constitution and they see it as the same thing as the system.”
Iran’s unique theocratic system, in place since the 1979 Islamic revolution, is based on the doctrine of the Velayat-e Faqih rooted in Shia Islamism that is used to justify clerical rule under a supreme leader.
The leader is elected by an Assembly of Experts, a body of 88 clerics. But proponents believe he is ultimately chosen by God, and that all arms of the state, including the military, should serve the ideology.
The guards were Khamenei’s most trusted defenders of the republic, internally and externally, as they built up a network of proxies, mostly Shia Islamist militants, across the region.
“I have always looked at the guards and the clerics, particularly the supreme leader, as two sides of the same coin,” said Mohsen Milani, author of Iran’s Rise and Rivalry with the US in the Middle East.
“Maybe in the future there will be that separation, but for as long as there is war it’s not very likely you are going to see a change in the nature or mission of the IRGC.”
But he added that the war had changed Iran, with the “Islamic republic entering uncharted territory”.
Wartime decisions are being taken by the leadership council and the Supreme National Security Council, which is chaired by Pezeshkian, while its secretary Larijani is a key figure in the top ranks of the ruling establishment.
“The Islamic republic is not a one-man show, it’s been institutionalised, there are multiple centres of power, with multiple layers of security and intelligence institutions, and it was deliberately designed from the get-go to survive external attack,” said Milani.
However, Nasr said, the critical test would be when the “big decision comes about do we stop the war or not? Do we surrender or not, or do we accept a ceasefire or not?”
He added: “Those are the kinds of decisions that Khamenei could make singularly and the system would follow, but that might now be a moment that you would test how the system manages a major decision without him.”
The regime insider said that prior to the war, the leadership had put in place a framework on how it would decide whether to agree to a ceasefire.
Over the past two years the guards have suffered devastating blows at the hands of Israel, including the killing of dozens of senior commanders in Iran, Syria and Lebanon. The depth of the infiltration of Israeli intelligence in the republic has also been a humiliation.
Their top commander, Hossein Salami, was killed by Israel in the opening hours of the June war, and his successor, Mohammad Pakpour, was killed a week ago in the bomb of Khamenei’s compound in Tehran.
The deputy head of the guards, Ahmad Vahidi, a veteran of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, appears to be overseeing operations, although he has not been formally named commander and has not appeared in public.
But they have shown they still possess the ability to wreak havoc across the region, successfully targeting US bases, embassies, airports and energy facilities despite the vast array of American air defences, as well as launching barrages of missiles and drones at Israel.
“At this point, names matter less. What matters is that the war is being managed and the country is being governed, which shows that a coordinated system is functioning,” said another regime insider.
“The guards are flexing their muscles towards the US and Israel, and they see this as an achievement. They are not unhappy.”
“We will be the ones to end this war,” Amir Heydari, deputy commander of the guards Khatam ul-Anbia headquarters, told state television in a rare wartime appearance by a top officer. “We will do so when we feel we have imposed the will of our nation on the enemy and taken revenge for our martyred leader and people.”
How long the guards can sustain their retaliation will be a critical question. Milani said more moderate regime forces could also seek to exploit the crisis to reassert their influence.
But in practice the war has been increasing the influence of military realities on decision-making. A more hardened national posture could, in turn, shape the trajectory of the republic, analysts say.
When the conflict ends, the guards, if the regime remains intact, are expected to frame their role as a victory: standing up to the most advanced militaries in the world and ensuring the regime’s survival.
“They are likely to argue that they fought the world’s sole superpower and the Middle East’s most powerful war machine — and didn’t capitulate,” Milani said.
