Iran's Revolutionary Guards: The Spine of a Militarized State [View all]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/08/us/iran-islamic-revolutionary-guards-corps.html

https://archive.ph/u8oiI

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards: The Spine of a Militarized State
With their pervasive military, political and economic clout, the Guards are often considered the main impediment to regime change, or any change, in Iran.
By Neil MacFarquhar
March 8, 2026, 5:11 a.m. ET

Within hours of the first Israeli and American airstrikes hitting Iran last weekend, militiamen from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps deployed in neighborhoods across Tehran, the capital, and in most urban centers.

Eyewitnesses and the occasional furtive video posted online depicted men in plainclothes, often armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, manning checkpoints where they searched cars and cellphones, alert for signs of endorsing the war. Black anti-riot vehicles were lined up in places like closed schoolyards that were less likely to be struck by missiles.

“They tried to create the illusion for outsiders that they are in control, and inside to create fear for people so they do not dare come out to the street,” said Saeid Golkar, a political science professor at the University of Tennessee and the author of “Captive Society: The Basij Militia and Social Control in Post-Revolutionary Iran.”

President Trump has suggested that the Guards drop their weapons to buttress popular support for regime change. Analysts consider that scenario highly unlikely. Iran might appear to be a theocracy, and its official ideology is firmly rooted in Shiite Islam, but the Guards constitute the spine of a militarized state. Analysts consider their pervasive military, political and economic clout the main barrier to regime change, or any change, in Iran.

Here is a primer on this powerful group.

...