Iran’s Revolutionary Guards take wartime lead, ensuring harder line, sources say

Written by: Parisa Hafezi and Angus McDowall

DUBAI, March 4 (Reuters) – Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has tightened its grip on wartime decision-making despite the loss of top commanders and is driving a hard-line strategy that advances Tehran’s drone and missile campaign across the region, senior sources say.

Anticipating the decapitation of their leadership, the Guard had already delegated authority to very low-level levels before Saturday’s US-Israeli attack; this was a strategy to build resistance that could also carry the risk of miscalculation or wider war with mid-ranking officers empowered to attack neighboring states. On Wednesday, Iran opened fire on Türkiye, a NATO country.

In Iran, the Guard’s central role at all levels of the system and its brutal approach to security could make it difficult for protests to break out and undermine hopes that U.S. or Israeli strikes would spur an uprising and regime change.

The election of the next religious leader after the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday could further strengthen their role, said Kasra Aarabi, head of research for the Guardians of United Against Nuclear Iran, a US-based policy organization.

Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, widely seen as a possible candidate, has very close ties to the Guard, wields significant control over them and enjoys broad support, including from the more radical lower ranks.

“If the conflict suddenly stops and the regime survives, we can be sure that the Guard will have an even more important role,” Aarabi said.

THE CENTRALIZATION STRATEGY OF THE GUARDS IS THE KEY TO RESISTANCE

For this article, Reuters spoke to six Iranian and regional sources with close knowledge of the Guard; They all confirmed that they have taken on a much larger role in the hierarchy since the war began on Saturday and are now involved in every major decision.

A security official close to the Guard said that the new head of the Guard, Ahmed Vahidi, was present at every high-level meeting and that his main goal was always the survival of Iran’s Islamic revolution system and its goals.

Deputy defense minister and Guard Reza Talaeinik touted elite forces’ efforts to build resilience in a television interview on Tuesday, saying each figure in the command structure has named successors three ranks down who are ready to replace them.

“The role of each unit and division is organized so that when any commander is killed, he is immediately replaced by a successor,” he said.

Israeli strikes last year killed the head of the Guard and the heads of its intelligence, aviation and economic units. Mohammed Pakpour, the last commander of the Guard, was killed in an airstrike on Saturday.

Aarabi said decentralization has been part of the Guard’s doctrine in case of attack for nearly 20 years and was developed after watching Iraqi forces collapse during the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

“The whole idea was decentralization so that if a particular province was attacked, it could defend itself and the regime could maintain its authority and rule,” he said.

PROTECTIONS AIM TO FIGHT BOTH EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL THREATS

He added that the plan was planned to ensure that the Guard can continue to act as both the main spearhead of Iran’s military response to external attacks and enforcers of internal security within the Islamic Republic.

The approach appears to be viable for now, but sustained attacks that continue to overwhelm both senior and more junior Guard commanders could eventually test the Guard’s ability to maintain strategic coherence.

Of course, the Guardians are not a completely homogeneous unit, with their own factional rivalries, personal disagreements, and differences regarding the group’s role. But one of the sources said they were “more united than ever when Iran was under attack.”

Aarabi said that five days after the Israeli and US attacks, there may be signs that the command structure has begun to deteriorate, and pointed to the increasingly brutal attacks on civilian targets in the Gulf monarchies.

It is unclear to what extent this may reflect a deliberate strategy to demonstrate that the attack on Iran was a mistake with global consequences.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said Iran’s response to the attack had already been planned.

“These units operate according to general instructions given to them in advance, rather than under the direct, real-time command of the current political leadership,” he told Al Jazeera.

While the Guard is now involved in nearly every strategic decision made in Iran – beyond the central role they held before the war – they can also rely on a surviving political leadership in which three senior figures are former Guard members.

POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC EMPIRE

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was established shortly after Iran’s 1979 revolution to defend the new republic against both internal and external enemies and as a counterbalance to the regular armed forces.

Responding directly to the religious leader, this organization emerged as a state within a state that combined military power, intelligence network, and economic power, all focused on ensuring the survival of Iran’s Islamic power system.

That role was tested when Iraq invaded months after the revolution, setting off an eight-year war of attrition that has been a formative experience for many of the current generation of Iranian leaders.

Senior Iranian figures serving with the Guard in the war include three non-clerics who have held the most critical positions in Iran since Khamenei’s death.

President Masoud Pezeshkian was a battlefield surgeon, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqir Qalibaf fought on the front lines before becoming head of the Guard’s air force unit, while Ali Larijani, Khamenei’s top advisor, was a staff officer behind the lines.

Beginning in the early 2000s, as the wartime generation began to move into more leadership positions and Iran’s long conflict with the West accelerated, the Guard’s role in the Iranian state also began to increase.

The Guard was blamed for Iran’s nuclear program; This project, which Tehran has always pursued, was purely for peaceful purposes, but Western countries believe that it is a cover for the construction of an atomic bomb.

Due to sanctions imposed on the nuclear project, the Guard took a role in the economy; Its construction arm, Khatam al-Anbia, has won major tenders, including in the crucial energy sector.

While the Guard increasingly served as conduits to Shiite proxies in the Middle East, volunteer paramilitary forces, the Basij, were also used to quell civil unrest.

(Reporting by Parisa Hafezi; writing by Angus McDowall; Editing by William Maclean)