What to know about Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the powerful force within the country’s theocracy

Dubai, United Arab Emirates — Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard has grown into a powerful force within the country’s theocracy, answering only to its supreme leader and overseeing its ballistic missile arsenal and launching attacks overseas.

The force is gaining renewed attention as Iran expands its offensive across the Middle East after the start of a US-Israeli airstrike campaign that already killed the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Here’s what you need to know about Guard.

The Guard emerged from Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, intended to protect the country’s Shiite cleric-supervised government and later enshrined in its constitution. It operated parallel to Iran’s regular armed forces, growing in importance and power during the long and devastating war with Iraq in the 1980s.

Despite facing possible dissolution after the war, Khamenei authorized expansion into private enterprise, allowing the force to develop.

The Guard runs a huge construction company called Khatam al-Anbiya and has firms that build roads, man ports, run telecommunications networks and even offer laser eye surgery.

The Guard’s expeditionary Quds Force was instrumental in creating what Iran describes as an “axis of resistance” against Israel and the United States. It supported former Syrian President Bashar Assad, Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group, Yemen’s Houthi rebels and other groups in the region, growing in power in the wake of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

US officials say the Guard has taught Iraqi militants how to make and use particularly deadly roadside bombs against US forces there. The Quds Force and Iranian intelligence agencies are believed to have recruited criminal gangs and others to target dissidents abroad and perceived enemies of Iran.

After the recent Israel-Hamas war, Israel has arrested civilians accused of receiving orders from Iran to monitor targets or carry out sabotage. Iran has denied involvement in those plots. The Guard is believed to be heavily involved in smuggling across the Middle East.

The Guard also operates its own intelligence services and has been behind a series of arrests and convictions of dual nationals and those with Western ties on espionage charges in closed trials.

Western nations and others have described Iran as using those prisoners as bargaining chips in negotiations, particularly over its nuclear program.

The Guard’s cautious “Axis of Resistance” faced its biggest challenge in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel that triggered the war in Gaza. The Palestinian militant group Hamas is backed by Iran. Israel is still fighting Hamas in Gaza, targeting other Iranian-backed groups, destroying Hezbollah and repeatedly targeting the Houthis in Yemen.

In Syria, the Assad government fell in December 2024, taking away a key ally for Tehran and the Guard. Israel and Iran exchanged missile fire, something under the watchful eye of the Guard.

In June, Israel launched a massive airstrike campaign targeting Iran. On its first day, those strikes killed top generals in the Guard, throwing the force into disarray. Israeli strikes destroyed ballistic missile sites and launchers, as well as Guard-manned air defense systems.

In Iran, one of the main means by which its theocracy represses demonstrations is through the Basij, an all-volunteer arm of the Guard.

Videos of the protests, which began on December 28, show Basij members wielding long guns, batons and pellet guns. His forces were seen beating and chasing protesters through the streets. A well-known Basij commander also warned parents to keep their children at home on state television as he called for force members to gather to stage demonstrations.

The European Union listed the Guard as a terrorist organization in January following Tehran’s bloody crackdown on the protests.

Iran’s foreign minister has indicated that his country’s military units are operating independently of any central government control after pressuring them about attacks on Gulf Arab states that have served as proxies for Tehran in the past.

Already, there have been attacks on Oman, which acted as a mediator in recent nuclear talks with the United States, and Qatar, which negotiated with Tehran and shares a huge offshore natural gas field in the Persian Gulf with the Islamic republic.

“What happened in Oman was not our choice. We have already told our, you know, the army, the armed forces to be careful about the targets they choose,” Abbas Araghchi told Al Jazeera on March 1.

Militaries around the world make contingency plans for wars, including what to do if their central governments are affected. But Iran is a special case in that the Guard controls its vast ballistic missile arsenal and large collection of bomb-carrying drones.

Araghchi’s comments could serve as a pretext for the attacks to ease tensions with Iran, which has been increasingly inflamed by persistent flare-ups with Iran’s Gulf Arab neighbors despite efforts to ease tensions in recent years.