Written evidence submitted by Kasra Aarabi, Analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (April 2020)
For over 40 years, the IRGC has been responsible for plotting and executing global terrorist attacks, hostage-takings, maritime piracy, political assassinations on foreign soil – including in Europe – human rights violations and supressing domestic dissent within Iran. It has provided key operational support for terrorist attacks stretching as far afield as Bulgaria, Thailand and Argentina.
In the 1980s, Iran’s leaders came up with the idea of establishing the IRGC’s Quds (Jerusalem) Force: an extraterritorial unit of the IRGC that would act as an Islamic army with a mandate to export the revolution overseas and “liberate” Palestine through the destruction of Israel – what Tehran calls the “Zionist regime” and a “cancerous tumour” that must be “eradicated.” The destruction of the State of Israel is at the heart of the IRGC’s Shia Islamist extremist ideology and the Guard is the main force driving this across the Middle East today.
Since its creation, the IRGC has also worked tirelessly to nurture Shia militancy across the Middle East: creating, arming, training and financing some of the deadliest Islamist terrorist groups in the world. This includes the likes of Lebanese Hizbullah, which it helped establish to destroy Israel and export the Islamic Revolution to Lebanon, to Iraq’s Asai’b Ahl al-Haq, which it armed to conduct over 6,000 attacks on American and British forces in Iraq (2003-2011).
The Guard’s relationship with terrorism is not restricted to Shia extremists. It supports Sunni Islamist groups from Hamas to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and has had ties with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
At present, the IRGC effectively operates as a “franchise builder” for militant groups that embrace its revolutionary Shia Islamist ideology, or the broader foreign policy aims of the Islamic Republic.
This has had direct consequences on the stability of the Middle East, UK interests in the region and UK national security.
In Iraq, following the collapse of Saddam in 2003, the IRGC Quds (Jerusalem) Force – the Guards extraterritorial unit – worked to recruit, radicalise and organise young Shia men into militias loyal to Iran’s supreme leader, rather than the Iraqi state. Iranian-backed militias in Iraq have been a constant source of violence, extremism and instability in the country. The sectarian agenda being pushed by Tehran and its proxies brought Iraq to the brink of civil war and would later contribute to the rise of Islamic State in 2014.
In Syria, as millions of Syrians poured onto the streets against Bashar al Assad, the IRGC Quds Force helped prop up the Assad regime with a degree of unbridled violence which left over half a million Syrians dead
The IRGC arms, funds and trains other militias, including the Houthis in Yemen, Lebanese Hizbullah, Shia militias in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Today in the Middle East, the IRGC has prepared approximately 200,000 fighters–from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan–to rise in support of a cause which is rooted in a perceived existential threat to the Shia Muslim identity and a hostility towards global powers and their allies. The paramilitarisation of the Middle East at the behest of the IRGC has not only significantly impacted stability in the region, but it has also undermined existing state structures.
Since 2017, there has also been a surge in IRGC activity in Europe. The discovery of an Iranianlinked bomb factory in London in 2019, as well as the successive chain of terror plots across Europe from 2017 and 2018, suggests that the interests of this group goes beyond the confines of the Middle East and underscores the urgency in countering the challenge it poses.
committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/3119/pdf/