London: The bad news for a jubilant Israel is that the latest generation of IRGC leaders are more radical than their predecessors, happy to suppress anti-regime protests in the country and eager to continue support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Assad in Syria.
There was much rejoicing in Israel on Thursday when news broke of the death of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who conceived and planned the atrocities against innocent Israelis more than a year ago, the worst in Israel’s history. Some commentators are calling it Israel’s “we got him” moment, echoing Barack Obama’s famous announcement of the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. Now, leaders of the free world are hoping that this is the moment that marks the beginning of the end of the horrors of the past year in Gaza and peace in the region. Sinwar was never a man likely to compromise and even by Hamas standards he was an extremist. He not only oversaw the rebuilding of Hamas’s military wing after several setbacks, but instigated a purge against anyone suspected of collaboration with the enemy—Israel. Stories abound of Sinwar’s brutality, at one point forcing a Hamas fighter to bury his own brother alive. It’s no wonder that he earned the nickname “the butcher of Khan Younis”.
Sinwar’s death is important because he wanted to trigger a broader regional and religious war that would lead to Israel’s “collapse”. A year on, however, while Sinwar hid in the maze of tunnels, the Gazans above bore the brunt of Israel’s response, something Sinwar reportedly dismissed as “necessary sacrifices”. Unquestionably, the current momentum is now on Israel’s side, but the risk ahead for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is getting trapped into something bigger, this time directly involving Iran’s powerful IRGC under a new generation of radical leaders.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was originally conceived back in 1979 as Iran’s “people’s army”, the backbone of the new Islamic Republic charged with defending it from internal and external threats. Over the years the IRGC has grown in power from a simple militia to an organisation that not only controls more than 50 percent of the Iranian economy, but has also gained an outsize role in Iran’s foreign policy, especially against Israel. Having absorbed the key interior and foreign ministries, the 180,000-member IRGC is now entrenched across Iran’s state bureaucracy, operating beyond the bounds of the law and the judiciary. The IRGC answers only to the supreme leader and bypasses the elected president, making it almost a “state within a state.”
It was the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war that transformed the IRGC from a people’s army into more of a conventional fighting force, with a command structure similar to that of many Western military forces. Now highly institutionalised, it remains a force parallel to that of Iran’s regular armed forces, composed of ground, naval, and air forces. Within the IRGC are also other forces, such as the internal security militia, the Basij and, in particular, an external operations force, the IRGC-Quds Force. The IRGC-QF, commonly known as the Quds Force, consists of about 10,000 members handpicked from the broader IRGC for their competency and allegiance to the regime. It’s one of the Iranian regime’s primary organisations, responsible for conducting covert lethal activities outside of Iran, including asymmetric and terrorist operations worldwide. Through the Quds Force, Iran commands a transnational movement of Shia militancy comprised of thousands of fighters from around the Arab and Islamic world. Under its leader, the charismatic General Qassem Soleimani who was assassinated four years ago by the United States, the Quds Force grew to one of the most powerful players in the Middle East and a direct threat to Israel.
Since Hamas’s 2007 takeover of Gaza, Iran has served as the group’s patron. Through the Quds Force, Tehran has provided Hamas with money, rockets, drones, and intelligence that made possible the October 7 attack. For the past 17 years, Hamas has been able to train its fighters and build its own weapons only because of IRGC assistance. In Lebanon, the Quds Force has been a reliable source of funding, weapons and training to Hezbollah since the terror group’s emergence in the early 1980s. Iranian leaders have openly praised this relationship. Syria is Iran’s main supply route for passing on support to Hezbollah, which explains why Tehran has an interest in keeping besieged Syrian President Bashar Assad in power. Further south, the Quds Force has been working with the Houthis, the group that now controls much of Yemen, to attack ships sailing through the Red Sea, causing transit through the Suez Canal to fall by 50 percent in the first two months of 2024.
The bad news for a jubilant Israel is that the latest generation of IRGC leaders are more radical than their predecessors, happy to suppress anti-regime protests in the country and eager to continue support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Assad in Syria. The IRGC has been driven by divisions between its older, conservative commanders who generally favour exercising some restraint when it comes to Israel, and its younger radical ranks who want to go after the Islamic Republic’s nemesis. When Israel began a series of strikes against IRGC forces following Hamas’s October 7 atrocities, the IRGC’s younger generation was not only infuriated but they were also angry by Iran’s response. These radicals felt betrayed when Tehran refused to strike Israel directly, and even after the IRGC fired hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel in April, many younger officials were unhappy at the lack of real damage, concluding that the response was largely symbolic. All this put considerable pressure on the Supreme Leader and IRGC’s senior leadership to strike hard on Israel, which is why Iran launched such a massive attack at the beginning of this month.
But even the 1 October barrage of 181 ballistic missiles is unlikely to satisfy and silence the IRGC’s younger cohort. Following the extraordinary assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, who served as chair of the Hamas Political Bureau and was killed by a bomb at an IRGC safe house in Tehran, it’s likely that there will be a major purge of senior ranks who will be replaced by the younger, more radical officials. This will have a profound effect, not only within Tehran, but also between Iran, Israel and the wider world. Not only will the IRGC seek to make Israel “bleed slowly” over a prolonged period, but there will be a push to expand and accelerate both Iran’s ballistic missile program and its development of nuclear weapons.
The power of these young IRGC hardliners will almost certainly
grow in the years ahead, resulting in the government becoming more repressive, more violent and more committed to destabilising the world. The hesitancy by the current regime to inflict major damage on Israel will be replaced by a determination to destroy the mortal enemy once and for all.
“Our fingers are on the trigger right now in order to turn the enemy into dust”, said a young IRGC commander last week. No doubt someone in Israel was listening.
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Plymouth.