Andy Burnham and his Government have firmly pointed the finger at Iran for a spate of recent incidents on British and European soil. In particular, they have accused the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of being behind the incident at RAF Fairford late last month, when five men were detained near the airbase used by a US bomber.
About 30 countries joined the UK on Monday in condemning what they said was a pattern of IRGC-linked operations, issuing a statement that said it showed the “IRGC’s continued willingness to project hostile activity beyond its borders through covert networks and proxy actors”.
It said Fairford came soon after a recent campaign of attacks across Europe by pro-Iranian Islamist militants targeting Jewish communities, Iranian journalists and US interests.
The IRGC has been active for decades, but since Donald Trump launched his war against Iran in February, its power – and potential threat – has grown, as has its likely willingness to go after targets far from Iran’s shores. Fairford was a reminder of how this could come back to bite countries like the UK.
In July, the UK formally designated the group a threat to national security, under new state threats powers, meaning it is now a criminal offence to express support or assist it, punishable by up to 14 years in prison. This came a few months after the EU added the IRGC to its terror list, following brutal crackdowns on protesters in Iran.
The IRGC was established in 1979 as a revolutionary army under Iran’s new supreme leader, with the new regime not trusting the regular Iranian armed forces, particularly the air force, which was sympathetic to the old regime. It would go on to make its reputation in the war with Iraq (1980-88), the foundational event for how the Iranian regime sees its role in the region.
In the subsequent years, the IRGC has become a major force, with about 190,000 men and a further 600,000 members of the Basij militia, brought under IRGC control in 2007, which is primarily responsible for suppressing domestic unrest. It also controls entire swathes of the Iranian economy, including banking, shipping, manufacturing and the illicit export of oil.
Membership of the IRGC – and in particular past service in the war with Iraq – is a sure path to political prominence in Iran, but until recently it was one of a number of routes. Trump and Israel’s move to take out the top tier of Iran’s leadership in the first days of the current conflict in February took out many of its rivals.
A poster with the slogan ‘Kill Trump’ is displayed as mourners gather to pay final respects to Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (Photo: Majid Saeedi/Getty)The Iranian regime had prepared for the grim inevitability of its leaders being targeted by creating a deep substitute bench. The gaps were filled not with clerics or civilian politicians but by hardened IRGC veterans. This included Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the assassinated supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who had fought in the final year of the Iran-Iraq War before going on to train as a cleric.
Mojtaba Khamenei is now Iran’s supreme leader, although there is doubt about his health, after he was injured in an airstrike in February that killed other members of his immediate family. He has not been seen or heard in public since, with written instructions allegedly from him being issued by IRGC members.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the powerful Speaker of Iran’s parliament, was also an IRGC officer throughout the 1980-88 war, before going on to head the air force and then Iran’s police force.
The US and Israel may have inadvertently strengthened the group. They made the same mistake in January 2020, when they assassinated Major-General Qasem Soleimani, the charismatic Quds Force leader who was one of the few genuinely popular national figures the regime had produced.
A billboard depicting the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei (Photo: Anwar Amro/AFP)The IRGC now has a far stronger hand in Iran, and that could be having an impact abroad.
Because Iran is a revolutionary regime pursuing a regional policy of resistance to external enemies, it works with external proxies to fight wars far from Iran’s own borders.
Iranian military experts were heavily embedded with Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen – both heavily armed by Iran – and provided expertise to the Assad regime in Syria. The Houthis are currently waging a war against Saudi Arabia, with missile attacks on one of its main airports over the weekend.
Iran also helped various Iraqi Shia militias to wage a more deadly campaign, using sophisticated IEDs, against Western forces in Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion.
The IRGC, meanwhile, has its own ‘aerospace’ command, which has come into its own this year, being responsible for the drone and missile attacks reigning down on military bases around the Gulf and hitting tankers trying to traverse the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran blockades the strategic Strait of Hormuz at the start of the war, sending oil prices sky-high and threatening vessels that tried to break through (Photo: Reuters)As in the case of Russian operations in Europe, Iran does not rely on a single agency to do its dirty work abroad. The Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) has repeatedly used accredited diplomats to foment terrorist plots, usually against exiled Iranian dissidents. The ministry has about 30,000 agents and its budget has grown tenfold in recent years. MOIS works closely with Iran’s Quds Force in operations to murder dissidents and separatists within and outside Iran itself.
These nefarious agencies are involved in recruiting people they task with murder or disruption. This indirect approach conserves more valuable Iranian agents.
When it comes to Fairford, the arrested men have been released on bail, and details of what actually happened are yet to be released. But even if the ‘plot’ was merely a feint to probe the defences of sensitive UK bases, it was an extraordinary development.
Some experts have speculated that Iran was actually seeking to replicate Ukraine’s 2025 Operation Spiderweb drone attack on Russian bomber bases, where drones were launched from containers on trucks, where the drivers didn’t even know what was inside. The men involved at Fairford may have just been hired patsies, a tactic more commonly deployed by Russian intelligence on foreign soil.
Whatever the reality, the IRGC – a shadowy group at the heart of Iran’s regime – is now being seen as a much more worrying threat across the Middle East and beyond.
Michael Burleigh is an historian, commentator and senior fellow at LSE Ideas.
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