The IRGC and the Quds Force

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is Iran’s parallel military, built in 1979 to protect the Islamic Republic from its own armed forces and from internal dissent, and its Quds Force is the expeditionary branch that built, arms, and directs Iran’s regional network of proxy militias, including Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthis. It is the only branch of a foreign state the United States has ever named a Foreign Terrorist Organization. It answers to Iran’s Supreme Leader, not to Iran’s elected government, and for over four decades it has run parallel wars against Israel, the West, and Iran’s own civilians.

Who it is and how it is built

The IRGC was created by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the weeks after the Islamic Revolution toppled the Shah in 1979, explicitly as a force loyal to the clerical regime rather than to the state, a hedge against a coup by the existing army. Iran’s constitution places it under the direct command of the Supreme Leader. It has grown into a parallel security and economic empire of roughly 190,000 personnel: ground forces, a navy, an air and missile force, the Basij paramilitary militia that can mobilize hundreds of thousands of volunteers for internal crackdowns, and a cyber command, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The Quds Force is its external operations wing, formed to export the revolution beyond Iran’s borders. From 1998 until his death it was commanded by Qasem Soleimani, who turned it into the architect of what Iran calls the Axis of Resistance: a belt of armed proxies encircling Israel and projecting Iranian power across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen.

What it funds and how

The IRGC draws on both a published line in Iran’s state budget and a vast off-books network of front companies, shipping firms, and sanctions-evasion schemes that CFR estimates channel billions of dollars a year, much of it built on oil smuggling. The Quds Force uses that money and Iran’s own arms industry to supply training, weapons, and cash directly to allied fighting forces. It is the reason Hezbollah fields a rocket arsenal larger than most national armies, the reason Palestinian Islamic Jihad can build and fire long-range rockets out of Gaza, and a principal supplier of the drones and missiles the Houthi movement has fired at Israel and at international shipping in the Red Sea. Hamas has received Iranian funding, weapons technology, and training through the same channel for decades, even though Hamas is a Sunni organization and the IRGC is the armed instrument of a Shia theocracy; the sectarian divide has never stopped Tehran from arming it against a shared enemy.

Its record

The IRGC was forged in real combat, absorbing enormous casualties defending Iran during the Iran-Iraq War (1980 to 1988) after Saddam Hussein invaded, a war of chemical attacks and mass infantry losses that gave the organization its founding myth of sacrifice. Its export arm turned to terrorism almost as soon as it existed. IRGC personnel helped build and train the Lebanese Shia militia that became Hezbollah in the early 1980s, whose 1983 truck bombings of the US embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut killed hundreds. Argentine prosecutors formally attributed the 1994 AMIA Jewish community center bombing in Buenos Aires, 85 dead, to Hezbollah operatives acting on Iranian orders. Under Soleimani, the Quds Force ran the network of Shia militias in Iraq blamed by the US government for the deaths of hundreds of American service members after 2003. On 3 January 2020, a US drone strike near Baghdad airport killed Soleimani, whom the Pentagon identified as the head of a US-designated terrorist organization responsible for attacks on American personnel; Esmail Qaani succeeded him as Quds Force commander. Israel’s own war with Iran escalated sharply in June 2025, when US and Israeli strikes hit Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in Operation Midnight Hammer, and again in February 2026, when Israeli strikes killed senior IRGC commanders and government officials, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, on 28 February 2026. See who attacked first in the Israel-Iran war.

The designations

The United States designated the IRGC in its entirety a Foreign Terrorist Organization on 15 April 2019, the first time Washington had ever applied that label to part of another country’s government rather than to a non-state group. The US Treasury had already sanctioned the Quds Force specifically in 2007 for supporting terrorism and had separately named Soleimani under counter-proliferation and terrorism sanctions years before the 2020 strike that killed him. The European Union moved to designate the IRGC a terrorist organization in 2026, after the organization’s role in violent crackdowns on Iranian protesters drew international condemnation, according to CFR. Israel, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia list it as a terrorist entity as well. Iran’s government disputes none of the underlying facts; it calls the designations Western hostility toward a legitimate arm of the state.

Its war with Israel and the Jews

The relationship is openly, declaratively hostile, not contested or ambiguous. Iran’s post-1979 leadership has called for Israel’s elimination since the revolution, and the IRGC and Quds Force are the instruments built to pursue that goal by proxy: arming and training the militias on Israel’s northern, southern, and Yemeni fronts specifically so Iran can wage war on Israel without declaring one itself. That strategy broke down into direct war in 2025 and 2026, when Israel struck Iran’s nuclear program and its military leadership directly rather than absorbing further proxy attacks indefinitely.

The domestic myth, and why it doesn’t launder the Quds Force

The IRGC’s founding function, defending a state that had just been invaded by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, was a real war fought at real cost to a generation of Iranian conscripts, and the organization’s domestic prestige rests substantially on that sacrifice rather than on invention. Its engineering conglomerate, Khatam al-Anbiya, builds roads, dams, and infrastructure inside Iran and has been a real, if monopolistic and corruption-riddled, provider of disaster relief and reconstruction after Iranian earthquakes and floods. That record explains why tens of millions of Iranians see the IRGC as something other than a terrorist organization at home. It does not change what the Quds Force does outside Iran’s borders: arm and direct the proxy network behind the AMIA bombing, the Beirut barracks attack, and the arsenals now aimed at Israel from four fronts at once.

Hezbollah · Hamas · Qasem Soleimani · Axis of Resistance · Who attacked first in the Israel-Iran war · Iran’s Ring of Fire