The Dispatch
If you know a little bit about Iran, you’ve probably heard of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. A militia founded shortly after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, it has mushroomed to a mammoth force of economic, political, and military power within the country. Many informed observers of Iran have long predicted that the demise of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would shift power to the Guards, with authority passing from the clerics to soldiers.
Iran, experts prognosticated, could replace a religious dictatorship with a military one.
When an Israeli strike killed 86-year-old Khamenei in February, wartime Iran moved to replace him with his son, Mojtaba. Vindicating the experts, the Guards indeed appear to be the power behind the throne in Tehran now.
Their job is made easier because the shadowy Mojtaba Khamenei, who had next to no public profile prior to his elevation, was injured in the war. Some reports even claim he is in a coma—rumors bolstered by the fact that he has yet to appear in public more than six weeks into his supreme leadership. He has no plan to speak to media “for the time being,” a close relative and friend of Khamenei told me last week, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The Guards are now being treated as the real power in Iran by its adversaries. Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed Mojtaba as “a puppet of the Revolutionary Guards.”
The younger Khamenei has long had links to the Guards, and the idea that he’d team up with them to run the country isn’t new. As early as 2017, exiled journalist Ruhollah Zam spoke of the force’s “grand plan” to “securitize the country” and pave the path for Khamenei’s leadership. The plain-speaking Zam, who ran a sensationalist social media outlet, wasn’t taken seriously by the more polished members of Iran’s international diaspora at the time. But he proved enough of a threat for the regime to abduct him to Iran in 2019 and execute him a year later, and his most outlandish predictions about the IRGC now appear to be materializing.
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