Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

ISLAMIC REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS CORPS • 315to assassinate President Karimov. The IMT exchanged gunfire withKyrgyzstan border guards, wounding two of them, on 25 July 2001when the border guards detected the IMT militants attempting to infiltratefrom Tajikistan. On 12 August 2001 four U.S. mountain climbersin Kyrgyzstan, who had been kidnapped by the IMT, managedto escape. This incident led the U.S. State Department to designatethe group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Following the U.S-ledinvasion of Afghanistan in response to the World Trade Center andPentagon Attacks of September 11, 2001, Khojayef, who had beendesignated as a deputy defense minister in the Taliban government,was killed by U.S air strikes on Kunduz in November 2001. The IMTforces were largely destroyed during the U.S. invasion; their remnantshave regrouped under Yuldashev’s leadership along with Taliban andal Qa’eda forces in the tribal areas of the Waziristan region of Pakistan.On 12 June 2005 the IMT exploded a bomb outside of the Ministry ofCivil Defense in Dushambe, capital of Tajikistan, which injured 12 butcaused no fatalities. Tajikistan authorities claim that on 28 September2006 the IMT attacked members of the party of President Rakhmanov,injuring two. On 11 May 2007 Russia banned the IMT under the namethe Islamic Party of Turkestan. Since 2001, Yuldashev has continuedto lead the IMT and is responsible for widening its goal to the creationof a Pan-Turkic state; however, the IMT has been relatively inactivesince its setbacks in 2001.ISLAMIC REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS CORPS (IRGC). TheSipah-i Pasdaran-i Inqilab-i Islami, or the Army of Guardians of theIslamic Revolution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is a state-runparamilitary organization charged by Article 150 of the 1979 IranianConstitution with “defending the (Islamic) Revolution and safeguardingits achievements.” Domestically, in addition to protecting the regimefrom possible coup attempts by the older branches of the Iranianarmed forces, it has also served as an instrument of state terror andrepression. In the war fronts of the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988) and outsideIran, in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf, it serves a revolutionarypurpose in assisting “Islamic liberation movements” to promote Islamicfundamentalist revolutionaries abroad, opposing conservativeregimes, and attacking U.S., Israeli, and other Western interests.The current IRGC was officially organized by the decree ofAyatollah Ruhallah Khomeini on 5 May 1979, but had existed