Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

316 • ISLAMIC REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS CORPSin rudimentary form just before the 1978–1979 revolution. SomeIranian Muslim student activists abroad had served with Amal unitsin Lebanon or had undergone Palestine Liberation Organization(PLO) guerrilla training there and elsewhere. With the ransackingof police and army armories during the Iranian revolution, variousShi’ite clerics armed their bodyguards and key lay followers, whothereby became pasdars, or revolutionary guards. Given the lootingof unsecured arsenals following the collapse of the shah’s governmentand the presence of opportunistic armed leftist and rivalMuslim groups, such as the Mujahideen-i Khalq, the revolutionaryregime saw fit to consolidate the various pasdar groups in order togain control over a near-chaotic security situation. At the time ofthe May 1979 decree, there were only around 4,000 pasdars.The original pasdars were largely unemployed and uneducatedstreet ruffians and the IRGC was originally intended to be a politicalmilitia with internal security duties, above all to counter any attemptat a military coup by officers in the regular armed forces havingmonarchist or secular nationalist sympathies. With the invasion ofIran by Iraq in September 1980, the IRGC changed into a moreregular military force having a hierarchical command structure,logistical support, and heavy armaments. Also, the numbers of theIRGC swelled from about 25,000 at the outset of hostilities to around350,000 by 1986. With the intensification of intraregime rivalriesbetween nationalists and fundamentalists, the IRGC was purged ofleftist and more secularist elements until it stood solidly “in the lineof the Imam” against perceived moderates such as Iranian PresidentBani-Sadr, who was deposed in June 1981. The IRGC played an essentialrole in organizing the street mobs of hezbollahis, membersof the “party of God,” in a wave of regime terror against internalopponents and in collapsing the attempted insurgency of the Mujahideen-iKhalq in June 1981.Beginning in February 1981 the IRGC was ordered by Khomeinito establish an “Islamic Liberation Movements” department. Thisunit established guerrilla training camps outside Tehran and Qum forIslamic activists from other Muslim countries and also dispatchedIRGC units to Lebanon, where training camps were established in theBekaa valley to organize the Lebanese Hezbollah militia. Officersand specialists of the regular Iranian armed forces special operationsunit were induced to join the IRGC and apparently were instrumental