The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was a nascent militia when it entered ethnic conflicts all around Iran and, one year later, the war with Iraq. Having insufficient training, equipment, and organizational cohesion, IRGC leaders and volunteers branded the organization as a guerrilla group. In their retrospective accounts, many IRGC combatants and commanders even count their guerrilla organization and training as their point of advantage over the classically organized Iranian Army. The matter of fact is, however, that there was no such organization and training. The flexible structure that resembled guerrilla warfare consisted in fact of young commanders who were given a generous deal of authority to fight as they saw fit, and minimally trained volunteers who were to learn about irregular warfare only by trial and error.
On the other hand, the IRGC did have sophisticated ties with some of the revolutionary guerrilla organizations that were part of the global militant wave in the 1960s and ‘70s. A few of the IRGC founders and early commanders had gone through guerrilla training in Lebanon and Syria in the month leading to the Iranian revolution. In addition, some professional guerrillas such as Chamran had a considerable influence on the early IRGC, even though they did not hold official appointments with it. Finally, within Iran, several Khomeinist militias that were eventually absorbed within the IRGC followed the global guerrilla resistance ethos indirectly, through their previous involvement with the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization.
This paper argues that despite the IRGC’s early self-identification with the globally recognized guerrilla organizations, it was exactly their differences from the global phenomenon that enabled their success as an official armed wing of the state in the following years. Based on interviews with IRGC founders and their close associates, archived interviews, and published memoirs, I demonstrate that the IRGC’s particular modus operandi was not the pre-meditated and practiced flexibility that was the common guerrilla principle. Rather, the Guards developed a habit of deciding and acting spontaneously among all ranks. Despite tactical inefficiency, the spontaneity’s appeal to volunteers as well as its proximity with radical revolutionary ethos of direct action transformed it into the IRGC’s strength. That is to say while the IRGC was claiming military legitimacy associating itself with the global guerrilla phenomenon, it was institutionalizing its own distinct organizational style—one that had long-lasting effects for its quick rise to prominence in the following decade.
