The IRGC is the guardian of the revolution and the Praetorian Guard for the Supreme Leader. Links to the international drug trade add further to its appalling activities. It helped brutally put down the Green Movement in Iran following the stolen election in 2009, and is active in Afghanistan, Turkey, Pakistan and Jordan. It has its own schools, neighbourhoods and even holiday resorts. The IRGC is effectively a state within a state. It oversees Iran's strategic missile programme and controls large parts of the Iranian economy - including oil and gas, automotive and shipbuilding. It consists of military and special forces with links to numerous militant armed groups in the Middle East, particularly Hezbollah in both Lebanon and Syria.
This extreme religious position is, in turn, brutally supported by the Revolutionary Guard, the IRGC.
"Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has argued that until the return of the Twelfth "hidden" Imam, senior clerics alone are qualified to direct and control all aspects of life, to protect the sharia.
It is underpinned by a dangerous and extreme theocracy whose roots go back to the Iranian revolution. But Iran is not the average "thugocracy" that we have seen in other parts of the world - including Putin's Russia.
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