Weakened Ayatollah Khamenei and his guards need each other more than ever

Sunday, 18 January 2026

With this month's unprecedented nationwide uprising, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei faced the biggest threat to the Islamic Republic since the 1980 invasion by Iraq.

Dissidents and many of their western backers believed the regime was about to fall - or even that the supreme leader's personal praetorians would intervene to force him from office. In Washington there was open speculation that Khamenei would go into exile and a new regime would emerge that would do deals with President Trump's Middle East envoys.

Nothing of the sort occurred. Instead, the loyalty of the guard - the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), to give it its full title - turned out to be absolute.

In the span of a weekend, the guards fanned across the country, along with their paramilitary volunteers, the Basij, shooting and arresting thousands of protesters. With the protests quelled, at least for the time being, they and the police staged motorcycle rallies across Iran's cities as terrorised residents locked themselves in their homes. Activists said the death toll had exceeded 3000.

Over the past three weeks dissidents had kept an eye on what the guards might do. Their decision, whether to stick with the octogenarian dictator or jettison him, would determine whether the republic survived.

But it was unsurprising that the IRGC, which has grown under Khamenei into a bloated economic empire with influence over the judiciary, stuck with their patron.

Khamenei has been weakened by the protests. But the IRGC has also been weakened by Israeli and American strikes last summer that killed much of its top leadership.

And their history is closely intertwined. 'The IRGC are part of the Iranian deep state, and they are deeply integrated,' said Sanam Vakil, an Iran expert who leads Chatham House's Middle East programme.

'They have grown in power and influence with the blessing of Khamenei and they have become more political and influential. They've kind of grown up together, if you will.'

The protests started almost 47 years to the day since Khamenei's predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic's founder, landed in Tehran on board an Air France 747 after the shah had fled a previous set of demonstrators.

Khomeini descended from the plane to a crowd of supporters and journalists before he was driven off in a Mercedes.

Unnoticed that day was a cleric in a white turban who walked behind Khomeini. Ayatollah Hassan Lahouti had been a fierce critic of the shah and became one of Khomeini's closest confidants. Soon, he would be entrusted with the survival of the supreme leader, a new title, and the new Islamic Republic.

Lahouti was the first commander of the IRGC, a separate military force that was formed out of suspicion of the army and which went on to spearhead the decade-long war with Iraq. Its influence then continued to expand, extending into the economy, politics, and the judiciary - forming, as one Iranian official described, the 'the spine' of the Islamic Republic.

Mohsen Rafiqdoust, a Khomeini aide who drove the Mercedes from the airport, later recalled how he first met Ali Khamenei, the future supreme leader, and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a future president, and was instructed to attend a meeting of militants planning the new force.

'I wrote on a piece of paper: 'The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps has been formed' and then wrote my name and asked everyone else to write down their names if they wanted to join,' Rafiqdoust later told Iranian state media.

When the Iraq war finally ended in 1988, a year before Khomeini's death, the leader had to find a new purpose, and new means of funding, for the thousands of battle hardened and deeply ideological soldiers.

'They didn't want to demobilise them,' said Farzan Sabet, managing researcher at the Global Governance Centre. 'They let them enter the economy, in any sector they want[ed].

'The government [had] budget cuts, they couldn't sustain the huge number of personnel, so they let them do economic activities. That's how it [began]. They built a massive complex, a multi-headed hydra.'

It now has its tentacles in everything from banking and construction to the black market and smuggling trade, which is thriving under western sanctions, including of alcohol and drugs, and more recently, cryptocurrency.

Together its companies turn over up to dollars 12 billion a year, according to some estimates, and its activities have helped to hollow out the country's independent economy and even its power grid, according to critics who say its bitcoin mining has had a part in the chronic blackouts.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the force also began placing its members in government and parliamentary positions, all but taking over the day-to-day running of the country.

Their outsized role drew opposition in Iran, even among the political elite, which found itself increasingly sidelined by the zealots. Rafsanjani, the first president of the Islamic Republic and one of the men who planned the creation of the IRGC, died in 2017 as a critic of the force.

Lahouti, their first commander, was later jailed after a dispute with the leadership and died in mysterious circumstances in prison.

Abroad, the IRGC was tasked with 'power projection', cultivating a network of allied militias in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, while taking command of the country's ballistic missile programme. It also assumed responsibility for the Iranian nuclear programme, ultimately the trigger for sanctions and the economic crisis that sparked the mass protests across the country.

It has been separately sanctioned by a growing number of western countries, with Britain now weighing whether to designate it as a terrorist group.

The force has been drastically weakened over the past two years, as Israel killed its top commanders and, along with the US, left its nuclear facilities in tatters during a 12-day war last summer. Hossein Salami, the IRGC leader, was assassinated in his bedroom in Tehran in the opening salvos of the war. His successor, General Mohammad Pakpour, is a veteran of the Iraq war who was picked by Khamenei for his loyalty.

Sabet said that the idea that the guards might turn on Khamenei to preserve their privileges underestimated their loyalty to him.

'A palace coup would require the IRGC,' he said. 'The top network from the pool of which the officer corps and senior leadership is selected are personally loyal to Khamenei and are considered ideologically reliable, and in my view won't turn on Khamenei. He provides them with cover.'

But even if the force were to betray Khamenei, it is loathed by the population, said Ali Fathollah-Nejad, an Iran expert and director of the Center for Middle East and Global Order think tank. It also includes tens of thousands of the paramilitary Basij, who have carried out some of the worst atrocities in recent days.

'The scenario of a Bonapartist kind of strongman emerging from IRGC would be in the context of ongoing protests, so that if the state cannot crack down on the protests, then the calculus within the power elite might change,' he said.

'Even if that is the case, I don't think that this would do away with societal opposition, because of the sheer atrocities and the legacy of the IRGC as the most powerful institution in the country.'