Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) emerged from its 12-day confrontation with Israel in June bruised but more entrenched in the country’s power structure, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
Bloomberg said the Israeli strikes killed many senior commanders in what was described as the most damaging conflict in the Guard’s history, forcing a restructuring of Iran’s security decision-making. Yet the confrontation has also reinforced the IRGC’s role at the heart of the Islamic Republic.
The Guard, founded after the 1979 revolution, has grown into a sprawling organization with land, naval, aerospace and intelligence arms, as well as the Quds Force for operations abroad and the Basij volunteer paramilitary.
Its influence extends into universities, hospitals, media outlets and large business conglomerates such as Khatam al-Anbiya, which is involved in oil pipelines, infrastructure, and housing projects. Estimates of its direct personnel run as high as 200,000, Bloomberg said.
“The war affirmed just how important the IRGC is,” Abdolrasool Divsallar, an Iran military analyst at Universita Cattolica in Milan, was quoted as saying.
A newly announced National Defense Council, headed by President Masoud Pezeshkian and dominated by IRGC veterans, underscores that expanded role, according to state media cited by Bloomberg.
The Guard is criticized at home and abroad. Rights groups and Western governments have accused its security branches of human rights abuses and crackdowns on dissent, while critics inside Iran link it to corruption and political repression. Supporters see it as a bulwark against Israel and the United States and as central to defending Iran’s sovereignty.
Narges Bajoghli, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, told Bloomberg: “People are angry at them, but they also realize that there is no other force in the country. What they’re committed to today is about sovereign independence and the idea of resistance.”
The IRGC’s overseas networks — Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Syria, and Hamas in Gaza — have been badly weakened by Israeli action, Bloomberg said. That may push the organization to focus more on nuclear deterrence, analysts said.
Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute, told Bloomberg: “The 12-day war exposed the IRGC’s counterintelligence failures. However, the IRGC’s loss of prestige is unlikely to lead to its capitulation.”
The report said the IRGC’s future remains closely tied to that of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, now 86, around whom the organization’s management is centralized.
It would take a US ground invasion or a sustained bombardment by both the US and Israel to change the metrics for the IRGC, Alfoneh said.
