The Empire of Terror Podcast

Empire of Terror Chapter Five Podcast Six

            Iranian-Supported Iraqi Militia
Iran created the Badr Corps from Iraqi refugees and prisoners of war in the early 1980s. Analysts have compared the Badr Organization in Iraq to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Badr conducted covert paramilitary operations in Iraq during the 1980s and 1990s under orders from the Qods Force. Many Badr Corps fighters have either dual Iraqi-Iranian citizenship or were born in Iran and only received their Iraqi citizenship post-2003.
Badr Corps leaders are highly influential in Iraq’s Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Interior. Badr recruits are often assigned to the Iraqi Army Intelligence and the Ministry of the Interior. The Ministry of Interior commands the Federal Police, a five-division motorized infantry force, and the Emergency Response Division. The AAH was formed in late 2006 with the support of the Guards as an elite force. The Guards extensively trained and funded the AAH. The group is openly loyal to Iranian leaders. It was founded in 2006 as an offshoot of the Mahdi Army, which fought the United States in Iraq from 2003 to 7. It fought alongside Hezbollah against Israel in the Lebanon War. In 2011, AAH shifted its focus to politics and social services before resuming military activities against the Islamic State.
The KH was founded in 2003. It is an Iranian-funded, anti-American Shia militia that earned a reputation for targeting U.S. and coalition forces with roadside bombs and mortars. The U.S. State Department designated it a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 2009. The KH has also sent fighters to defend the Assad regime in Syria. In addition to its military and paramilitary roles, the KH is involved in organized crime, including kidnapping and armed robbery. In April 2018, Qatar paid at least $276 million to the KH and the Guards to secure the release of members of the Qatari royal family kidnapped during a hunting trip in southern Iraq.
Some observers of Iran downplay Iranian control over events in Syria and Iraq. For example, Harvard professor Stephen Walt wrote, “Tehran’s present allies will not blindly follow its orders if doing so would jeopardize their own positions. To see these collaborations as a new Persian empire, as Henry Kissinger and Max Boot do, is risible.” Other observers of events in the Greater Middle East hold a very different view. They see the Guards as a potent force for enduring political, demographic, and military change.
Lebanon, Yemen, and Bahrain
As noted in chapter 3, Mustafa Chamran, the first commander of the Guards, helped build AMAL, Hezbollah’s precursor. Established by the Guards in the early 1980s, Hezbollah flourished and supplanted Amal in the Beirut area. In 1982, Israel drove the PLO from southern Lebanon. Although Iran was engaged in the Iran-Iraq War at the time, the Guards took the lead in organizing, training, and equipping Hezbollah.
 Hezbollah also recruits, trains, and leads other groups of fighters in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Nigeria. The Party of God espouses the same ideology as the Iranian regime and pledged its allegiance to Ayatollah Khomeini. Hezbollah’s leader describes the group’s struggle with Israel and the Jews as a “total life-or-death war.” Soleimani claimed that Lebanese Hezbollah has evolved from a “Resistance Party” to a “Resistance State.”
In addition to using commercial cover to transfer funds to Hezbollah, Iran established training camps among the Shia population in the Beqa’a Valley, an important farming region in eastern Lebanon. Training at the Guards’ camp became a prerequisite for membership in Hezbollah. Hezbollah remains Iran’s most skilled militia, but anecdotal accounts suggest it may no longer enjoy its privileged status with Tehran, at least in how its forces are treated on the battlefield. Hezbollah provides Iran with a measure of plausible deniability in regional meddling, even as the Guards use commercial cover to transfer funds to the Lebanese organization.
Hezbollah carried out the 1983 truck suicide bombings of the U.S. Marine and French barracks at Beirut International Airport, killing 241 U.S. and 58 French servicemen. The Guards' deputy commander celebrated the attack. He proclaimed, “In 1983, the flames of Islamic revolution flared among Lebanese youth for the first time, and in a courageous act, a young Muslim buried 260 United States Marines under the rebels east of the Mediterranean Sea.”
Among other nefarious activities, Hezbollah kidnapped U.S. citizens Terry Anderson and CIA station chief William Buckley. The organization has built an impressive social base in Lebanon, and its medical facilities are superior to those of government hospitals. After Israel’s 2000 withdrawal from the country, Hezbollah became a major political party, and its members were hailed as victors by Shia worldwide. Hezbollah has been adept at conducting cyber operations against a wide range of Middle East targets. Hezbollah operatives are deployed worldwide, including in Latin America.
Hezbollah personnel partner with the Qods Force in Arabic-speaking countries. A typical Hezbollah member wears insignia similar to those of the Guards and adheres to the doctrine of velayat-e faghih. The Qods Force maintains a joint command-and-control structure with Hezbollah. Hezbollah also assists the Qods Force in advising, supporting, and training other Shia militia groups, including the Yemeni Houthis. Iran controls a proxy network in Yemen to support the Shia Ansar Allah, or Houthi Movement. Iran also supports groups in Bahrain, where the population is 70 percent Shia. Iran has provided Iranian-origin missiles and small arms, including sniper rifles, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), AK variants, and hand grenades. The Houthis seized control of the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, in September 2014 and forced its president to seek refuge in Saudi Arabia. The Houthis and their allies advanced south, aiming to seize the Gulf of Aden and unite the country. In March 2015, a military coalition of Arab nations led by Saudi Arabia launched a bombing campaign to oust the Houthis and restore the government.
The Saudis fear that the Houthis' success, fueled by weapons shipments from Iran and training from Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah, will stir nationalism among the Shia in Saudi Arabia. Yemeni security forces have intercepted a shipment from the Guards to the Houthis that included RPGs, surface-to-air missiles, and high explosives.
The area was the site of widespread protests in early 2011, which were crushed by an intervention by Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia. Iranian leaders have claimed that Bahrain, which has a Shia majority, is an integral part of Iran and should be restored to it. The Qods Force sponsors militant Shia groups that have attacked government targets using arms and explosives transferred to the country by Qods Force operatives and affiliates, including Iraqi Shia militia groups. In 2017, U.S. Vice Admiral Kevin M. Donegan opined that Iran’s involvement in Yemen is one element of its Middle East strategy to promote civil unrest and establish a power vacuum. This allows Iranian forces and its proxies to fill that void and build security that favors Iran.
Population Transfers
Like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union before it, Iran uses panic and devastation in neighboring states to alter the region’s ethnic and religious composition. Iran employs coercive methods to drive Sunnis from their homes and resettle the areas with Shias. Under Hitler’s leadership, Germany pursued internal colonization. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union came plans to eliminate indigenous populations in Poland and Ukraine and repopulate subjugated terrain with Germans and locals who conformed to specific racial characteristics. This German colony would be administered by Himmler’s SS. Hitler spoke of “shaping the landscape” by enticing ten million Germans to go east and settle families there. The colonizers were to be given plots of land to be tilled by Polish slaves, who would be killed when they were no longer useful.
The Soviet Union, too, shifted populations. During his reign, Joseph Stalin oversaw the forced resettlement of six million people. Lenin relocated ethnic groups immediately after the Civil War in 1921, and the practice accelerated in the 1930s and 1940s under Stalin. This was part of a broader plan to purge the new Soviet state of nationalists, religious leaders and believers, and free thinkers. Iran, like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, has used demography as foreign policy. The wars that have overwhelmed societies in Iraq and Syria have dispersed besieged populations throughout the Middle East, with some families taking refuge in Europe or the United States. Taking advantage of these population shifts, Iran has resettled Shia in the Middle East. By late 2017, Iran began consolidating its presence throughout Syria by settling militiamen and their families there. Schools in Syria teach the Persian language, and Iran has subsidized the tuition and food costs of many students aged eight to fifteen, each of whom receives a $20 monthly stipend for attending. Shia clerics cultivate ties with locals. This demographic shift in the Syrian Shia population boosts Iran’s long-term influence.
 
Summary
 
Iran’s theocratic leadership has cast its foreign policy in the context of a holy war, and the Qods Force is the engine through which Iran expands its global power. Iran has built a land corridor connecting Iran through Iraq to Syria and Lebanon. Iran’s forces or its proxies defend shrines in Syria and Iraq, and the Guards help prepare Hezbollah to destroy Israel’s cities.
The Qods Force’s SLA comprises three divisions deployed across Iran’s Shia Arc. The Guards continue to target their enemies for assassination in the Middle East, Europe, the United States, and around the world. Iran provides Hezbollah $700 million a year and offers Palestinian terrorist groups another $100 million, with another $300 million to other terrorist groups. Patiently and steadily, the Guards are changing the demographics of Iran’s neighborhoods. Christians and Sunnis are declining in proportion, while the Shia are growing.
 

Empire of Terror - Chapter Five Podcast Four

            The International Divisions of the sla
In several significant wars of the twentieth century, armies used foreign nationals to augment their ranks. Foreign nationals sometimes fought as independent but affiliated units. Sometimes they were inducted directly into the host armed forces. At other times, foreign nationals fought in international divisions. The subject of novels and folklore, the French Foreign Legion is the most famous and enduring model of this type. The Soviets and Nazis, too, used foreign nationals. The Soviets recruited and commanded foreign battalions and brigades to fight against fascists in Spain, while Germany built foreign divisions to fight its enemies during World War II.
More specifically, the Soviet NKVD recruited communists and antifascists to fight in Spain from 1936 to 1939. Each battalion’s commander was a Stalin loyalist and confirmed communist. Most of the thirty-five thousand volunteers in the Soviet International Brigades had left-leaning views, and many were dedicated communists. The defense of the Spanish Republic was romanticized by Western intellectuals, particularly the Bloomsbury Group in Britain and American celebrity journalists such as Hemingway. Progressive salons acclaimed the brigades in song, verse, and prose. But it was not only hard-left ideology that drew the volunteers; many young Western men had dismal employment prospects at home during the Depression.
Germans also created international units. During World War II, ss leader Himmler built international divisions to fight for the Reich, particularly after the defeat at Stalingrad, in early 1943. The Thirteenth Mountain Division of the Waffen-ss, the Handschar, recruited Balkan Muslims, and the Mufti of Jerusalem, then living in Berlin, called them to jihad. They fought for Hitler. Volunteers in the German SS, like those in the Spanish International Brigades, were often starry-eyed, unemployed men who hoped to craft a new world. They faced high unemployment in Europe and admired Germany’s financial recovery under National Socialism.
Like the Soviets and the Germans before them, Iranian leaders have built a legion of foreign volunteers to fight for a common cause. It comprises three divisions commanded by Iranians: the Afghan division, the Fatemiyoun; the Pakistani division, the Zaynabiyoun; and the Iraqi division, the Hayderiyoun. These divisions wear a standard uniform and carry a single banner. These were the primary ethnic cohorts of the SLA units.
There are three underlying reasons why Afghans, Iraqis, and Pakistanis join the SLA. They are poverty, religion, and resentment. There is widespread poverty in the Middle East. Many Middle Eastern and South Asian Shia men are unemployed, depressed, and destitute. They need to provide for themselves and their families and see service in the SLA as a means to do so. At the same time, many recruits are religiously devout and find Khomeinism appealing. Just as some Westerners were drawn to the Soviet cause in the Spanish Civil War or the Nazi cause in World War II, many Shia see Iran as an advocate for their cause. In Iraq, they guard Najaf and Karbala, two cities particularly revered by Shia Muslims.
Another reason is resentment of the secondary social, religious, and economic status that the Shia hold in many Sunni-dominated countries. Historically, the Shia had to conceal their religious identity when living under the suzerainty of the Sunni. They continue to live at the sufferance of the Sunni in many countries.
 The Afghan Division
In the 1980s, Iran shipped money, supplies, and arms to Afghan groups fighting the Soviets. Despite Iranian leaders' dislike of the Taliban, whom they saw as vulgar, they supported the Afghan group and its precursor organizations. Those Afghans who received Iranian aid were both Sunni and Shia. Today, there is a sizable Shia population in Afghanistan that serves as a pool of recruits for the Guards. The Guards developed the Fatemiyoun in 2002. Since then, more than two thousand Afghans have been killed fighting in Fatemiyoun uniforms. Fatemiyoun has several brigades and anywhere between twelve and fourteen thousand fighters, of whom three to four thousand are active in Syria. At the height of their involvement in the Syrian civil war, during the 2015–16 Battle of Aleppo, the Afghan division had nearly ten thousand Shia fighters deployed to Syria.
Recruits join for several reasons, but the dominant driver is economic. These Afghans are among the poorest of the world’s poor and turn to Iran for help. Unemployment in Afghanistan is about 27 percent. Some serving in the division will be able to obtain Iranian citizenship for themselves and their families. These Afghans are paid from $100 to $500 per month to fight. By regulation, recruits must be 18 or older, but many are younger, some as young as 14.
In 2015, the Iranian Interior Ministry estimated that 2.5 million Afghans were living in Iran, many without residency documents. Many of those holding refugee status today were born in Iran, yet they are not eligible for citizenship and are denied essential services. One Afghan recruit explained that the Guards’ recruiter promised, “We will send you to Syria. When you come back, we will give you an Iranian passport, a house, and money.” The recruiter added that he would be fighting a “religious war” in Syria.
Young Afghans fight for Shia Islam and for the praise they receive from revered leaders. They struggle to escape the Sunni-driven discrimination against Shia in Afghanistan. Many young, poor Shia revered Major General Soleimani as a father figure and now perceive him as a martyr. Ali Khamenei, too, praises the living Shia and salutes the Shia dead. If Hazara Afghans are disparaged by their Afghan Sunni countrymen, they are praised by Khamenei, who said, “I have personally seen that their seminary students felt an affinity with us. I have known them since old times.” Fatemiyoun are acclaimed in Guards-produced culture, such as in the documentary titled The Conquerors of Tomorrow. Tombstones at their graves throughout Iran describe fallen Afghan child volunteers as “defenders of the shrines.”
 The Pakistani Division
The Zeinabiyoun Division is the Pakistani Shia unit of the SLA. Its recruits are drawn mainly from Pakistan's impoverished regions, particularly areas with a history of Sunni attacks on Shia. Many of those fighters come from Parachinar, the main town in the Kurram tribal region, which has a sizeable Shia population and where sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims is common. Suicide attacks and planted bombs have killed scores in the Kurram region.
 
In Pakistan, it is sometimes dangerous for the Shia to participate in Ashura processions, an essential Shia ritual, without fear of harassment or attack. Major General Jafari called for efforts to ensure the welfare of Pakistani pilgrims entering Iran en route to Iraq for pilgrimage. Like Afghans and Shia Arabs, Pakistani Shia rally to Iran’s causes based on religious conviction.
The Iraqi Division
The Iraqi Heydarioun Division was created in 2015 to supplement Iranian-commanded or Iranian-sponsored units in Syria. Its soldiers engage in combat, but the division’s central mission is logistical support. Inside Iran, it maintains logistics depots near major airports, moving personnel and cargo, including weapons and equipment, into Iraq and Syria via military and commercial aircraft. It also moves military cargo through border crossings along Iran’s western border into Iraq. The Heydarioun maintain the Guards’ land corridor between Iraq, Syria, and Iran. The Shia sect of Islam makes Iraq and Iran important neighbors. Millions of Iranian and Iraqi Shia cross each other’s national boundaries to visit the shrines of first-generation Muslim heroic figures. Crowds of Shia pilgrims converge on central Karbala each year to pray at the shrine of Mohammed’s grandson. The Heydarioun, unlike the Pakistani and Afghan recruits, fight mainly on their home terrain. For many Heydarioun legionnaires, the war is personal.  

Empire of Terror - Chapter Five - Podcast Three

Iran’s Three-Phased Plan
Iran has a flexible, grand strategic plan to expand its global influence. These tactics include cultural, economic, military, and diplomatic elements. In some parts of the world, the Qods Force uses nonmilitary tactics, techniques, and procedures to build influence. National security analyst Joseph M. Humire, testifying before the U.S. Congress on the Guards’ penetration in Latin America, outlined Iran’s three-phased strategy to gain influence there. Humire’s model has broad applicability to Iran’s efforts to gain sway in many Third World, non-Muslim-majority states.
The phases—cultural and economic, diplomatic, and military—usually progress sequentially, but these activities often occur concurrently. The first phase is developing cultural and economic influence. Iran uses cultural activities to infiltrate and proselytize. In this phase, Iran first cultivates prominent Shia in foreign states. From there, operatives introduce themselves to the broader Shia community. This may involve outflanking Sunni sheiks and mosques in those communities. Iran subsidizes the construction of new mosques to be run under the direct or indirect control of Tehran. In 2015, Gen. John Kelly, then commander of Southern Command, testified that Iran has built eighty cultural centers in Latin America alone.
As the Qods Force establishes a cultural beachhead in targeted countries, it expands its economic influence through both illicit and legal activities. In Latin America, this includes exploiting corrupt systems to influence political outcomes. According to Transparency International, Latin America is among the world’s most corrupt regions. In Venezuela and Argentina, Iran has funneled funds to politicians in hopes of securing favors. In the Middle East, Iran’s intelligence services, the Guards and the MOIS, also target host nations’ intelligence and security services.
The second phase is diplomatic. Some diplomatic activity in Iranian embassies, consulates, and associated offices is legitimate. However, under the guise of diplomatic activity, Iran also conducts intelligence and influence operations. Sometimes the Guards and the MOIS partner with host-nation intelligence services. Other times they act autonomously and in violation of the host nation’s laws and agreements. Iran employs diplomatic personnel to promote film festivals, book fairs, and youth festivals to expand its influence. Iranian staff working in embassies target three particular communities—youth, women, and, in the case of Latin America, indigenous groups. Iran’s embassies also serve as hubs for military sales and purchases of strategic minerals.
The third phase is military penetration. In many Middle Eastern states, particularly Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, Iran’s military assistance and guidance to Hezbollah are well known and often openly acknowledged. In other countries, Iran’s military and intelligence footprints are concealed. Humire points to cooperation between the Basij and Venezuelan political, military, and intelligence leaders. For example, Basij and Venezuelan paramilitary personnel have exchanged lessons learned on counterprotest tactics.
Shia Liberation Army
Since its founding, the Islamic Republic has championed Shia militias abroad. Major General Jafari described the Qods Force’s mission as aiding “revolutionary movements, the resistance movements, and the oppressed worldwide.” In January 2019, Major General Salami threatened to “eliminate” Israel if Israel went to war with Iran. Guards are stationed in Latin America, North Africa, Central Asia, and South Asia. Other Shia from Bahrain, India, Kuwait, and Pakistan have served under Iranian command in the Shia Liberation Army (SLA).
The SLA is an organization in which non-Iranian military personnel take orders from high-level officers. During the war with Iraq, Iran trained, funded, and equipped Shia recruits from abroad. It still does, and many serve with the SLA, answering the call of Iran’s mullahs to fight alongside Iranian soldiers. Nearly 4,600 foreign nationals have been killed serving in Iranian-commanded units, generally in the SLA. Most were Shia Afghans and Iraqis who had taken refuge in Iran and served in the SLA. By 2018, in Syria alone, there were about seven to ten thousand foreigners and Syrians in various groups working with the Iranians, often with the SLA but also with indigenous groups. The SLA is headquartered in Iran and deploys forces across the region, particularly in Syria.
The SLA’s three divisions are supplied with armored personnel carriers, artillery, antitank guided missiles, man-portable air-defense systems, and small arms. Some SLA recruits are sent to one of the Qods Force’s military training camps inside Iran. Basic training courses last twenty to forty-five days. Those who pass proceed to advanced training courses in logistics and support, explosives, and advanced-weapons skills. More advanced courses cover explosives, mortars, tactics and warfare, and sniper skills. Iran also engages in charity in the region to gain local support; to that end, the SLA operates soup kitchens and medical dispensaries.

Empire of Terror - Chapter Five Podcast Two

World Conquest or Defeat
Khomeini viewed the Third World as an arena for confronting Western influence. Before the revolution, Iranian activists, namely Ali Shariati and Mustapha Chamran, advocated for their theories of universal social justice. Today, the Guards try to outflank American, European, and Israeli diplomatic and economic efforts in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Latin America, and elsewhere. Iran declares itself at war with Western states, and the Third World provides many venues and opportunities for unconventional and non-kinetic warfare.
 
The Guards pursue three primary foreign policy goals. The first is to use international initiatives to build Iranian regional dominance across the greater Middle East and western Afghanistan. The second is to export the revolution. Since the early days of the Republic, the Guards have sought to disseminate Khomeini’s ideas, particularly to states with significant Shia populations. The third is to support states that attack Iran's enemies. As in Hitler’s Germany and Lenin and Stalin’s Soviet Union, Iran’s rulers are ideologically driven to pursue vast conquest. In Mein Kampf, Hitler outlined steps to forge a racial German empire reaching the Ural Mountains. Lenin’s Red Army drove west in 1920 to master Europe but was halted at the Battle of Warsaw. After the Soviet Union captured Berlin, Stalin established satellite states. Iran, too, has global goals and uses the Guards to achieve them.
Mullahs express a nostalgic lament when they speak of a Greater Iran. The ancient Persian Empire spanned the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan. Since 1979, Iranian leaders have sought to reestablish “Greater Iran,” stretching from Israel to Afghanistan and loosely based on the pre-Islamic Persian Empire. Such an effort is expected to advance Iran’s strategic position and prepare for the Mahdi's arrival, as discussed in Chapter 2.
Jordan’s King Abdullah is credited with coining the phrase Shia Crescent to describe Iran’s mounting threat to the region after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The Qods Force can move personnel and material, including weapons and military equipment, through this corridor. It also maintains an air bridge to Damascus International Airport and other Syrian airfields.
Global Peace and Enemies
As noted, the second goal of the Guards is to export the revolution worldwide. Like the first goal of generating regional mastery, this objective promotes Iran’s prestige and political power; however, it emphasizes the global mandate to spread Twelver Shia Islam and Khomeini’s religious, spiritual, and political views. Large Shia minorities also exist in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Yemen.
Iranian leaders view them as pools of recruits for their revolutionary causes. In Latin America, Iran has established a base for exporting revolutionary ideas and seeks to project its influence throughout the Western Hemisphere. Iran has vast energy, money, and materiel to develop links to Shia communities around the world. In terms of the third goal, combating Iran’s declared enemies, the most reviled opponents are the toxic “triangle” of the United States, Israel, and world Jewry; they also include the Saudi royal family. A leading Guards-controlled media outlet claims that “these three countries (including the Saudi royal family) finance terrorists and provide them with weapons.”
Iranian hatred of the United States is deep and enduring. Early in his adulthood, Ayatollah Khomeini named the United States the Great Satan, and his moniker stands. Historical disputes still grate. Often and loudly, Iranian leaders and Iranian media clamor that the United States has dominated weaker countries for centuries. They proclaim that the United States intends to destroy Islam and the Islamic Republic. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has said Americans use soft warfare and hard power to project its unwanted influence in the Middle East. An unforgiving Ayatollah Khamenei demands that Iran must defeat the United States.  Broadcasts, television shows, films, songs, and video games that depict the destruction of America proliferate in Iran.
Similarly, Iranian leaders have repeatedly pledged to annihilate the “Little Satan,” Israel. Iran’s Guards’ army commander has declared the destruction of Israel a central national goal. Ayatollah Khomeini coined the phrase, “The path to Jerusalem goes through Karbala,” meaning that the struggle for the ultimate Islamic goal (Jerusalem) passes through Iranian control of areas historically part of Sunni hegemony. The annihilation of Israel is a recurring meme among the mullahs and their devotees. Parliament speaker Ali Larijani called Israel the “mother of terrorism” and its creation the greatest disaster of the twentieth century.
 
In 2015, Khamenei predicted that in twenty-five years Israel would no longer exist.30 Interactive video games allow players to obliterate Tel Aviv with rocket fire. Iranian intelligence operatives—Mois and Guards—tried to kill senior Saudi statesman Adel al-Jubeir, a career Saudi diplomat, in 2011. With impeccable English and well-tailored suits, al-Jubeir was long a fixture on the diplomatic circuit. But for Iran, he represented both the Saudi royal family and Muslim collaboration with the United States. An Iranian-born Texas man was charged in the plot to kill al-Jubeir. In October 2018, Belgium charged an Iranian diplomat and three other individuals with planning to bomb a meeting of an exiled Iranian opposition group in France earlier in the year.
All three of Iran’s main enemies—the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia—take Tehran’s threats seriously. Leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel disagree on many issues. However, they dread the prospect of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons and fear its burgeoning conventional capability.
Saudi Arabia’s King Khalid bin Salman has called on the international community to meet the Iranian threat and to take the rhetoric of its leaders seriously. He urged the world “not to approach Iran with the sort of appeasement policies that failed so miserably to halt Nazi Germany’s rise to power,” such as the Munich agreement of 1938.
 
Echoing these sentiments, then–U.S. national security advisor John Bolton opined that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the international agreement that released Western-controlled Iranian funds in exchange for promises to delay nuclear weapons development, was an act of appeasement. Israeli statesman and historian Michael Oren has also drawn parallels to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Western powers appeased Germany as the Nazis built a vast arsenal of advanced weaponry to conquer neighboring countries. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stressed in 2018 that Iran is persistently and aggressively developing a nuclear weapons program.

Empire of Terror - Chapter Five Podcast One

There is no greater source of pride in this world than martyrdom. —The late Haj Qassam Soleimani, 2014. P
olitical and religious rulers in Tehran insist that Iran is the real Mecca, or center of the Muslim world. Iran’s leaders feel morally compelled to spread Iran’s revolution around the globe, as Khamenei promised. Some observers trace the Qods Force’s origins to Operation Ajax in 1953, when revolutionaries concluded that politics could not serve as an agent of change.
Today, with his ever-growing prestige and power in the Shia world, Iran’s supreme leader uses foreign policy to boost the country’s status, expand its power base in the Middle East, export the Iranian revolution, and confront its enemies. Iran uses the Guards to project influence well beyond the Middle East. Guard personnel are involved in foreign embassies, charities, and religious organizations. After its revolution, Iran developed close relations with several anti-American regimes, including the left-wing governments in Cuba, Nicaragua, and, later, Venezuela. Since 1979, Iran has openly vowed to export the regime’s revolution.
The mullahs and the Guards have upheld this pledge, rooted in Khomeini’s philosophy. They hail the Guards as custodians of many causes, from liberating Jerusalem and safeguarding Islam to serving as the international headquarters for what they call the global resistance movement. The Guards project Iran’s influence on the Arabic-speaking side of the Persian Gulf.
The Guards recruited non-Iranian personnel soon after the 1979 revolution. The organization also extended its influence across the Arab Middle East during its war with Iraq. By 2018, Iran controlled or heavily influenced four Middle Eastern capitals—Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus, and Sanaa. Beyond their military actions, the Guards use psychological operations to stir unrest in Shia-populated parts of the Middle East.
Iran’s regional power is entrenched, bold, and dynamic. The Guards have built a land bridge through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, fulfilling an ancient Persian and modern Iranian strategic goal of creating a contiguous route to the Mediterranean Sea. According to Major General Jafari, the Guards’ foreign mission is to aid revolutionary and resistance movements and the oppressed worldwide.
Iranian leaders say they are confident that the American image is sullied, particularly in the greater Middle East, creating opportunities for Iran. As quoted by the state-run Tasnim News Agency, Khamenei said in spring 2020, “The Americans won’t stay in Iraq and Syria; they’ll be expelled.” According to Khamenei, American leaders, namely President Trump and Secretary Pompeo, have crafted a foreign policy loathed for “its warmongering, helping notorious governments, training terrorists, [and] unconditional support for oppression,” which makes the United States “abhorred by a major part of the world.” Iranian intelligence operatives and diplomats work closely together abroad. Qods Force personnel are well represented in embassies.
 As mentioned earlier, the Qods Force is an elite, externally deployed unit of the Guards. Its personnel, particularly its leadership, are among the most ideologically committed and highly trained members of the Guard. Like other branches of the Guards, it is charged with ensuring the regime’s survival. Unlike other branches, its central role is to propel Iran toward becoming the most significant power in the region. For several years, the leader of the Qods Force was Haj Qassam Soleimani, who commanded multinational armies. He was killed on President Trump’s orders in January 2020 and replaced by Brig. Gen. Esmail Ghani. In earlier assignments, Ghani served as Soleimani’s second-in-command and worked on the IRGC staff. The U.S. government has stated that the Qods Force is a “branch of the IRGC that conducts sensitive covert operations abroad, including terrorist attacks, assassinations, and kidnappings, and is believed to have sponsored attacks against coalition forces in Iraq.”
Major General Jafari affirmed in 2016 that nearly two hundred thousand Shia youths from across the Middle East were organized and armed under the command of the Qods Force, which supports non-Iranian
Shia by providing arms, funding, and paramilitary training. While estimates of the personnel strength of the Qods Force vary, its members are posted in Iranian embassies, charities, and religious and cultural institutions that support Shia Muslims. While providing some humanitarian support, Qods Force personnel also engage in paramilitary and destabilizing operations. Sometimes personnel hatch assassination plots from within embassies. Iran’s proxies, such as Hezbollah, have also previously targeted Israelis abroad, in Europe, India, and Thailand. Qods Force operatives likely participated in the lethal attack on a Jewish center in Argentina in 1994, an event some journalists call Latin America’s 9/11. The Guards probably directed the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia and many insurgent attacks in Iraq since 2003.
In Syria and Iraq, children supporting the Islamic State and children supporting Iran sometimes fight each other. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Hailey noted that Tehran has produced many films and television shows to recruit children. The Guards-produced films encourage boys to become “the protectors of the holy places” in Syria. Similarly, the Islamic State recruits boys to become “Cubs of the Caliphate” in Syria. Similarly, the Islamic State recruits boys to become “Cubs of the Caliphate.”

Empire of Terror - Chapter Four Podcast Five

 Pupil and Student Basij: The “Liar Generation”
The Pupil Basij are students ages twelve to eighteen who participate in religiously directed after-school activities and specialized summer camps. The Pupil Basij organization plays a role similar to that of the Young Pioneers in the Soviet Union or the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany; it straightjackets impressionable minds and discourages free thinking. As in mosques and local communities, Basij representatives in primary schools inculcate revolutionary ideas. Throughout Iran, there are ten thousand Koranic schools to pave the “motorway of martyrdom.”
This indoctrination following the revolution has created generations of young Iranians who scrutinize the behavior of their friends, classmates, and parents for signs of dubious conduct. The children share their suspicions with their teachers, who, in turn, report to the Basij. A woman recounted that her father drank whiskey but fibbed that it was a soft drink, lest the truth be revealed to her teacher. “We have been instructed to lie to everyone. We are a liar generation,” the young woman confessed.
 
The Student Basij, founded in 1989, is a student organization at a university. The Islamization of Iranian universities in the early 1980s was intended to build and maintain ideological fervor. Tehran University’s Basij was established in January 1990. War veterans were given a distinct advantage in university admissions, and 40 percent of university slots were reserved for Basij and Guards. The Student Basij is headquartered in Tehran and has a regional headquarters in each province. There is a Basij organization at every university.
Universities in Nazi Germany were also under state control. As with Soviet student groups, Nazi student organizations surveilled faculty and fellow students until the fall of the Third Reich. They ensured that lectures and publications conformed to the ideological guidelines set by Nazi leadership. Many university students join their Basij chapters for reasons similar to those of students in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. The Soviet Communist Youth Movement, or Komsomol, was founded in 1918 as the Russian Young Communist League. University student groups existed in Nazi Germany, too. They became pathways to political leadership and career advancement and served as centers of social activity.
In Iran today, joining the Basij offers immediate and sometimes substantial rewards. Membership is easy. Applicants for admission are given preference if they have ties to the Basij. Some students join the Basij because of their Islamic beliefs and their commitment to the regime’s philosophy. There are also social advantages. Students from poor or rural families find a warm home among the Basij. Student Basij also holds short-term recreational, cultural, and religious camps. Top Basij students are selected for additional intensive ideological and political courses.
The more ambitious university Basij participates in extracurricular social campaigns. One example is the Justice Student Movement, which encouraged attacks on the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem in May 2018, offering a $100,000 bounty for its destruction. Iranians scrutinize their professors' lectures, thereby facilitating the Guards' purge of reformist intellectuals and lecturers from universities during periods of social upheaval. Students are also expected to offer their full devotion, including their lives, to the causes espoused by the Guards. Some students prepare for martyrdom operations, and Zara is one of them.
Basiji Zara, a third-year university student, is fully covered in garments, and only her eyes are visible on the street. She attends Basij guidance sessions where she and others are indoctrinated into martyrdom culture and tactics. Ayatollah Khomeini is liberally quoted during the pep talks. Leaders stress the need for a network of martyrs to supply the Guards for suicide attacks around the world. Each volunteer is required to submit their last will and testament so they can be deployed at any time.
Zahra has prepared her last testament, in which she affirms that her life’s goal is to become a martyr; “My father fought on the front . . . and I too am eager to become a martyr and to fight on the front.” She envisions her death in these terms: “It’s just like in Palestine. They strap explosives . . . and then you attack in some location where the enemies gather.” This fanaticism alienates many Iranians who do not support the Basij. Often, the Basij feel like pariahs in their own country. Many Iranians speak only to Basij when necessary, seeing them as a hostile occupying force. Basij tend to mingle among themselves. One venue is within walking distance of Tehran University and is run by the Student Basij. Café Kerase—an old Persian word for “a book”—is open to all “if they observe Islamic dignities,” its owner explained. The cafe attracts conservative customers who find other coffee shops in the capital city too Western. Student Basij feels comfortable there and is unlikely to receive hostile glances from liberal-minded students.
 Professors’ Basij Organization
 In the 1980s, Iranian professors faced challenges similar to those confronting their Russian and German counterparts in the early Soviet and Nazi years. Then, intellectuals could not escape the new political conditions. Some had their decisions made for them. In August 1922, Lenin corralled liberal-oriented professors, placed them on two ocean liners, and deported them to Germany. The vessels became known as the “Philosophers’ Ships.”
 
In Germany, some intellectuals left early, anticipating persecution by the Gestapo. Some were hardened communists of the Frankfurt School, such as Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, while others were liberals, such as Thomas Mann and Hannah Arendt. Some prospered in the West, whereas others never fully adjusted. But many German and Russian professors never left for the West. They saw their careers soar and felt comfortable with the new regime. Now entrenched in positions of power and prestige, they molded the intellects of future leaders and scholars. The careers of German racial theorists flourished in Nazi Germany. Martin Heidegger, the most prominent philosopher of his day, signed the Loyalty Oath of German Professors to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State in 1933. In the Soviet Union, Professor Trofim Lysenko, a dedicated communist, rejected scientific theories of natural selection and promoted a pseudoscience that devastated Soviet agriculture for generations.
Like their German and Soviet counterparts, Iranian professors faced the choice of whether to leave or stay. Some left; some stayed and kept quiet; others became boosters of Khomeinism. The Professors Basij Organization was officially established in 2001 to ensure that the ideas of the revolution ring on campus. There are 350 professor-associated clubs in Iranian universities. Many professors have taken courses at Imam Housein University, and some teach there. Basij connections at the university further employment and promotion prospects.
As in the early Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Iranian professors rewrite curricula to conform to ideological standards. The Professors’ Basij transformed the humanities curriculum. Genres of “resistance literature” and “holy defense” became mandatory components of university programs. As in the Nazi and Soviet eras, professors serve on cultural councils, where they monitor fellow professors and students. Periodically, particularly after periods of social unrest, universities are purged of supposed dissident elements to ensure ideological conformity. The more dedicated, the more vacancies left by cashiered faculty are filled. But there may be long-term liabilities for Basij-affiliated professors if the mullahs’ rule falters. Because many Iranians despise the Basij, many students strongly distrust and dislike professors closely connected to that organization.
 

Empire of Terror Chapter Four Podcast Four

 Pupil and Student Basij: The “Liar Generation”
The Pupil Basij comprise students aged 12 to 18 who participate in religiously directed after-school activities and specialized summer camps. The Pupil Basij organization plays a role similar to that of the Young Pioneers in the Soviet Union or the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany; it straightjackets impressionable minds and discourages free thinking. As in mosques and local communities, Basij representatives in primary schools inculcate revolutionary ideas. Throughout Iran, there are ten thousand Koranic schools to pave the “motorway of martyrdom.”
This indoctrination, following the revolution, has created generations of young Iranians who scrutinize the behavior of their friends, classmates, and parents for signs of dubious conduct. The children share their suspicions with their teachers, who, in turn, report to the Basij. A woman recounted that her father drank whiskey but fibbed that it was a soft drink, lest the truth be revealed to her teacher. “We have been instructed to lie to everyone. We are a liar generation,” the young woman confessed.
The Student Basij, founded in 1989, is a student organization at a university. The Islamization of Iranian universities in the early 1980s was intended to build and maintain ideological fervor. Tehran University’s Basij was established in January 1990. War veterans were given a distinct advantage in university admissions, and 40 percent of university slots were reserved for Basij and Guards. The Student Basij is headquartered in Tehran and has a regional headquarters in each province. There is a Basij organization at every university.
Universities in Nazi Germany were also under state control. As with Soviet student groups, Nazi student organizations surveilled faculty and fellow students until the fall of the Third Reich. They ensured that lectures and publications conformed to the ideological guidelines set by Nazi leadership. Many university students join their Basij chapters for reasons similar to those of students in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. The Soviet Communist Youth Movement, or Komsomol, was founded in 1918 as the Russian Young Communist League. University student groups existed in Nazi Germany, too. They became pathways to political leadership and career advancement and served as centers of social activity.
In Iran today, joining the Basij offers immediate and sometimes substantial rewards. Membership is easy. Applicants for admission are given preference if they have ties to the Basij. Some students join the Basij because of their Islamic beliefs and their commitment to the regime’s philosophy. There are also social advantages. Students from poor or rural families find a warm home among the Basij. Student Basij also holds short-term recreational, cultural, and religious camps. Top Basij students are selected for additional intensive ideological and political courses.
The more ambitious university Basij participates in extracurricular social campaigns. One example is the Justice Student Movement, which encouraged attacks on the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem in May 2018, offering a $100,000 bounty for its destruction. Iranians scrutinize their professors' lectures, thereby facilitating the Guards' purge of reformist intellectuals and lecturers from universities during periods of social upheaval. Students are also expected to offer their full devotion, including their lives, to the causes espoused by the Guards. Some students prepare for martyrdom operations, and Zara is one of them.
Basiji Zara, a third-year university student, is fully covered in garments, and only her eyes are visible on the street. She attends Basij guidance sessions where she and others are indoctrinated into martyrdom culture and tactics. Ayatollah Khomeini is liberally quoted during the pep talks. Leaders stress the need for a network of martyrs to supply the Guards for suicide attacks around the world. Each volunteer is required to submit their last will and testament so they can be deployed at any time.
Zahra has prepared her last testament, in which she affirms that her life’s goal is to become a martyr; “My father fought on the front . . . and I too am eager to become a martyr and to fight on the front.” She envisions her death in these terms: “It’s just like in Palestine. They strap explosives . . . and then you attack in some location where the enemies gather.” This fanaticism alienates many Iranians who do not support the Basij. Often, the Basij feel like pariahs in their own country. Many Iranians speak only to Basij when necessary, seeing them as a hostile occupying force. Basij tend to mingle among themselves. One venue is within walking distance of Tehran University and is run by the Student Basij. Café Kerase—an old Persian word for “a book”—is open to all “if they observe Islamic dignities,” its owner explained. The cafe attracts conservative customers who find other coffee shops in the capital city too Western. Student Basij feels comfortable there and is unlikely to receive hostile glances from liberal-minded students.
 
Professors’ Basij Organization
 In the 1980s, Iranian professors faced challenges similar to those confronting their Russian and German counterparts in the early Soviet and Nazi years. Then, intellectuals could not escape the new political conditions. Some had their decisions made for them. In August 1922, Lenin corralled liberal-oriented professors, placed them on two ocean liners, and deported them to Germany. The vessels became known as the “Philosophers’ Ships.”
In Germany, some intellectuals left early, anticipating persecution by the Gestapo. Some were hardened communists of the Frankfurt School, such as Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, while others were liberals, such as Thomas Mann and Hannah Arendt. Some prospered in the West, whereas others never fully adjusted. But many German and Russian professors never left for the West. They saw their careers soar and felt comfortable with the new regime. Now entrenched in positions of power and prestige, they molded the intellects of future leaders and scholars. The careers of German racial theorists flourished in Nazi Germany. Martin Heidegger, the most prominent philosopher of his day, signed the Loyalty Oath of German Professors to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State in 1933. In the Soviet Union, Professor Trofim Lysenko, a dedicated communist, rejected scientific theories of natural selection and promoted a pseudoscience that devastated Soviet agriculture for generations.
Like their German and Soviet counterparts, Iranian professors faced the choice of whether to leave or stay. Some left; some stayed and kept quiet; others became boosters of Khomeinism. The Professors Basij Organization was officially established in 2001 to ensure that the ideas of the revolution ring on campus. There are 350 professor-associated clubs in Iranian universities. Many professors have taken courses at Imam Housein University, and some teach there. Basij connections at the university further employment and promotion prospects.
As in the early Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Iranian professors rewrite curricula to conform to ideological standards. The Professors’ Basij transformed the humanities curriculum. Genres of “resistance literature” and “holy defense” became mandatory components of university programs. As in the Nazi and Soviet eras, professors serve on cultural councils, where they monitor fellow professors and students. Periodically, particularly after periods of social unrest, universities are purged of supposed dissident elements to ensure ideological conformity. The more dedicated, the more vacancies left by cashiered faculty are filled. But there may be long-term liabilities for Basij-affiliated professors if the mullahs’ rule falters. Because many Iranians despise the Basij, many students strongly distrust and dislike professors closely connected to that organization.
 

Empire of Terror - Chapter Four Podcast Three

Callow Youth with Whips
Since the end of the war with Iraq, recruits have been drawn to the Guards for several reasons. Many are devoted to the Islamic Revolution and want to defend it. Others need the food and housing that the service provides. Still others, who are not competitive in other occupations, can find employment there, even in menial roles. The less able might monitor roads and traffic. Although most Basij members do not wear uniforms, they are readily identifiable. The men have short hair, wear camouflage jackets, and openly carry batons, clubs, and chains. In their green minivans, they wait outside shopping malls, plazas, parks, cafes, and sporting venues. They flog and pound young people for showing affection in public. According to a high school student, “The Basij are everywhere. . . . In the streets, in the newspapers, on television.”
As in other large organizations, the Basij has its colorful personalities and noisemakers, one of whom is Hamide Reza Ahmad Abadi. Part comic, part stoic, part iconic, Abadi patrols Tehran’s mosques during Friday-afternoon prayers. He claims to chant “Death to America” in his dreams. His performance is animated by wild gesticulations, and he helps stage-manage weekly political rallies. He once claimed to have worked at Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, explaining, “I used to hand over and receive the accused,” but he denied any participation in beatings or killing dissidents: “These are allies; these are all fabricated.”
Women in Service
Women employed by the German SS, Soviet NKVD, and Iranian Basij could be every bit as pitiless as their male counterparts, serving with blinkered authoritarian zeal and, at times, sadism. This was certainly the case in Germany. SS women were not marginal sociopaths but part of the social fabric of the time. They rarely showed a nurturing instinct toward those they considered enemies of the state or racial inferiors. Women guards used prisoners for target practice. Some randomly tortured female prisoners, kicking and beating them to death. In popular culture, women in Soviet intelligence are often portrayed as seductive, high-cheekboned beauties who purloin secrets or entrap men. In some cases, this was accurate. But some served as guards in the vast Soviet concentration camp system, performing clerical work at interrogation centers. Others were commissars and could have people executed smoothly and quickly. Full accounts of the cruelty perpetrated by NKVD or KGB women are not as readily available as those of their Nazi counterparts because there were no Soviet war crimes trials comparable to those that took place in Nuremberg in 1946.
Women also find opportunities within the Basij. Women Basij can be ruthless. They walk the streets, often in packs, and beat women they judge to be dressed or behaving immodestly. They break up mixed-gender parties and arrest those who secretly drink alcohol. Girls are put in special punishment rooms where they are whipped. Some of the brutality is captured on social media, including a 2018 video footage of a woman Basiji slamming a young woman to the ground because her hijab was loose. In another incident, a woman Basiji slapped her victim in the face and wrestled with her as the assailed woman pleaded repeatedly, “Let me go, let me go.” Despite their subordinate position, women Basij can be hard-line, as evidenced by Minu Aslani, leader of the Women’s Basij, who tenaciously fights efforts to promote gender equality, which she sees as a Western concept that isolates women. In her words, “it is against human nature . . . the main identity of a Muslim woman is centered on her role as a mother.” For reasons that remain unclear, Aslani recommends that at least one day each month, women and girls should “not grant their love and affection to their families.”
Mission and Structure
As noted above, Basij personnel are classified by status: Regular Members, Active Members, and Special Members. They are also organized into seven main organizations: the General Basij, the Pupil Basij, the Student Basij, the University Basij, the Public Service Basij, the Tribal Basij, and the Construction Basij. There are also smaller units, such as the Labor Basij and the Guild Basij, which specialize by occupation. Occasionally, groups are formed and later merged into other units. One was the Poor Basij Organization, formed in 1979 to consolidate solidarity for the revolution among the poor. The Basij recruitment process is supervised by local clergy. Towns that are particularly fertile recruiting grounds tend to be small and have a highly religious population.
 General Basij
 The General Basij is organized into brigades, battalions, and subordinate structures. In 1993, the Ashura Brigade was created as an anti-riot force. Ashura units are paramilitary.50 All members of the battalions are trained to use light arms and rifles and to participate in military and paramilitary exercises. The Imam Hussein Brigades comprise Basij veterans who collaborate closely with other elements of the Guards, namely the Guards’ ground forces. The Imam Ali Brigades address security threats. In addition to the paramilitary organizations, the Basij has specialized branches. The Basij of the Guilds represents trade organizations.
The Labor Basij is the Guards’ arm responsible for monitoring labor organizations, unions, and syndicates. The Student Basij serves as a substitute for independent student organizations. The Basij is organized regionally and is deployed to areas in cities designated as “resistance areas.” Each resistance area is divided into resistance zones, each zone into resistance bases, and each base into several groups. Smaller towns and villages have Basij “resistance cells.” Sometimes the Basij will team up with local police. For example, during the popular uprisings of July 1999 and June 2009, the Guards were deployed alongside the National Police Force, which has four local special-unit brigades, and the MOIS operatives. 
 

Empire of Terror Chapter Four Podcast Two

The Shifting Image and Role of the Guards
The war fostered camaraderie among the men and boys who fought on the front. Those who survived the trials of battle could rise rapidly through the ranks. Enlisted soldiers could become company, battalion, or, at times, brigade commanders. Talented soldiers were promoted quickly. Eager college students clamoring for leadership were often ordered to the front for three months to test their abilities. The Guards, which now included the uniformed and activated Basij, numbered approximately 300,000 by the end of the war. Many served in combat against Iraqi forces or against the Kurds in Iran and Iraq. Some were deployed to Lebanon to support Hezbollah. Most of the Guards demobilized at the end of their military service. As in the aftermath of other major wars, veterans sought employment or admission to higher education. Some Pasdaran and Basij veterans started families, reenrolled in school, or took the low-level jobs reserved for them within the government administration. While Basij members could enroll in universities without passing entrance examinations, some young veterans had no clear direction for the future and grappled with their wartime losses. Some pursued career opportunities within the Basij. Later, Basij became involved in construction; today, the organization penetrates every sector of Iran’s political economy.
Within the Guards, the Basij’s mission shifted from traditional territorial defense to a broader mandate of “defending against threats to Iran.” No longer fighting from foxholes or marching in rows toward machine-gun nests, the Basij were, by the 1990s, tasked with enforcing virtue, a challenging proposition. Many of the Basij were young, uneducated, and ill-equipped to distinguish between morality and sin. Teenagers relied on broad guidance from Basij leaders, often no more educated than they were. New Basij were not trained in crowd control or police work; to make matters worse, some had been coarsened and traumatized by their experiences in the war.
The image of pious, youthful Basij volunteers praying in muddy trenches and foxholes had disappeared. The picture of brave, self-sacrificing youth had deteriorated into roving bands of hard-bitten thugs. By the 1990s, most Iranians had grown to loathe them and would speak of the “gangsterization” of a once-esteemed service, which was now also dubbed execrable “shadowy vigilantes” by Western news organizations.
 
Today, the mission of the Basij is to maintain law and order, enforce Islamic values and virtue, and combat Western culture and other foreign threats. In Khomeini's words, the Basij are instructed to patrol against Satan. It is a morality police force that enforces retrograde dress codes and nonfraternization rules. They harness technology to prevent cyber corruption. For example, Basij teams scour social media for images of women wearing provocative clothing or sporting revealing hairstyles. Basij pulls down satellite dishes and confiscates material they consider obscene. They quote the Koran’s warning about the ever-present Satan, who corrupts culture. In 2019, it became illegal to walk dogs because mullahs declared them impure, and Basij ensured they have no place on city streets.
The Basij perpetuates a culture of death and martyrdom, though the war with Iraq ended over three decades ago. Among the pious, martyrdom for Islam and the revolution is the noblest act achievable by men or women. Young Iranians are still expected to conduct suicide operations. Guards and Basij leaders continue to build a reserve corps of suicide bombers. At the Guards Center for Doctrinal Studies of Security across Frontiers, located at the IHU, young Iranians are encouraged to volunteer for those operations. The mission of the Center is to produce martyrs prepared to kill Americans. Women, as well as men, are aggressively recruited; upon joining, they prepare themselves for a place and time when they will be expected to kill themselves and others.
Protecting the Spirit of the Revolution
The Basij derives its authority from Article 151 of the Iranian Constitution, which requires the government to protect the citizenry. Many of these statutory requirements, as they apply to the Guards, remain fossilized. In October 2009, Major General Jafari stated that the “main mission” of the Basij is the nonmilitary task of confronting “soft threats and soft war.” Khamenei expanded the Basij into all sectors of Iranian society and emphasized that the organization's central role is to preserve and propagate the spirit of the revolution. More than any other branch of the Guards, the Basij has been charged with countering anti-government protests at high schools, universities, factories, and on the street. Other branches of the Guards could be mobilized to repress domestic riots. Jafari strengthened the connection between the Guards' land forces and the Basij to confront hard threats.
 According to a University of St. Andrews professor, the Basij periodically creates a sense of emergency as a ruse to exert power and clamp down on burgeoning dissent. The Basij statute identifies three cohorts of personnel. First, there are the Regular Members, who are mobilized in wartime and engage in developmental activities in peacetime. They generally do not receive a salary unless mobilized. When Basij leaders claim to have personnel rosters numbering in the millions, they likely refer to these unsalaried and often untrained cadres. To be sure, Khomeini’s call for a Basij force of twenty million has never been met. Second are Active Members, who are extensively vetted and salaried. The third group is the Special Members, who are members of both the Basij and the Guards’ ground forces.

Empire of Terror Chapter Four Podcast One

The idea of creating the Basij was a divine prophecy [delivered] to the Imam [Khomeini] and can be seen as a wondrous miracle. —Guards deputy commander Hossein Salami, November 2016
On November 25, 1979, Khomeini called for the creation of, in his words, a “twenty-million-man army.” In response, the People’s Militia, later known as the Basij, was established in April 1980. Initially a separate service from the Guards, the Basij fought in the war against Iraq, which lasted from 1980 to 1988. Survival in the trenches would help define a generation of Iranian leaders. The newly formed Basij’s mettle was tested early and often during the war, as the organization provided human fodder for combat. Nearly an entire generation of young men and boys served and suffered in the war.
By the conflict’s end, Iran’s economy had absorbed an estimated trillion dollars in direct and indirect losses. The war convinced Tehran that a robust, capable missile force is critical to the country’s security, as long-range missiles pummeled cities in both countries, forcing more than a quarter of Tehran’s population to flee during the so-called War of the Cities. In these trying circumstances, the Basij offered an endless stream of youthful volunteers, ready to cross minefields and face Iraqi fire to clear paths for regular Iranian troops. Children served as shock troops. Many fought bravely, though they were poorly equipped and often led by adolescents no more experienced in combat than they were. The Iranian regime deployed at least 550,000 youths under eighteen during the war. The Basij itself suffered an estimated 190,000 fatalities, a casualty rate that overshadowed those of the Guards and the army.
Great Wars
The Iran-Iraq war bore some similarities to World War I, which gave rise to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Like the battles of the Great War, clashes in the Iran-Iraq war occurred episodically. Lines of combat were often static, with long periods of boredom punctuated by flurries of slaughter. Most dreaded were the frontal assaults, which involved crossing minefields and dodging artillery fire to plow into the teeth of entrenched defensive positions. Iranian boys, with small metal or plastic keys dangling from their necks and promises of immediate entry to heaven if they died, formed human waves that shielded more-experienced soldiers in the onslaught. Many of the older boys saw the plastic keys as symbols of their impending sacrifice. Some of the younger ones thought they were literally their personal keys to unlock the doors of heaven. Many of these boys, aged twelve to seventeen, also wore red headbands with the words “Sar Allah,” or Warriors of God.9 Western observers decried the use of such young children as a war crime.
As in World War I, the combatants in the Iran-Iraq conflict used poison gas extensively. Iraq used Sarin and Tabun, which killed quickly, causing paralysis, convulsions, and vomiting in the minutes before death. Many soldiers and Guards were disabled for life. One survivor described his lifelong injuries: “I can’t breathe well, I can’t walk well, I can’t walk upstairs or up hills, I feel tired all the time.”
Also, much like the slaughter pens of World War I, the front lines of the Iran-Iraq war produced a culture of martyrdom. Song, prose, and verse appealed to God and patriotism. In his letters about the Great War, the British commander General Douglas Haig quoted the Muslim emperor Baber, who, before sending his troops into battle in 1527, said, “If we fall in the field, we die the death of martyrs; if we survive, we rise victorious the avengers of the cause of God.” This was the milieu and mindset of the early Guards and Basij, and successive Iranian leaders kept these images alive to teach and inspire the youth. Today, Iranian students travel on excursions to the battlefields where their fathers fought and sometimes fell. The trips are called “Travelers to the Light.”
The poppies of Flanders Fields became symbols of the slaughter of the Great War; similarly, the red tulip came to represent Iranian martyrdom generations later. Said a mother, "Tulips are the color of blood.” Today, the names of the dead adorn libraries, streets, bridges, and town halls. Murals depicting bloody battles ornament urban landscapes. To memorialize the fallen, mullahs built a Martyrs’ Cemetery twenty miles south of Tehran, with a fountain spurting red-tinted water to symbolize the bloodshed for the defense of Iran. Today, the fountain’s red water still flows, and mothers dip their hands into it as they weep over memories of their sons, many of whom were Guards and Basij who were cut down in combat. Though the war is long over, life in Iran is filled with death. Iran has some of the world’s highest levels of executions, suicide, traffic fatalities, and cancer growth rate.
 Sketching the Wars: Art in “Hell”
Both World War I and the Iran-Iraq War produced antiwar art, some of it stark, some subtle. This art derided militarism, challenged authoritarianism, and mocked nationalism. After four years in the trenches, the German Otto Dix produced a series of etchings called Hell in 1919. His art depicted a wasteland of barbed wire, skulls, and clumps of flesh. The artist George Grosz, a contemporary of Dix, was also traumatized by the war and became a communist. He left for America in 1933, where he lashed out at Hitler and his regime.
The Soviet Union had no place for pacifism, antimilitarism, or nonconformity.
In 1923, the painter and book illustrator Marc Chagall left the Soviet Union for the artistic freedom of Paris. Later, he escaped German-occupied France and, like Grosz, found refuge in America. As in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Iran seeks to control, imprison, or expel dissident artists. Basij and MOIS operatives hound them. Like frontline artists before him in wars around the world, Reza, an Iranian, put the war he saw and lived through onto canvas. His gritty, expressive paintings reflect the trauma of his boyhood spent as a conscript on the front lines. At fourteen, he was deployed to combat, and two years later he commanded thirty or forty soldiers, most of them teenagers.
He drew and painted the suffering he witnessed. A few memories still haunt him. In his dreams, he revisits the site of a rotting female Iraqi soldier's corpse. Like the artists who escaped Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin, Reza sought refuge in the West to practice his art without fear of imprisonment or death. Grosz feared the Gestapo, and Reza feared the Guards. Those artists who remained in Iran are ever mindful, like those in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, of harassment and imprisonment by security services, notably the Basij.