As Israeli forces target not only Iran’s nuclear sites, but also the Islamic Republic’s mechanisms of repression, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has changed Israel’s mission in Iran to include regime change. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz went further, when he called for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s assassination. Khamenei “cannot continue to exist,” he reportedly stated while inspecting damage caused by an Iranian ballistic missile.
While President Donald Trump has had U.S. forces bomb three nuclear sites, U.S. officials disagree with any decapitation strike for a simple reason: They fear the vacuum that Israel might create in Iran if an Israeli strike kills Khamenei. This does not mean the Trump administration wants to preserve Khamenei’s rule; rather, they hope they can subject him to sign a humiliating surrender and then transfer power to an interim authority.
Whatever happens, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will be an obstacle to a peaceful transfer of power.
Whatever happens, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will be an obstacle to a peaceful transfer of power. The Revolutionary Guard is not a monolith, however. The Islamic Republic staffs its army with conscripts. Facing a tour of duty, some Iranians join the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps instead for higher pay and benefits. Other Iranians—particularly those from poorer, religious backgrounds—enter via the Basij, a paramilitary that serves as a feeder for the Guard.
Not all Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps units are the same. Mohammad Ali Jafari, who served as chief of the Guard from 2007 until 2018, reorganized the Guard to focus more on inward repression than territorial defense as he calculated that challenges to the Islamic Republic from within would trump the threats emanating from across Iran’s borders, especially as U.S. forces had captured Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and pushed back the Taliban. He created Revolutionary Guard units for each province. That U.S. authorities apparently do not know if each provincial unit staffed by natives of the province reflects an intelligence deficit. After all, if the regime does not allow most recruits to serve in their home province, that suggests the regime knows that even within the Revolutionary Guard, kinship trumps ideology if given the order to fire on crowds in the street. The regime staffs more specialized units, for example, those that would have command, control, and custody of Iran’s potential nuclear weapons, based on ideological screening.
While some analysts in Washington—mostly those who rely on Azerbaijani patronage—exaggerate Azeri nationalism in Iran, they ignore an inconvenient truth: Not only is Khamenei part Azeri, but the most brutal unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is overwhelmingly staffed by ethnic Azeri officers and rank-and-file. The Iranian regime regularly uses their Azeri Revolutionary Guardsmen to crush Kurdish dissent in northwestern Iran, because Khamenei knows that the Azeris will be more brutal in their attacks on Kurds (and other minorities) than the predominantly Persian units would be. For the Azeris, killing Kurds would be not only work, but pleasure.
The Iranian regime regularly uses their Azeri Revolutionary Guardsmen to crush Kurdish dissent in northwestern Iran.
That the Azeris would be more pro-Islamic Republic than many Persians should not surprise. The current border between the Republic of Azerbaijan and Iranian Azeri areas dates to the Treaties of Gulistan (1813) and Turkmenchay (1828) that concluded the Russo-Persian wars. Following the Soviet consolidation of power a century later, however, there was an informal transfer of population as religious Azeri Shi’ites moved south from Soviet Azerbaijan to escape state-imposed atheism.
While it is true that some Azeris chant nationalist slogans inside Iran, especially at sporting events, the fact that the Islamic Republic does not often crack down and arrest the perpetrators suggests such sloganeering is state sanctions, designed to play to Iranian nationalism by creating anxiety that separatism could spread should the regime fall.
If Israel truly wants to handicap the regime’s system of repression, therefore, they need to start targeting the ethnic Azeri Revolutionary Guard units and officers. While Israel has done a good job of degrading the regime’s capability to repress at its center, those living out of sight of journalists along the periphery often suffer far more. Protecting them will both win hearts and minds and protect Iranian lives, not only across northern and western Iran but also potentially in Tehran itself if the regime recalls the ethnic Azeri units to crush dissent in the capital, especially if they can no longer count upon imported Hezbollah units for such repression missions.
