The Armed Forces: Divided We Rule

Abstract

The reign of terror and the invasion of Iran by Iraq effectively secured Khomeini’s rule in the decade that followed. Wary of the army and its potential for staging coups, Khomeini chose the komiteh guards to secure his hold on the country. Khomeini’s initial idea, that his revolutionary message was sufficiently powerful to arouse all Muslims and create a united Islamic revolution across the Middle East, proved hollow, as did his initial declaration that a revolution rooted in the people would need no army for internal security. He soon changed his mind on this, as on most political issues, but he was wary of what he regarded as the Shah’s army and secret police. So, in a move not unlike that of the formation of Hitler’s SS, Khomeini organised his own personal alternative armed forces. He gathered the youths who had already armed themselves by ransacking the Shah’s arsenals and had spearheaded of the US Embassy occupation to form the Guards Corps of the Islamic Revolution, the revolutionary guards, sepah. They were declared to be:

the popular organ which has emerged from the core of the revolution, to protect it and its ideological purity and to act as the powerful arm of the Islamic revolution and the protector of the oppressed the world over.¹