Origins of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)

Two outstanding links provide a coherent backstory explaining how the Revolutionary Guards came to be. Because of it's status in Iran, that group is widely thought to be organically Iranian. But Kyle Orton's paper a year ago together with a current Middle East Forum article by Oved Lobel clearly trace the origins outside Iran.

In fact, many of the trainers at the Taleghani Center were part of the global Soviet proxy network, including its communist satellites, clients, and Arab protégés, for which Iran would become temporarily responsible during the 1990s while the reborn Russia found its footing. From Libya, Syria, and the erstwhile People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, all the way to Cuba, the Palestinian factions, and North Korea, the Islamic Revolution became a component part of the Soviet "anti-imperialist" nexus. This Islamic Comintern helped create, entrench, expand, or guide terror groups across the gamut and globe.[35]

The roots of this supranational revolution date back to the Iraqi religious center of Najaf, where a multinational group of Shiite clerics formed the revolutionary Islamic Da'wa Party around the time when Khomeini was based in the city.[36] Exiled from Iran in the early 1960s for an abortive Islamic revolution, Khomeini refined and popularized his concept of Islamic government; he built his militant clerical networks and alliances in Iran and across the region while his acolytes from the entire spectrum of the Iranian opposition—Islamists and Marxists to Liberals—were being trained in PLO camps in Lebanon by 1970.[37] This vast depository of revolutionary activity and ideology cross-pollinating in Lebanon, Iran, Syria, and Iraq was ultimately subsumed, co-opted, or destroyed in concentric coups by Khomeini once he officially took power in 1979.

This is a remarkable paper. It is long, detailed and densely documented (68 endnotes)

Conclusion

The collapse of the Soviet Union almost instantly brought down its global client network and communist fronts. Excising the Islamic Revolution from the Iranian state would do the same to its organs throughout the region.

Often dubbed the "resistance axis," the IRGC is no ordinary national army but the vanguard of a multinational Islamic revolution—a supranational monolith whose nerve center is located in Iran. As such, it is no more Iranian than Hezbollah is Lebanese or Ansar Allah is Yemeni. IRGC indoctrination materials do not mention Iran, and its members are referred to as "mujahedeen"—warriors of God—rather than as Iranian soldiers, as it trains a multitude of local proxies and allies in a fully-integrated, transnational network across the region. Occasional pragmatic feats notwithstanding, the Islamic Republic has never moderated its long-term ambition to substitute a broad theocracy for the existing regional (indeed global) political order.

In this it has been helped by the Soviet Union and now Russia, with which it shares both allies and clients as well as the overarching goal of destroying U.S. influence in the Middle East. Far from a recent partnership of convenience, the Russo-Iranian alliance is ideological and has existed since at least 1989, though even in its infancy the revolution owed much of its power and ideology to the Soviets and their global network. Just as Hezbollah and PIJ/Hamas cannot be compartmentalized as Lebanese or Palestinian issues, so Russia cannot be dealt with as a separate problem from the Islamic Revolution in the Middle East.