One of IranPolitik’s main interests is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its role as a political actor in the Islamic Republic. Since at least 1999 they have intervened in Iranian politics, and are now assuming a position at the pinnacle of power. One of the central figures elucidating the organization’s political preferences has been Ali Saeedi, the supreme leader’s representative to the IRGC. Saeedi, among others, has been making a serious effort to do this in part because of a phenomenon known as “Sepah-Harrasi” or “IRGC-phopia” inside and outside Iran. This has made the IRGC sensitive to accusations that it has been getting involved in partisan [...]

Since President Barack Obama’s November 2012 electoral victory, a number of U.S. foreign policy and Iran analysts have argued that the best time for negotiations between the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) and Iran is between the start of the Obama administration’s second term and the June 2013 Iranian presidential election. This notion may have been proven wrong by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s response to Vice President Joseph Biden’s offer of bilateral negotiations recently, but probably not for the reasons many think. Speaking at the recent Munich Security Conference, Vice President Biden asserted that the United States had: “…made [...]

On 3 February 2013, one of the most spectacular political events in the Islamic Republic’s 34 year history took place on the floor of the Iranian parliament, the Majlis. For the third time in the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad administration’s tenure, the Majlis impeached a sitting Cabinet-level minister as a direct political attack against the outgoing president. In response, Ahmadinejad played segments of a video where parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani’s younger brother was asking one of the president’s subordinates, the notorious former senior judiciary official Saeed Mortazavi, to engage in corruption. Soon after the Judiciary, headed by the parliamentary speaker’s older brother Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani, arrested Mortazavi. On the tarmac [...]

A recent interview by the website Ghanoon with General Nasser Sha’bani, professor and deputy chief of Imam Hossein University which trains Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officers, on 14 January may have revealed much about the Islamic Republic’s senior hardline military and political leadership’s thinking. Sha’bani touched on both domestic and foreign policy issues, outlined below. Domestic politics General Sha’bani, who is a senior IRGC commander, began the interview by discussing the deviant current, the regime’s terminology for the Ahmadinejad-Mashaei current. Shabani expressed the IRGC’s disappointment about president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom the Guard had backed fully during his first term (2005-2009) in office but began to doubt during [...]

On 13 December 2013, the official website of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Center for Preserving and Publishing the Works of Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, created a community page on Facebook. This has caused quite a stir in the Western media, which took great interest in this action given the Islamic Republic of Iran’s animosity toward Western online social networks. However, this was not the Iranian supreme leader’s first foray into cyberspace or social networks. Alongside the official website, which is regularly updated and available in 13 languages, Khamenei.ir appears to also maintain a Twitter and Instagram page; in fact the confirmation of the official [...]